A Not So Gentle Reminder...

I've been trying to avoid the calendar lately.  After I broke that plateau a few weeks back, I had a great feeling that I was going to meet Angie's challenge to me.  I was on a roll and losing about a pound a day!  Then it slowed down, much like I expected it to.  Last week, I lost 2 pounds.  And honestly, I was pretty much OK with that.  It's a bit unrealistic to think that you're going to lose a pound a day while going about your daily life, even when it includes 5 days a week of workouts and limited calories.  This isn't "The Biggest Loser" and I don't workout as a full-time job!

This week, though, I haven't lost any weight yet and I'm desperately afraid I'm heading back to another plateau so soon after breaking the last one.  I'm also not feeling all that positive that I'm going to reach the 100 pound challenge by New Year's Eve.  I haven't given up...because I just don't do that...ever.  But I'm honest enough to admit that it's not looking too good right now.

Feeling the way I have been this week, I've stayed away from things that remind me about this journey and the challenge looming large over me.  Things like my blog.  (Maybe you wondered why I was more quiet than usual this week...or maybe you were just grateful! Hahaha!) But try as I might to avoid having to face the fact that I'm going to probably fail in this challenge (and despising failure is a huge dimension of my personality that I have yet to conquer!) I found myself surrounded by things this week that reminded me of why I began this entire journey in the first place and just how far I've come on it.

In the space of the past few weeks, I have seen 2 people in my life that I've known for a long time begin to use electric scooters because they're not able to walk without tremendous pain. I know that pain.  I've experienced that pain.  And I ache for them.  Seeing them scoot around reminded me that 93 pounds ago, that might have been me.  If I had taken the doctor up on his offer to write me that prescription for one 20 months ago, it WOULD have been me! 

I'll be honest, watching these ladies use their scooters is hard for me to take.  It hits a little too close to home and reminds me that if I stray from this journey, it could very likely still be me.  The image of a scooter in my mind is what gets me up out of bed early on the weekends to head to the gym.  It haunts me, compels me, drives me to distance myself from the possibility that I'll have to face life from a chair rolling around instead of looking people in the eye. 

The day the doctor offered me that option, something changed deep inside me.  Something very elemental in my character shifted, and it won't ever be the same again.  I know that, but I've been forgetting it a little too easily lately.

I really can't afford to forget.  I can't afford to shut my mind off from the journey I've already made or the rest of it that's yet to be traveled.  And so, I brought myself back to my blog tonight and spent a lot of time reading it.  Seeing where I've been.  Evaluating my successes...and my failures.  Deciding where I have yet to go.  Honestly examining why I might be stalling in my weight loss again.

I will definitely be drinking more water during the next week.  I'll also be paying closer attention to how many calories I'm taking in each day.  It is also fairly certain that I'll be pushing myself a little bit harder in the gym.  The interval training I started a few weeks ago is hard already, but there are ways to ramp it up a bit, like stretching the sprint interval length a bit.  I'll be trying that in the morning when I make my 5th visit to the gym this week.

I guess the bottom line is this...seeing those friends in scooters is a not so gentle reminder that there are bigger things at stake in my journey than whether or not I reach the 100 pound challenge.  I want it.  I want it badly, and I'm gonna throw everything I've got at losing those 7 pounds over the next 2 weeks.  But whether I make it or not, this journey continues on January 1...and January 2...and for all the days it takes to reach the goal of being a healthy person. The goal is not 100 pounds.  The end goal is 188 pounds...and a healthier Angie - physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

I'm glad that I had the chance to refocus on the big picture a little bit tonight. No more forgetting it!

The Elliptical, The Little Drummer Boy, and Me...

In the gym this morning, I was on the elliptical.  That's really nothing new.  I do that a lot lately.  It has quickly become my favorite piece of training equipment, despite the fact that 4 months ago I couldn't go a tenth of a mile on it without tremendous pain.  This morning, though, I wasn't thinking about that.  I was trying to shake up my workout routine a bit and go for distance instead of speed.

