New Philosophy

I have had some nice comments and emails about my post yesterday and me trying to figure things out. It seems like a lot of other people are going through similar situations and are trying to make positive changes in their own lives.

Emily sent me a link to the blog Roni's Weigh about a woman who has lost a lot of weight on Weight Watchers. She sent me three different posts about Roni's 3 Steps to a Healthier YOU! saying that they had reasonated with her. After reading them, I completely agree and thought I would share them with you since I couldn't have summed up my new outlook on life any better:
Step 1. Self Acceptance
Step 2. Stateless Dieting
Step 3. Move More

Figuring things out

The last few months have been a roller coaster ride of stress and binge eating. I feel like I have had very little control over my life and it isn't a very good feeling. The result of all of this is that I weighed in at 181.8 lbs last week, the highest weight I have been in two and half years. To say it was a bit depressing is an understatement. I don't want to be one of those people that lose weight only to gain it all back and then some.

I restarted Weight Watchers online last week to try and get back on track, but for some reason, I don't feel like Weight Watchers is working for me this time. Calculating all of the points felt like a punishment rather than it did a reward for being healthy. I would end up going over my points for the day only to beat myself up about it and then go on to consume even more extra points. All I could think about was what I couldn't eat rather than focusing on what I could eat.

Over the weekend, I came to the realization that beating myself up about not being perfect whether it comes to my food consumption or my exercise routine only makes things worse and negates any positive results of me eating and being healthy. I'm trying to figure things out and instead of restricting what I can eat, I'm trying to be mindful about my choices and to make wise ones, choices that will satisfy me and won't make me go off the rails.

'm trying to eat in moderation. I love food and wine and to deny myself from trying new restaurants and new wines only makes me unhappy which leads me back to the dark path of overeating. Learning how to eat in moderation is hard, but one that I'm hoping will get easier as I learn to love myself better and not beat myself up when I don't follow a prescribed plan.

I've been following this plan for the last few days and managed to lose 0.8 lbs this past week. It isn't the largest 1-week weight loss I've accomplished, but it is a start and definitely better than the scales continuing to only go up.

Cheesy as it may be, I've also been reading The Secret and am trying to include positive affirmations and visualizations in my life. I definitely know that I'm much more likely to live a clean and healthy lifestyle when I'm happy, so I'm trying to focus on finding more joy in my life and all of the things that I do to take care of myself. Training your mind to think about all of things you have rather than all of the things you don't is definitely not as easy as you would think, but I'm going to get the hang of it soon.

My philosophy on eating has also changed the way that I'm approaching exercise. Running or any other kind of exercise became one more thing that I had to do each busy and stressful day and it has stopped being fun for the past few months. My training suffered because I couldn't bear to get out of bed in the mornings and into my running shoes. Instead of forcing myself to run so many miles per week, I'm trying to have fun with exercise and learn how to enjoy it once again. For the past week or so, this has meant going on walks and enjoying the beautiful Vegas fall weather and all of the wonderful animals that inhabit the trail by our house, including chipmunks, rabbits, hummingbirds, and even a huge desert tarantula on Sunday. These workouts make me feel energized and good about myself, the way exercise should make you feel. Granted, I've found that it is very hard for me to only walk on these excursions, and I usually find a way to sneak in some running intervals (usually when a song comes on my shuffle that makes me want to run), but I'm running because I want to and not because I have to run.

I'm trying to figure things out and realize that this will take time and that I need to care for myself and allow for mistakes and setbacks without it completely derailing my efforts to get more healthy and fit.

What I inspire to be one day....

I know that I need to post about the fat fighting adventures, which have actually started for real this week, but I wanted to post about this inspiring woman. I want to be her when I'm older.

