Keep moving!

(I am crossposting a variation of this today on both of my blogs, A Fat Girl & A Fat Horse and Love it, then lose it., because I think it needs to be said on both a healthy lifestyle vein and also the horsey vein!)

I love these little tidbits that I get everyday from SparkPeople.com in my email - they are almost always applicable to the personal emotional journey that I am on in addition to my weight loss journey. This showed up in my email this morning:

Be not afraid of going slowly; be afraid only of standing still.
- Chinese Proverb

I am choosing to take this one both literally and figuratively - in many respects.

On the weight loss front, I have not moved down on the scale in quite a long time - when I do see progress in a downward direction, it is very small and usually short lived, despite trying my best to keeping working out and keep eating well - sometimes, I slip up and eat something that I know full stop is bad for me, but I figure "since I'm not going down anyways, I can allow myself this." - this is a mindset that I need to get rid of completely. I used to be very good at discerning if I actually wanted to eat something that was bad for me because I wanted it or because it was convenient. 9/10 times, I could turn away from the Snickers bar or the piece of pizza because I knew the only reason I wanted it was because it was there, and so was I, and I wouldn't have that chance again later.

I know that eating right is good for me - it feels good - most of the time it tastes good - and it gives my body the correct fuel for the physical activity that I have been engaging in. I still am conscious of how to eat clean - I am going to continue to go - getting moving again. I feel like the above quote needs to go hand in hand with "fall down seven times, get up eight" - some wise words of wisdom for this whole journey.

On a personal level, sometimes the things I want in life take some time to come to fruition - ie right now, my living situation is kind of at a standstill as we wait for G to get the call for training - that can be frustrating - but every day that passes is a day closer to it - I need to remember that even if things are not going at the speed I want them to go - they are still moving, and I am the only one responsible for allowing them to stop.

I am a great one for getting some good steam going - a quick pace, and then burning out. I'm talking about various aspects of my life, really - weight loss, emotional issues, riding, career... Because going slow is scary. Being behind everyone is terrifying for me. I am used to excelling at life, being competitive and good at most things that I put my mind to.

When I graduated from high school, I decided to take a year off to work and then go back to university to complete my BSW specializing in Child Welfare. By the time I got back to university, I was already a year behind all of the friends I had graduated with - my mother graciously suggested, since I did not have enough of a student loan to both keep my apartment and pay my tuition and so would have to work through the school year, that I take part time courses. I didn't want to be any farther behind my friends, so I insisted on taking a full course load and working full time - to get to my goal faster.

The disadvantage to this is that I was so caught up in getting to my destination that I missed a lot of the journey. (For those wondering, student loan pulled all of my finding because I had worked too much and I ended up burning out and dropping out of university and haven't been back since - now I am way more than just 1 year behind my friends!)


KEEP MOVING, DON'T QUIT.

The Twisty Turnies

That's what I call it when you set out with a plan and through a variety of incidents not completely your fault, your plan gets tossed aside but is replaced with something either equal to or better than what you originally hoped for.

Such was my day today. I had a nice lie in and the house to myself (well, and the 70lb border collie/lab cross who demanded to be the little spoon), a nice breakfast that fueled me up for what I hoped was one heck of a going over by Jillian Michaels via my Frontside and Backside videos that (surprise, surprise) have killer exercises specifically to target either your frontside or your backside. For whatever reason, while I consider myself to be reasonable adequate when it comes to technology, the television-to-dvd-player-with-satellite-and-vcr baffles me to no end. Today, of all days, I just could not get the darn contraption to play a dvd.

Second plan! My laptop has a dvd player, I would just pop it in there and set my laptop up on a stand so it was an appropriate level. This is the first time I had tried to play a dvd in my (new to me) laptop, so imagine my surprise when sounds akin to a cougar that has pulled its prey into a tree started coming from my laptop... eeeeeeeks.

Fine then! I have to go with conventional, "real life" exercise, in the fresh air. I was reluctant... It was pretty warm... I would get a sunburn... I'd get so far from home and then be too tired to come back... Flies would bite me... My iPod was dead so I had no tunes to motivate me... I couldn't run if there was a car coming by! Trust me (and ask anybody who knows me), I can be the entire royal court when it comes to making excuses. Today was no different, but grudgingly, knowing that if I didn't work out then, I wouldn't get to work out later, I tied up my shoelaces, filled my water bottle, and grabbed my trusty companion, Morrie:

The running buddy is a 5 year old Miniature Australian Shepherd - they're a herding breed, so generally known to be high energy. Though he was not originally intended for me, Morrie has been my right hand man since the day that my parents arrived home with him at 2am and dumped him on the bed where I was sleeping and he pinned me down by my hair and washed my face - the rest, they say, is history. Good ole Morrie would do anything for me and with me... except run 2.9km, apparently.


That's right, the path was a 2.9km, mostly uphill ramble. I know this picture is tiny (I took it with my not-a-smart-phone) but try to understand my vision here. I was at the end and turning around and the red dot on the horizon, that's where I had to go back to. I chose this route for a variety of reasons, even though I could have traveled a different route which would have had -slightly- flatter terrain. Most importantly - not a lot of houses to see me coming by. Secondly - not a lot of dogs that might run out of their yard and attack the fluffernutter, and thirdly - there is a stream at the 1/4 mark where I could give Morrie a proper drink and chance to cool down. It was on our way back at this stream that he started to lag behind. Just tired, and lazy - a lot like me, but he doesn't have as much weight to lose! It soon became more that I was dragging him than him keeping up.


Fortunately, I was wearing the most psychedelic outtfit possible and my sister, as she was coming home from a dog trial, saw me and drove down to say hello. Morrie begged his way into the air conditioned car and drove home with her while I jogged another telephone pole length uphill and then briskly finished off the trip back home. The last 1/4 of the trip, I kept thinking to myself "I can't wait to get home and blog about how I was able to motivate myself, for once!"

I won't lie. I'm pretty dang proud of myself for doing any amount of running without someone there to prod me along. I ended up completing 2.9km in 34 minutes. I would say that I ran or jogged approximately 1/4 of that and even did some of it uphill. I just kept thinking to myself "Don't stop." and somehow, that managed to work. Overall, I have to say... proud of myself. (The boyfriend (hereafter known as "G") also ran today - almost 5km himself - so I am pretty dang proud of him, too! Even though it did take some convincing for him to concede that my 2.9km equaled his 4.93km because mine had hills and his didn't!)