Working On My Fitness: No Breaks

Pinned from here . . .  and of course, there's a Pinterest board for that!

Happy holidays and all that.

The holidays are weird.  Do we celebrate them so much as we endure them?  Just me?  Okay.

The thing that I have learned this holiday season is that if I slack off anywhere, it should not be on my gym schedule.  I took a break from working out the week of Thanksgiving because of traveling and weird work schedules and that break stretched into about three weeks-almost without my notice.

There were no physical changes to snap me back to my senses.  Instead, I noticed a steady slump into depression.  Not working out regularly is a little too taxing on my mental and emotional health.

Here's the thing. . . I don't LOVE working out.  I am mortally embarrassed by the people at the gym who like to make love to themselves in the mirrors with their eyes while working out.  I am a little put off by the manic sounding fitness updates of some of my more committed facebook/pinterest/internet friends.  I can't imagine myself ever looking forward to just sweating.  If I ever post a selfie from the gym I have probably been coerced in some way.  Like-it might actually be a proof of life thing because I've been kidnapped.  Seriously-call someone.

But, I have come to realize that I NEED  to work out. 

I need to go out and do things that are really hard for me because focusing on doing those things makes it possible to just be quiet in my mind.  I guess working out is a kind of meditation space for me.

I need to work out because I need to stick to a schedule that is just mine.  Every other part of my day feels like it has been taken up by things I need to do for other people.  I work to make money for myself, sure, but my schedule is still dictated.  My fitness schedule is really the only one that I have complete control over.

This wild impulse to commit some holiday martyrdom over Thanksgiving meant I relinquished my schedule in favor of other things. . .  and it did not go well.  I felt more stressed, more rushed, and more unhappy than I have felt in a while.

So I will be heading back to the gym-along with everyone else this month.  

The Weight: Documentation

I feel like a slug these days.  My energy is low and I am generally depressed, moody, and anxious.  A huge part of all of these things is the level of uncertainty in my life right now.  Added to that, my health and fitness routine have suffered significantly in my general domestic chaos.  We have spent so much time on the road in the past weeks that we have not been eating as cleanly as we should either.

This epiphany has led me to two responses:

• This won't do.
• I need to get back on track.

Even though we are packing up and preparing for a move, I can commit to maintaining enough open floor space to work out at home.  Right now my time is very much my own so I need to take advantage of that.

My ace in the hole though, is documentation.

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When I first began working hard on my health and fitness routine, I documented pretty much everything.  I was tracking my fasting blood sugar daily and I kept a food diary with those measurements and my after-meal readings.  In addition to that, I also documented my weight, my measurements, my fitness minutes, and my workouts.

When I lost that first twenty pounds, I eased up on my documentation routine.  I think that was a mistake because not writing down my workouts and not writing down what I have been eating has made me less accountable to myself.

Documentation is essential, even if it is documentation of only one thing.  There is quite a bit of writing about tracking calories, food, carbs, or whatever out there on the internets, but my favorite article on the subject by far is How to Properly Track Progress over at Nerd Fitness.

I created a simple spreadsheet in Google Docs to track all of my numbers.

Image is my own

It is not nearly as cute as the log image I found on Pinterest, but it does lay it all out there at once with no frills.  If you have a fundamental aversion to spreadsheets, there are a ton of online fitness tools and entire communities that are built around really nice documentation tools.  SparkPeople is my favorite.  You might not be able to tell from this screenshot, but in lieu of a food diary, I only included total carbs and total calories for the day.  I got that information from the food tracker tool at SparkPeople.

I am getting back on the wagon with tracking my activity.  Looking through my numbers and seeing the progress trend has made me wonder about where I am now and anxious to get back on the path towards a healthier, fuller life.

Ouch

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I have not been sticking to my workout schedule these last two weeks.

Excuses, they say, are the tools of the incompetent, and I have many, many tools.  The main one is that my gym membership expired with my student status.  I have a plan for working out at home, but somehow it's much more difficult to put in the hours in my living room.  At the gym, there's only the one thing to do-work out.  At home, the overflowing laundry basket, the overflowing kitchen sink, and general disorder keep calling my name and drawing me out of the zone.

I sucked it up Thursday and got a workout in.

Cardio: Two mile walk
Bodyweight Exercises: 50 Prisoner Squats, 15 Inverted Pull Ups, 30 Pushups (5 military style), 5 Dips, 10 Lunges (per side), Plank, Side Planks
Weights: Deadlifts (46 lbs total), Rows (46 lbs total), Clean and Press (46 lbs total), Chest Press (46 lbs total), Bicep Curls (18 lbs total)

All of my weighted exercises are done with dumbbells because that's what we have.  Most of these ended up being two sets of six reps each but for deadlifts I did thirty total in three sets of ten.

Even though it's been awhile since I did this workout, I was able to go heavier on everything except the bicep curls.  I think I need to go even heavier next time because I'm not feeling it in my upper body at all.