WWGD

I promise this is my last celeb post, but I got the first email newsletter from Gwynnie's new website Goop. In it, she offers up too of her favourite recipes: Turkey Ragu and Banana Nut Muffins (the Ragu actually sounds good and I think I will make it next week). Interestingly, she starts off the newsletter addressing her reputation of being a horrible eater:

Cooking and food have become my main ancillary passion in life. This may strike some of you as odd, as my friend Mark Bittman of the New York Times once told me, “you have a terrible food reputation, everyone thinks you eat some dry seaweed and a little brown rice.” How did this come to be? I suppose it was my rather strict four-year foray into macrobiotics. I am no longer so restrictive with my diet, far from it. But some of the tenets of macrobiotics have stayed with me and they always will. I try to eat locally, seasonally and always organically. I don’t eat processed foods or red meat and I try to stay away from sugar and dairy but I have a major cheese weakness and, well, you only live once.

More celeb workout routines

Many people were right to point out that god knows whether Gwyneth really eats all the "fried dough" she says she craves or not. However, this new article about Posh just might be the most ridiculous thing I've read a celeb say about dieting (or at least recently).

Granted, I don't run 4 miles 7 days a week, but I have a feeling that if I did I would have to eat very very little in order to look like Posh. Running burns on average 100 calories per mile, which is only 400 calories that Posh burns per day. She must significantly watch what she eats to remain that thin, I'm sure of it.

Maybe I need to do a Posh running experiment and see what happens ;P Even though I would much prefer her "old" cardio routine of just shopping.

How to look like Gwyneth

I have always had a thing of Gwyneth Paltrow. Something about Sliding Doors made me love her, even if subsequently she seems a bit cold and aloof as a person. She has always looked good, but over the summer when she started rocking those short dresses and crazy high heels, she looked incredible! Perfect from head to flawlessly shoed toe.

She was on Oprah yesterday talking about how she manages to look so good. Although I didn't watch the episode, it was refreshing to read and see on YouTube that she realizes that she is horrible at restricting her eating and going on a diet, so she exercises like crazy instead to make up for what she wants to eat. While who knows what Gwyneth "really" eats--she was macrobiotic for a while after all--anyone that works out for 2 hours a day six days a week deserves to look fab. In a time when most Hollywood starlets claim they don't work out because they have great genes or that their only work out is going on a walk with their pooch, it was nice to see a sweaty Gwyneth showing the nation her work out routine.

When I first read that she works out that much, I thought, "Oh mustn't that be nice to have the time to work out for 2 hours a day. I could do that too if I had maids, personal chefs, and someone devoted to loading and unloading my dishwasher." But then I started to realize that if I really wanted to work out, I have more than enough time to work out for up to 2 hours a day. I just need to make sure I get out of bed early enough and not sit on my butt and watch tv as soon as I get home from work.

So Gwyneth has got me riled up and ready to lose some weight and look great. I had already decided that I'm rejoining Weight Watchers on Monday to help get control of my weight--seriously, a 10 lb weight gain this year is not a good thing and I don't want it to continue. In addition to being more mindful of my eating, especially portion-wise, I'm going to try and aim for at least 1 hour of exercise a day six times a week. If Gwynnie can workout two hours a day, I can definitely do at least one. Not only will this make me look better, but it will also make me feel better and more balanced in my life. This change is long overdue.

Change of Plans

So I haven't posted in a while despite my promises to enthrall whatever readers I may have these days with training stories galore about me prepping for the Nike Women's Marathon in October. Well things didn't work out as I had planned.

I started running again after being off for 3 weeks due to the wedding and being sick, but kept on having major issues on my runs. Ever since moving to Vegas, I've been having problems when I run due to what has been diagnosed as asthma due to severe allergies. I had gotten a couple of new inhalers a few months ago that made me stop sounding like Darth Vader during my runs. They worked great until I ran out of the good inhaler right before the wedding. Instead of wasting 2 hours or so waiting at the doctors for him to see me and refill my prescription, I tried calling for a refill. I seriously called every day for 5 days and left messages or spoke to the front desk about getting a refill. No luck. During this inhaler-free time, I was unable to run 3 miles let alone the 10 miles that I needed to run over Labor Day weekend to get me semi-back on track with my marathon training. It was really frustrating.

