Surprising myself

Thank you for all the fabulous suggestions from the last post. Here is how they have played out.

Things that make you go Huh?
It’s normally your partner or a close friend that surprises you. Sometimes they say things or do things that you just wouldn’t expect and you think to yourself ‘wow! I thought I knew them’. Rarely do you expect that from yourself, but it turns out that this week has been full of it!

• On Monday, I figured I’d give the jogging thing another chance. So I started and at first it was hard but then I just kept going. For 15 minutes until the destination I had set myself. For someone who hates jogging and doesn’t consider herself very fit, I was shocked. When I got home, I felt this incredible sense of empowerment and calm. It was so bizarre.
• On Tuesday, I went to a Body Balance class at the local gym. Walking away after the class I was disappointed that it wasn’t a whole body workout because everywhere north of my belly button didn’t get worked. So before dinner I grabbed some weights and finished off what the class had started.
• And this morning, I awoke at 5:30am (an hour earlier than usual) bouncing off the walls so excited about going interval training. When I came home, bathed in sweat I proceeded to grab some dumbbells, my yoga mat and started strength training. I thought ‘who is this person?’

On interval training
I was usually totally put off by the idea because the instructions were always so convoluted. They either changed from day to day or week to week and I have no idea how you are supposed to walk effectively with the instructions in one hand, stop watch in the other, whilst monitoring you heart rate. So I never bothered. I was intrigued when I read about using the outdoors to create an interval course and I figured that would suit me perfectly. So I embraced stairs, park benches, the timber rails along the sides of bike paths, dirt patches, surface changes, hills and any other thing that got my attention. And I had a wonderful time! It got me out of my head (apart from the occasional ‘who is this person’ thoughts) and focused on how I could push my body. I made up little ‘rules’ like every time I saw a dirt patch on the oval I would skip really fast or when I left the bike path I had to jog or I would jump over all the timber rails in one section or run along them in another. Each time I caught my breath after these bursts I would find a new activity to amuse myself and get my heart rate up. I presume that that is the idea of the usual instructions, but this was so much more natural and in tune with my environment which dovetails neatly with my cardinal rule of listening to my body and responding.

The other thing that worried me was not working hard enough both during cardio and weights. I am usually the first to go ‘too hard, I’m outta here’ but the class on Tuesday showed me how great it felt to push your limits. So what I found worked for me was:

• set goals based on landmarks like ‘I’ll jog the length of these rails’ or skip fast until I get tangled up 5 times.
• when doing yoga standing poses (or something where there isn’t a particular number of repetitions) play music that has regular changes in it like long rifts of music with no lyrics so the goal might be to hold the pose until the singing starts again.

I had so much fun pushing myself that I can’t wait to do it again. And when I reflect on my sore muscles I keep asking myself ‘who is this person’?

Conclusion
All of this has made me wonder about the person I actually am. If this peculiar being inside of me who is loving pushing herself physically really is me, then where has she been hiding for the last 15 years? Can we really hold ourselves back this much based on our beliefs of ourselves? Before I started walking regularly, I was sure of two things about myself; I don’t like pushing my body hard physically; I need to exercise because it’s healthy and has weight loss benefits but I may never love it. Two ideas that I have held for a long time, shattered in just one week.

I am really interested to see how my love of exercise develops especially over the coming days. We are spending a long weekend at the beach and I’ve always said I would be fit and healthy if I lived by the sea. But when on holidays I usually have to drag a very grumble bum out the door to do anything physical except for soaking in the ocean or pool. Is this the end of lazy me? We shall see. In the meantime on a very philosophical note, I’m curious to know are humans really the empty vessels that can be anything we want to be? Are our dreams are reflection on what is within us even if it seems distant from reality?

It's ok to fail

A perfect life is something that we strive towards, after all isn’t that what New Year’s resolutions are; changing something you don’t like about yourself. And if year after year we tell ourselves that we need to change then we carry over to our daily lives that feeling that we need to be perfect and aren’t. When we decide that this year will be the year we become healthy (guilty!) we strive towards control over ourselves. We set boundaries by defining what health or a weight loss program is for us, even if we don’t follow a traditional diet. And while we are in control, everything is ok, but when we lose that control, we feel like we failed, fell off the wagon, sabotaged ourselves. We have all experienced what happens next – throwing in the towel, saying that this diet isn’t for us, feeling like a failure and so eating even more and saying horrible things to ourselves.