My legs, however, are screaming for mercy.

I still took them on a two mile walk this morning.

GANGSTA.

Fitspiration

I’m not sure exactly how I fell down the tumblr rabbit hole but I am pretty sure that it had a lot to do with a random link under an interesting picture.

There has been a lot of chatter in the media and on the Internet about obesity, health, and (either blatantly or covertly) race.  Heart disease, diabetes, and asthma seem to be conditions that disproportionately affect people of color but the overwhelming takeaway from reading articles and watching news reports is that people either don’t know or are unwilling to make the necessary lifestyle changes to correct the problems-diet and exercise.

This is far from the whole story-probably far from even a quarter of the story, of course.  But this explanation . . . is easy.  It is simple, short, and it gives us all plenty of time to bang out a pseudo-thoughtful facebook status that ends with a subtly judgmental smh. 

Building on that basis, it isn’t surprising that people of color don’t seem to have much of a presence in health and fitness imagery.  The myth that black people, particularly black women, don’t work out seems to be a reality, especially if you look at gym advertisements, fitness magazines, and commercials.

I stumbled into fitspiration because I went looking, specifically, for people who looked like me.  I did and didn’t find them.

Fitspo, like thinspo, is, apparently, a thing that exists now.  In one sense it’s always existed.  Everyone has ideas about aesthetics that are influenced by things that we’ve seen.  The difference today is that we have Pinterest and tumblr and the ability to somewhat obsessively monitor and disseminate every new image we see.

There are positives.  Pinterest is fairly useless as a search engine, but tumblr is where the real action is.  My favorite sites are Fit Black Girls and Curvesporation.  I had to pick two because while Fit Black Girls has images of women of color, these images are almost entirely of athletes, models, or women in peak physical condition.  

Fit Black Girls

Some of them stretch the imagination as far as what “fitness” means (is perching on an exercise ball holding three pound dumbbells while arching your back and showing as much cleavage as possible a fitness move?  Never heard of it) and some cater almost exclusively to the male gaze.  

Who is working out like this?

I'm not an expert on bikinis . . . but is it safe to say that this one is too small?

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Curvesporation has the same focus but it also contains more images of women who have not yet achieved goal weights, women who are not trying, and a body positive focus.

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When I obsessively check these sites, I tend to look at them with a satirical eye.  I can look at an image of an eight pack and think, “I should work out.”  I don’t think, “I have got to get a fucking eight pack. BY. ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY.”  I mean an eight pack is nice and all but if I have to walk around backlit and perpetually dewed with beads of sweat to really show it off, is it worth it? 

The problem with fitspo, much like thinspo, is that these images can become goals for people and the images themselves can be made up of so much fiction.  Photoshop, creative lighting, makeup, professional photographers . . . .  I know what you're thinking, what about the cell phone photos?  If any man has ever sent you a cell phone pic of his junk then you know that angles can be deceiving.  Also, Instagram.

These images aren’t goals for me . . .  yet I check them obsessively.  Why?  FBG helps me counteract the negativity directed towards black women in the media.  There are some "WTF! For real!" images on there, but for the most part it presents a powerful, and different, aesthetic.  Curvesporation, unlike some other sites, is very real food and healthy body positive.

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This article helped me gain more perspective on the issue and to pay more attention to where these images are coming from-especially the ones with ridiculous slogans.  Read it.  Please.  If you are into fitspo, please make sure that you monitor your responses to what you are seeing.  I ask myself if I feel motivated or de-motivated?  Does this make me happy?  Does this make me hate myself?  Am I becoming more mindful about making good choices or am I simply becoming anxious?

Fitness should be about self-care and your mental health is a big part of that.

The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram Your Genes for Effortless Weight Loss, Vibrant Health, and Boundless Energy

I have been contemplating a lifestyle change for a while now.

There is so much that I want to see and do and I think that my level of health and fitness is holding me back.  Added to that, I'm not getting any younger and I want to avoid, if at all possible, the illnesses that have started to strike older family members.

Wes and I have flirted with primal eating before and it definitely had noticeable benefits for us.  We both visit Mark's Daily Apple a lot but this week I finally broke down and bought the whole book.

I am so glad that I did.*

Lately I have been doing the rounds at the health center.  I'm there so often and in so many different departments that people are starting to remember me.  I've visited my doctor, the nutritionist, my doctor again and so on and so forth.  I've asked a ton of questions and gotten a lot of information and I have to say-not all of it added up.  What I liked about this book is that things are laid out in ways that make sense and the disconnect between prescribed "best practices" and what actually happens in the body are pointed out and explained.

The emphasis is on nutrition but this book takes more of a holistic approach towards health that I really appreciate.  You should definitely give it a read, if not a try.

*I have been experimenting with primal eating for the last three days.  As I said, we've tried this before but this time I am paying more attention to what is happening in my body and monitoring any changes.