A Slap in the Face for me and You

Lately I've been thinking about how I've spent most of my life slightly over weight. I was never the thin girl or the healthy girl. Looking back I would have never called myself fat outside of a short stint in elementary school but definitely wasn't healthy.

Ready for the slap? Here it comes. Being over weight was a choice that I made. By making the choice to eat whatever I wanted and to sit on the couch watching TV versus exercising I made the choice that those things were more important to me than losing weight and being healthy. After spending so much time and energy feeling bad about not being that healthy girl I wanted to be I slowly forgot about the "choice factor" in all of this. It became this big thing that was out of my control. I was destined to be a slightly overweight girl my whole life. It was the card that was dealt to me and I would just have to accept that.

S L A P

This was my choice! I have control over what I eat, I have control over how much work my body does or doesn't do, I can decide if I'm going to give in to being "that girl" my whole life, or if I am going to step up to the plate, take responsibility for my life and change. If we traded in the time that we spend complaining about how we don't like how we look or feel with exercise and healthy eating we would be in the best shape of our lives.

So where does this start? How do we change? I think it really starts with training our brains to think differently. We need to start thinking that it's possible to be different than we think we have to be. We need to stop with all of the excuses that we let rule our lives and thoughts. We need to want something more for ourselves than the standards that we've been living up to. Ultimately, we need to have hope.

Those are all of my thoughts for now. I hope that this cry for hope fills your heart and inspires you to be something more than you think you have to be.

I'm Back! Insanity and the7 Stages of Grief

Hey everyone! I am back to blogging and I'm back on my game as far as being healthy goes. Yay!

To recap, after the birth of my daughter (almost 10 months ago) I decided to get serious about my health. I was working out every day and was eating really well. I ran a 5k, did something called the Warrior Dash, and lost quite a bit of weight. All the while my daughter, who has always been a terrible sleeper, was waking up about 5 times a night. I finally got to the point where I was really burning out and decided to take a break from working out and save that energy for necessary things, like going to the bathroom :). In my mind my daughter would be sleeping well in a short period of time and it would be an easy transition, that was not the case. Finally, at 9 3/4 months, my daughter has been sleeping through the night. I am so excited that I've had extra energy to clean my house and I finally feel capable of taking care of my body by working out. I should let all of you know that my pattern of being completely on or completely off about being healthy wasn't any different this time around, which is something I'm pretty disappointed about. While I wasn't exercising I was eating really poorly. I gained back some weight but not all of what I lost, which I'm really thankful for. I'm still 13lbs below my pre pregnancy weight at 162.

So what am I doing now you ask? Well I just started a really intense workout video called INSANITY. Insanity claims to be one of the hardest workouts that you can do on a video and I am a believer. Because it's so hard you get results fast, which is what I'm looking for since we're going on a family vacation to Puerto Rico at the end of February!

With Insanity you start by doing a fit test. This sounded pretty easy before I actually did it. The fit test consists of doing 8 different exercises as many times as you can in the allotted amount of time that you're given. The idea behind the fit test is that you push yourself to your limits and redo the fit test every two weeks so that you can see clearly how you're improving. I love that aspect of this program. When I was doing Jillian Michaels videos (which I still like, don't get me wrong), she would say things like "Remember how hard this used to be?", but honestly, I never really remembered. It was all just a painful blurry mess of sweat and yelling. I love how clearly I will be able to (hopefully!) see my improvement. The fit test lasted about 30 minutes and during those 30 minutes I think I went through all of the stages of grief. Let me go through them for you:

1. Shock/denial: This would apply to the point of deciding I would do Insanity until the moment that I started. I tend to think I'm capable of anything and I'm generally really dedicated once I start something. Being that I knew there was no going back once my mind was made up the moments, hours, days preceding the fit test were filled with me telling myself over and over "I'm sure it won't be that bad", "You survived Jillian Michaels, this can't be much harder", or I just completely blocked out the fact that I was about to have my world rocked by a little thing called Insanity.

2. Pain and Guilt. Ok, I'm just going to go with the pain aspect of this one. Man, it was painful to push my body to that limit. It wasn't painful like "you should stop because you're hurting yourself", it was painful like, "Remember all of those Christmas cookies? Well this is payback." My throat immediately felt like I had swallowed a fireball and about 5 minutes in I was ready to throw up everything I had ever eaten. I have never been that physically distressed before in my life.

3. Anger and Bargaining: This was another pretty intense stage for me. I kept thinking in my head all of the reasons I should stop working. I, thankfully, didn't. This one mostly came in after the fit test was over though. When I was looking at my scores right after the overwhelming relief of being done, I realized that I scored high in two areas. That means something is wrong because I am not physically capable of scoring high at any physical activity at the moment. We realized one of the numbers needed to be split in half because we counted it wrong, but then my husband told me that I didn't have the best form in the other, which is probably why I scored so high. I have really good work ethic and wouldn't feel right about taking a score that I didn't earn. The realization that I was going to have to immediately turn that video back on and do MORE work just about killed me. I definitely yelled a little at this point. Happy Nyki was out of town.

4. Depression: Ok, so that's a little extreme, but about half way through I definitely didn't know how I was going to make it through. At some points I was just collapsed on the floor saying over and over "I can't do this, I'm going to die". You know when you commit to something and then finally have to do this impossible task and you say to yourself, "Self, what in the HECK were you thinking? Seriously Self, what was going through your stupid brain that would make you think this was a good idea?". I would say this was the stage that I stayed at during the majority of this workout video.

5. The Upward Turn: According to the site that I'm getting these stages from the "Upward turn" refers to the point where the depression lifts slightly. I would say that would have been when there was about 5 minutes left on the clock. I can do just about anything for 5 minutes so I knew that somehow I would survive.

6. Reconstruction/Working Through: This would have been the cool down/stretch part of the video. I just had to work through this last little step in order to be done with this painful and terrifying experience. My brain seemed to be slowly becoming more functional (though it took at least an hour post-fit test before I could do something as simple as typing.

7. Acceptance/Hope: I did it! I took short breaks throughout the video but I finished and I finished strong. You are overwhelmed with such a deep, unique satisfaction when you push your body to its limits and you succeed. We spend our lives underestimating what we're capable of in almost all aspects of our lives, so it is SO refreshing to be on the other side of a workout like that knowing that you could do more than you thought.

I started on Sunday with the fit test and woke up on Monday SO INCREDIBLY SORE. My calves felt like they were being cut off with a chainsaw and my back muscles (which I didn't know existed until Monday Morning) made me have to bend into this little hunchback position while walking, which was really awkward. Although I was in pain I pressed play on Monday for my first real workout. The normal workouts are about 45 minutes. It was really, really hard but I finished. Then I woke up this morning (Tuesday) even more sore than the day before! I pressed play again today and survived another day of Insanity (literally).

I'll be working out 6 days a week and will be eating five 300 calorie meals a day.

I think I've probably scared anyone reading this out of doing this workout video, but my hope is that eventually my before and after pictures will push all of the fear out of your head and you will take the jump too!