Great Expectations OK Maybe not Great

I walked Mathew to school on Friday and Monday.  He is home sick today but he is already feeling better and I am really wishing he went to school. 

Walking Mathew to school did not instantly make me feel better.  Actually it kind of made me a little sleepier.  So lesson one:  Don’t quit just because you don’t get the results right away.  I am real good at that, the quitting.  I am not very good with tracking time so I easily feel like I have been doing something forever when in fact it has only been a week or a few days.          

I think it would be a really good idea to have really clear expectations of what I am going to get out of anything I do and then have a set date to reevaluate the effectiveness.  This way I stay motivated and don’t fall prey to the tendency to feel like nothing is working. 

So let’s set the expectation and time line for walking. I expect to see less inflammation in my lower legs.  I will know this because I will get my pretty little ankles back.  I also expect to have more energy.  I will know this because I will stop taking naps.  I am not such a good sleeper so I tend to cat nap during the day.  This can be a real productivity drain.  That seems good for expectations.  Notice they are very specific and I have included the measures that will tell me I am succeeding.  Starting tomorrow I will both drop him off and pick him up on foot.  This will mean I will be walking two miles each day. 

We will revisit this on May 8^th.  Until then I walk each day and I do it just because that is what I am doing and I should not think of it again until May 8^th.  Good luck with that self, good luck.

Change and Socrates

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

― Socrates

So today I woke up with a jelly bean hang over.  I ate somewhere south of a cup of the little buggers while watching Game of Thrones last night, two bad habits in one.  My body just cannot take the on-slot of pure sugar.  Maybe it used to be able to but not any more, not any more.  I still have a ton of jelly beans, yum Jelly Belly, but I am not sure what to do with them.  I should have brought them with me to work and given them to all the teenagers I am surrounded by.  Don't get me wrong I love my teenagers they do great work and have loads of energy, usually.  They are really low key today, very focused on all the work I gave them to do.  Darn, because I sure could use a little of their silliness today, jelly bean hang over oh it hurts.

So change.  I used to work with OCD clients and man they will teach you a whole lot about habits if you let them.  When I started we were working with the behavioral modification model   Man oh man that didn't work.  With behavioral mod it was all about stamping out the (bad) behavior/habit.  We would stamp them out alright but it was like stepping on smoke.  The minute one habit died a new one would take its place.  Actually mostly two or three little new ones would show up and by the time we noticed them they had all gotten as big and strong as the original habit.  No wonder I dreamed of fighting hydra back in those days.   Truth be told the only thing I found that brought any relief was helping the client identify their anxiety and develop new coping mechanisms.

I am not OCD.  If there is a thing that is the opposite of OCD I am that.  If I even get a hint that I am doing something habitually, I change it.  This is no healthier than obsessively washing your hands.  Imagine going through your whole life with the conviction that every moment must be a spontaneous and unique experience it is exhausting and CRAZY.

Back to change.  According to Socrates, and my own life experience, change is less about what you no longer do and more about what you do differently.  So change number one:  Today I will walk to pick my son up from school.  It is a half mile walk each way, rather pleasant with a moderate incline.  This will give me more energy, help me sleep better, decrease the inflammation in my legs, all good.  Even better it gives me slow time with my son to chat about his day.  He loves being outside and walking.  We get to see wild life and he has better focused when doing his homework.  This leads to an overall better evening, read no yelling.  Yep it seems silly not to go and get him.  By being lazy (lets face it that is what it is, lazy) and having him come home on the bus, I am causing myself and my son all kinds of grief. 

Second change, do something with those Jelly Bellies that does not involve consuming them!  Please comment any ideas that you have for resolving my Jelly Belly problem.  Creative ideas welcome.  FYI putting them in any other orifice will be considered consuming so don’t even go there with your bad selves.

A New Day

This is the end of a very long journey.  There are no sign posts, no welcome to the end or even a single landmark.  This place looks very much like a million places I have been along this journey.  But it is different because this is the bottom.  Looking down I can see, feel the ground.  It is a ground made up of fatigue, upset stomach, sore joints and an aching head.  There is nothing new in all that.  What is new is what I see when I look up, light.  

For years I could only see down into the darkness, the darkness of my belief that I was fat so I deserved to feel all these things.  Today I know better.  Fat or not I don’t have to feel any of these things.  I can be fat and fit.  Being fit is a much simpler goal then being thin.  Weight lose is burdened with decades of data showing that losing even a small amount of weight is nearly impossible and keeping it off is even harder.  There are also decades of personal yo-yo dieting keeping even the hope of weight lose deeply buried under a pile of contrary experiences. 

Being fit is far easier.  I know that if I eat less sugar my joints won’t hurt.  I know that if I eat good food my stomach will not feel bad.  More vitamins and minerals and my head will no longer hurt.  If I practice healthy sleeping habits and walk every day, I will not be fatigued.  Looking at it from here I almost feel a fool because all that is so simple.  I have done it a hundred times and always felt better.  

But I remained fat so I slid back to my old ways because I was fat so I had no business being fit.  What I silly thought.  It is a thought I did not come up with on my own.  It is not native to my way of reasoning.  Maybe you recognize it.  Maybe you too have picked up that evil thought.  It comes from our collective eating disorder and I choose to put it down right now.  

My fitness has nothing to do with my fatness.  Fatness is not what causes disease.  Unfitness is the real danger.  It is not the obesity epidemic that is our problem it is the unfitness epidemic.  Now I bet many are saying, “But you can’t be fit and fat.” For some being fit will mean they also lose weight but for most of us, as the studies show, the weight will not shift much and we will be fat and fit long before we reach thin and fit, if we ever get thin at all.  So I have reached the end of my weight loss journey and the end of my fat journey and I am at the beginning of my return to fitness and a return to myself.