Thursday, March 6, 2014

Petulance gets you nowhere fast

So I was petulant for a few days about my unfortunate exercise thing, until I went in and talked to them and they said, "What? We didn't say it was optional?  So sorry!" and then I told them what I felt my current limitations were, and we devised a different plan for strength training, and I felt like an adult and felt better about the whole thing.  I haven't been on schedule with the exercise, and I haven't always made food choices that made me feel better after eating, but any exercise and any good food choices are much, much better than I was doing.

I did the OA thing for quite awhile, some years back, and that helped a lot for awhile.  There's this thing, like in AA, where you might count the days you've been sober (or abstinent, they say, in the overeaters thing).  And I was very proud of my long stretch of abstinent days, until the day I slipped.  Talk about feeling like a failure!  What?  I have to start from zero days?  No way.  So I just shut that thing down, and gained back everything and much, much more.  I'm no longer doing the days of perfect abstinence, and it's so much easier to say, ok, that was not the best choice for me, but now I'm going to make a better choice for this next meal.
And so, after all these years of gaining, now I've lost 16.5 pounds, which is amazing.  And I can walk farther.  And (I know this sounds weird if you don't have the problem) but I actually tied my shoes, while they were on my feet, without any problem the other night.  This was the first of the goals I wanted to reach.  It's huge for me.  Another goal was to walk for a reasonable amount of time, keeping up with my friends, and I was able to do that for a good amount of time too -- actually much more than I expected -- on a Girls' Weekend trip.  (I even went to the fitness room at the hotel while I was there!)

So I'm seeing progress.  I had lost 10 pounds the first two weeks I was on this plan, and then plateaued for six weeks, and then suddenly I lost 6.5 pounds again.  So I can't start looking forward to some sort of constant progression, and I can't be disappointed with I don't see a perfect slope on a graph.  And if I don't go to the gym, or I eat too much, or I indulge in something, that's the time to avoid the stinkin' thinkin' and jump back in.

One of the exercise physiologists told me she was so pleased to see my confidence.  That amused me.  I do try to show enthusiasm, and I do try to keep the petulant child at home, where I can have a good talk with her one-on-one.  So I'm happy to see if I'm exuding confidence.  What's the point of doing it if I'm going to be portraying myself as a morose poopyhead?  But I bet she deals with a lot of morose poopyheads in her work.

So that's the latest on the challenge.  Did I mention:  No cancer?  Yeah, I probably did.  But nothing like a cancer scare to help change course.  Onward and upward!