Now if you are reading this, then you are probably a human being like me. You are probably living a life that isn’t perfect, because unfortunately life just doesn’t happen that way. No matter how annoying or painful that is, it’s a good thing, because the challenges in life are what make us grow and come to realise what is most important to us. It doesn’t really matter what the original reason was either, wether an event that was out of our control, throwing our emotional state out, time pressure which meant we weren’t able to follow through with our resolve or self sabotage. Any situation that throws us off course requires the same response, accepting ourselves.

Eventually our lives return to an equilibrium where we must face up to the choices we made in dealing with our crisis and the impact they had on our goals. In the thick of it, the easiest answer is to give up, but when we simply accept that we aren’t perfect, that things happen in our lives and sometimes our response is not ideal, then it’s easier to return to our good habits. This is part of the process of learning to love and respect yourself and providing room for failure to enable growth and learning. The worst thing we can do is punish ourselves for being human and for being imperfect. Here are a couple of strategies that might be helpful:

1. If you are breaking one of your boundaries, realise it, decide if you still want to keep going and if you do, accept that that is the choice you made. Making a conscious decision is very empowering because you give yourself permission to proceed rather than feeling out of control when you realise halfway through a 2L bucket of ice cream what you are doing. Which brings me to point two.
2. Avoid negative self talk and if you don’t know how the strategies invest some time into learning them. It will probably be the best investment for your mental health and self esteem you can make. Of course, apart from the theory you need to apply it – that’s the bit I always struggle with (read: don’t do) but just the knowledge has helped.
3. Keep asking yourself, gently, if you are still making the right choice based on how you are feeling.
4. Don’t vow to make up for the episode. Perhaps you’ve taken a step backwards if you are trying to lose weight, that’s a part of life and aiming to work harder to make up for it is more likely to be a discouragement to a return to a healthy lifestyle. The problem is that it’s like punishing yourself because you are a human being. If you manage to graciously accept your failings then you have learnt a whole lot more than what sticking to your course might have done.

At least this is what I have come to realise, over the last few very sad days. Between tears, I would gobble up bowls of ice cream, chocolate covered honeycomb and hot chocolates. While I knew that this wouldn’t make any difference to the hurt inside and I would probably even feel worse from a sugar overdose, I still did it. I accepted myself while making those choices and today when I feel better I’m still ok with my response (despite the added kilo’s that I have no desire to check on) and am returning to the healthy habits that I’m creating. It actually makes me happy to realise that this is in stark comparison to what would have happened in the past.

But I’m curious if there is anything I could have done differently or is occasional emotional eating just a part of life as much as emotional experiences are? It’s the classic female cliché, reaching for a block of chocolate and a chick flick to unburden our feelings, but is it really ok or is there a better option? Would we be better off to deal with our feeling the way men do? Have you found a good way to deal with emotions without reaching for the freezer door?

Sugar and spice and all things nice

I must confess, it was a bit of a rough weekend on my body. Unfortunately, I was still recovering from it today. I kept up the exercise as promised to myself almost too well. My thighs are aching from an itsy bitsy bushwalk that was only 2 kilometres one way, but vertically straight up. After dangling from tree branches and rocks on the way down, even my arms were aching.

But no, it wasn’t the walk that was bad for my body, it was food (as usual). We had a very social weekend with three dinners and a morning tea. I loved catching up with friends I hadn’t seen for a while, but I wasn’t prepared for all the eating. The problem with having listened to my body lately has been that it just doesn’t need as much as I have always given it. So after an appetizer and entree I was pretty satisfied. It was awesome food too – mud crab from far northern Australia caught my friends. Yum.

Soon after the mains was served, already plated up in the kitchen. The portions were huge and as mentioned, I was already full. What to do? As previously said, I am a plate cleaner and I assume that if you like what’s served you eat until you are stuffed. It is after all only one meal and it would offend the hosts if you only ate half of it say. To me not eating implies that you don’t really like what they have cooked. But what do you do when you when you don’t have any control over how much is put on your plate? How do you avoid offending your friends without eating what they think is a serving?

Well, that’s not the reason why I am recovering either, but it did get me thinking since I will be dinning at friends places again this weekend and I would appreciate any advice for how to deal with oversized portions.

Apart from lavish desserts for 3 days in a row, the final straw came at morning tea on Monday. Some friends caught up over coffee and a platter of delicious sweets. As we chatted for hours, we each reached for the platter of treats many times. I lost count to be honest, but by the time I left, the plate was pretty empty. It was mindless eating at it’s best and my body told me all about it and still is for that matter.

