Warning: This blog contains real thoughts and feelings, which have been painfully absent from this site for the past several weeks. If you don’t like feelings, including the bad ones, this might not be the blog for you.
Over the past month or so, I have not blogged as I had anticipated. However, tonight I was inspired. A few weeks back I ordered The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl which is a book based off of a blog. I really haven’t read a ton of the blog (even when she was blogging about her weight loss I don’t think she posted more than weekly) and she’s hardly posting weekly now. However, I had heard great things about the book, so I bought it. Turns out this was probably the best thing I did for my own blog. The book is a quick read so far and made me think a lot about the why I’m overweight, the why I fail at diets after a few weeks/months, and the why I always gain weight back. Some thoughts on why I’ve fallen off the bandwagon:
- M, the boyfriend. What I must say first is that it is not in any way, shape, or form his fault. In fact, the reality is he has been incredible about my working out and eating better, and he even reads the blog. However, I’m notorious for this pattern: be fat and single, decide I’m single because I’m fat, kick butt into gear via diet and exercise, meet a man, fall off diet and exercise bandwagon. Now, granted, I haven’t totally fallen off the bandwagon here yet, but I’ve definitely slid. For starters, I have hit a massive plateau and haven’t lost any weight to speak of in weeks. I’ve only been hitting the gym three times a week at a maximum. And my eating has been less than great. On the eating front, I ate out a lot and made bad choices in January, but even this month I haven’t been good about my food. Many of these issues will be discussed later, but I need to quit tying my health to whether I’m happily single or happily taken. I also need to recognize that I don’t have to eat what or the same amount as M. I can eat less/different and still enjoy the time we have together. I think we took a good step this weekend in joining the same gym because hopefully we can make going to the gym a time to hang out, but as of right now we haven’t actually even been to our new gym yet. I need to stop letting the relationship be a reason for not keeping up with my dieting and exercising. No more excuses.
- I’m letting my diet slip. I have been having a ton of excuses to eat like crap lately (for really obvious evidence of this, see post from earlier this evening). Not one of these excuses is good. I don’t have to eat bad because I’m swamped at work; I don’t have to eat bad because I’m not in a good mood; I don’t have to eat bad because someone in my family is sick. No excuse is good enough to eat bad. I should bring my lunch to work every day so that I can’t forget a day. If the habit is to bring the lunch, then how can I forget? Again, the bottom line here is no more excuses.
- I’m not working out as much. The last long run I did was at least 2 weeks ago (I can’t even remember when exactly it was). I give myself lots of excuses for not working out: I want to sleep in, I want to hang out more with M, I want to relax, etc. Regardless of the reasons for why I’m not, there just needs to be no excuse. I’m getting up at 6 a.m. tomorrow and going to a gym (haven’t decided which one yet, since I belong to two until I make it to NIFS to cancel my membership, but I will definitely be at one). No more excuses
- I need to get to the bottom of my weight loss. Shauna pretty easily lays out in the intro to her book why she got fat in the first place. Now granted, she maintained her blog for 7 years before she wrote the book so she had ample opportunity to figure out why she was where she was when she weighed 350 pounds, but for everyone there’s a reason, for some it’s biological, for most it’s emotional. I’m sure mine is emotional and I think, if I had to try to be specific, it has to do with using food as escape. I am an emotional eater. I eat for good and bad emotions or sometimes for no emotions (i.e., boredom). I think reading the rest of the book will help me more fully reflect on why I’m overweight to begin with, why I have such a hard time not gorging myself, and why I always give up on working out after 3/4/5/6 months of consecutive work outs. I want working out and eating healthy to be the norm, not the exception.
I hope I can continue blogging about exercising and eating, but more importantly I hope that I can start talking more about the whys I am here to begin with and how I can fix those. Obviously, I didn’t exercise enough and ate poorly, but what is not so obvious is why I did that.