After 5 days of being without my inhaler, I ended up calling the front desk of the doctors office and freaking out and telling them that I needed this inhaler because I was training for a marathon and I couldn't run without. They said my doctor was out that day, so I asked if I could get a sample and pick it up. They begrudgingly said that would be okay.

With the new inhaler, I was able to run again without being winded or sounding like I was drowning, but my runs never felt that great, or at least not great enough for me to feel confident in suddenly increasing my mileage significantly in order to cover the distance needed to feel somewhat prepared for the marathon. After being so sick for over a week and gaining some weight since the wedding week, I feel like I've really lost quite a bit of fitness and motivation. Work has been very stressful these past few weeks (thankfully things are looking up right now) and I had been relieving my stress by eating crap and drinking wine a bit too often. Running which normally makes me really happy began to feel like a burden, one that I didn't want to wake up early and do (which is really the only option in Vegas since it gets so hot).

A couple of weeks ago, I was supposed to run 12-13 miles on Sunday which would "ease" me into increasing my long runs each week by 2 miles before I reached the final 20 mile run two weeks before the marathon. I was pretty nervous about whether I could run this far, but kept on trying to talk myself into it. My confidence level got substantially lower when the latest issue of Runner's World arrived in the mail the Friday before the 12 mile run. This issue was pretty much dedicated to training for marathons and had all of these different training schedules and people discussing how they best train for marathons. The one common thread was mileage, mileage, mileage. Even if you take the low mileage training options that Runner's World offered, the miles that I had covered were significantly less and I hadn't given myself enough time physically or mentally with everything that had happened since the SF half marathon to build up to running a marathon.

Reading the magazine freaked me out, but I kept on thinking if I can run 12 miles this weekend and it goes okay, I can push myself to train for and run the marathon. Fast forward to me waking up from a nap on Saturday by jolting out of bed with a horrible dream about me crashing and burning during the marathon. Having this dream made me remember how hard and difficult my first marathon was and how I was so much more prepared for that marathon than I was for this one. It felt like this nightmare was an omen of what would happen to me in October.

I set my alarm for 5 am on Sunday morning with the plan of doing the long run with Carlo. I ended up waking up around 2 am in a panic attack thinking that there is no way in hell that I can run this marathon without doing harm to myself, physically and emotionally. I laid awake for the next couple of hours thinking about how I felt and whether I could keep on training with the marathon as my goal and succeed, or at least achieve a good race regardless of when I crossed the finish line. My honest conclusion was that I wasn't prepared to run a marathon and 6 weeks of intense training wasn't going to change that.

Carlo of course got woken up at 4 am by me sobbing and not knowing what to do. Even though I knew I was making the right decision to not run the marathon, I still felt like a failure for not being able to train like I had wanted or not following through with my goals. All I could think about was my 7 mile meltdown during my last marathon and how I didn't want that to happen for all 26.2 miles, because I knew I would never finish. Despite being half asleep, Carlo managed to calm me down and told me that I was making a smart decision. He is right, not running this marathon is probably the smartest decision I have made in a while, even though it was hard and it still makes me feel a bit like a failure.

Despite my choice to not run the marathon, I will still be going to San Francisco in October and running the half marathon instead. You aren't technically allowed to switch distances and I haven't found anyone who I could trade my marathon bib with for a half bib. However, I emailed a woman on Craigslist who has run the Nike Womens Half for the last 2 years and she says that once the race gets started, they don't care if you cross the half marathon finish line despite wearing a full marathon bib. We will see how it goes. I just want to be a part of this race and run with 20,000 other women that day even if I only do the half. I think it is going to be an incredible experience and I know I can be prepared for 13.1 miles and run a good race.

So I've learned a few lessons from all this, I have decided that I will not consider running a marathon again until:
- I move to a more runner friendly environment, both climate-wise and support/training group wise.
- I am consistently running 20+ miles a week.
- I have hit my goal weight, or have lost more weight.
- I give myself the time to properly train and succeed at achieving my marathon goals.
- I run a really fast half marathon of around 2:15.

Until then I will keep on running and trying to get better at the half marathon distance.