On the way home, I started to feel a bit unwell in the stomach, which I reasoned was fair considering the amount of sweets I had consumed. Apart from the sweets, I hadn’t eaten lunch, but at that point I definitely didn’t feel like any, figuring that I would get hungry at some point later. Gradually the nausea got worse until dinner time came around and I still couldn’t stomach any food. Eventually, I made a vegetable broth just to eat something healthy and maybe settle my stomach. It didn’t work, even though I was hungry and even this morning I woke feeling lethargic, nauseous and puffy eyed. I had never heard of a sugar hangover, but it would seem I had one. Needless to say, I won’t be touching sugar again for a while and if anyone asks next weekend I have a great topic of conversation. Have you ever had a sugar hangover?

When coffee isn't the answer

I was feeling a little sleepy when I started writing this morning. My yawns, deep and cavernous kept swallowing up my thoughts in a drowsy fog. Slowly my eyelids would close and as I struggled to open them my eyes watered. Coffee I thought! That will wake me up without a doubt. Needless to say I had already had one with breakfast, but apparently this morning I needed two. Maybe it was the grey day, with the sounds of rain softly tapping on the metal roof. It could have been the warm humid air that I was breathing into my body that made it feel like it hadn’t woken up yet. On the way to the coffee machine I had one of those aha moments. That was it; my body hadn’t woken up yet!

Moving your body first thing in the morning increases oxygen consumption and gets your blood flowing. The increased blood flow to the brain causes the release of endorphins that give a sense of well-being. This is what provides that feeling of being energized for the day that I just didn’t have when I flicked on the coffee machine. Realising this, as the water was warming I briskly walked around the house. Then I grabbed some weights. By around circuit 10 I was dancing. In the end, I had woken myself to the point that I really didn’t need that coffee.
In reality, there are many mornings when I wake, but struggle to get out of bed. Then the groggy feeling clouds my mind for the first part of the day. So is setting the alarm clock early for tomorrow for a quick lap of the block or some yoga moves worth it? I think so!

You know more than you think you do

That was the message that Dr Benjamin Spock had for parents back in the 1960’s. This was the message I learnt last night on an ABC show ‘Bringing Up Baby’ which follows 6 couples bringing up children using last centuries most popular parenting techniques. Now I should clarify – I have no children, nor am I likely to have any children in the next few years. But a lot of my friends already have babies or are about to, so I have heard a lot about parenting recently. Facing up to the inevitable (children) I listen with interest to all their hardships and theories thinking about what I would do differently or wondering how I would cope.

What got me watching last night, was that phrase – Trust yourself: you know more than you think you do. Dr Spock’s message was that the strict parenting styles of the 1950’s that dictated for example that you should not pick up your baby or you will spoil them were flawed. He suggested that the one-size-fits all approach did not reflect that parents know their children best. He urged parents to use a flexible approach to parenting that would be reflective of each child’s individuality. That was exactly what some friends advised after the birth of their second child, when they threw away the ‘rule’ book and listened to their baby. The other thing that Dr Spock suggested was that parents have fun being parents and enjoy their child’s development.

Now how does this relate to anything about being healthy and losing weight? Well, it made me think even further about what I have mentioned in previous posts about listening to yourself. If the number of parenting books is in the hundreds of thousands, then the number of diet books must be double that. Everywhere you turn there are books, magazines, newspaper articles and tv shows telling you how to lose weight. Not only that but manufacturer’s are creating ‘100 calorie snacks’, all the fast food joints have their ‘healthy options’, cat food is advertised as ‘low fat’ and we are telling the government to introduce legislation over junk food advertising and blaming the media for showing us itsy bitsy models. Effectively, the control over our bodies is out of our hands and into the outstretched arms of the ‘experts’ that form the diet industry. There are so many diets and so much advice out there about every food under the sun (and those from laboratories), analysed based on all manner of scales like GI or whatsitmadooba. It’s enough that those who don’t need to lose weight are panicking over their food choices and hating their bodies.

What I think we need more of is trust in our own wisdom and knowledge of our bodies. In reality most people know that potato chips and cheesecake aren’t all that good for them and vegetables are. No diet book is required to tell you that – after all I just did! But even with the knowledge we have, we relinquish control and follow the various prescriptions of low carb, no carb, high fat, low fat, or no snacks.

My aim this year is as stated ‘to end the war between mind and body’ and the only way to do that is to listen to what my body says. Since tunning in at the start of the year, it’s been pretty clear what it wants. At first my body was a little timid, but soon it gained confidence and started speaking out. It tells me loud and clear when I need to get up off the computer chair or it’s eaten enough or it really isn’t interested in food at the moment. In fact in the past, if I haven’t done any exercise for long enough, I would start having repeated dreams about jogging! So, I am going to keep following Dr Spock’s advice for myself and who knows maybe one day listen to it raising my children.