For the past two weeks, I've been focusing on using interval training on whatever equipment I use for cardio workouts.  I love what it's doing to shape my body, kickstart my metabolism, and improve my cardiovascular conditioning.  But one of the drawbacks for me that I've noticed in using it so often is that I haven't been going long distances.  After about a mile or mile and a half of intervals, I'm pooped!  My muscles are screaming at me, and I'm ready to call it quits and move on to strength training.  Today, I wanted to change it up a bit and focus more on distance and endurance, rather than speed.  My goal was to go farther than I've ever gone on the treadmill, elliptical, or arc trainer.  (I didn't include the stationary bike in that equation because I routinely go far distances on that piece of equipment, but it's a completely different workout in my mind and doesn't compare with the work I do on the other three.)  The longest distance I've done to date on all of those machines is a 5K.  3.11 miles.  Today the goal was to go farther than that.

The True Measure of Success...

How do you measure success?  If this was the classroom, I could tell you easily.  At my heart, I am a teacher. I've been on that particular journey for 24 years now and know that success is measured by achievement of the objectives that were taught.  Plain and simple.

But what about success on this other journey I'm now on?  The one that I undertook when I finally realized my health and life (or at the very least my lifestyle) were at risk and did something to change that.  How is success measured on that journey?  Is it as simple as achieving the objectives?  Do I have to achieve them ALL before I can call the journey a success? 

Last week as I finally broke the plateau I was on for 12 weeks, it occurred to me that I have been measuring my success by pretty much one standard - weight loss.  If I'm losing weight, I'm feeling successful.  And that's actually a fairly decent measure for an obese woman!  After all, I've got a lot of weight still to lose so I can finally lose that title of "obese"!  But it's not the only measure of whether I'm being successful right now or not.  And really it may not even be the best measurement of success for me right now.  Take a look at a few more with me.

Last night in the gym, working on the elliptical, I made a 9:10 mile even faster.  I did it in 8:53.  Those 17 seconds amaze me.  Really.  I can move my body a full mile in under 9 minutes!  Do you know that on April 18th of this year, my first night in the gym, I could only go a quarter of a mile on the treadmill...and that it took me almost 10 minutes? So, in 8 months, I've gone from about 1.5 miles per hour to a little more than 6 miles an hour.  No matter how you measure success, that surely has to qualify.

Tonight, my dinner plate contained very reasonable portions of a very lean meatloaf (I've got a great recipe for that, btw!) and redskin mashed potatoes.  There was no butter on my potatoes because I've learned to season things to replace the flavor I loved from the butter I used to add.  My total calories today...1500.  This is a pretty common occurrence for me these days.  Room for growth?  Absolutely.  But successful for a person trying to lose weight?  To a certain degree, yes.  I've got a decent shot at seeing the scale look a little lower tomorrow morning.

You know from our discussions here on this blog that I've discovered one of my personal demons - one that caused so much of this weight gain in the first place -  is emotional eating. I tend to engage in mindless and needless eating, not for hunger, but to avoid feeling strong emotions.  There's not too much going on in life that can't be buried under chocolate fudge brownies...and I make REALLY good brownies!  But there have been some really difficult things in the past two weeks happening in my life.  And I've been controlling myself and sticking to my eating plan for the most part.  I did sit down last week with that piece of peanutbutter cup pie.  But after the first bite, I stopped and threw away the rest.   For the most part these days, I eat when I'm hungry...and not for any other reason.  Is this success?  In my mind...absolutely!

And here's a biggie.  Today the weather has been warm, changing to cold, with a steady, heavy rain all day.  Normally, my knees would be swollen and walking would be difficult.  But not today.  I have moved freely around my classroom, I cooked dinner after unloading and reloading the dishwasher, and the only reason I am sitting down right now is to write this blog post.  I could be up and moving if I wanted to be.  I am able to move on a cold, rainy night after a long day of work.  Is that success?  YOU BET!!! 

Which, brings us full circle.  Right back to weight loss.  The reason my knees are not unbearable today is that I've lost 91 pounds.  There's 4 pounds of pressure on your knees for every pound you weigh.  Did you know that?  I do...intimately! Because I've lost those 91 pounds, I've relieved 364 pounds of pressure off of my knees.  THAT is why I'm walking right now, able to move freely, able to live my life in a very different way than I did when I began this journey.

So, what is the true measure of success?  To me, it's all of these things.  And I need to remember to view it this way, and not totally rely solely on what my scale says.  Losing weight is always going to be a great indicator of how well my journey is going.  It's easy to measure and mark milestones using my weight.  But it's only part of the picture.  I need to remember that and refuse to get down when the scale moves slower than I want it to.