Good Morning Monday.

one-twenty-five:

The gym this morning was blah.  I talked too much, and sweat too little. I let my trainer know I needed (not wanted) to drop my sessions with him to twice a week (as apposed to 3 times) in order to prolong my sessions, because of money issues and he was kind of an ass to me.

I explained that when I signed up for the gym I actually only wanted a trainer once a week and was scared (bullied?) into THREE times a week, “for the goals you want to accomplish you have no choice, but to sign up 3 times a week, you won’t achieve them otherwise.” Hence I dropped $3,000, I didn’t have, on personal training.  My trainer’s exact words were, “well they were right, you’ll die if you don’t do this.” I call bullshit on that. 

So, I did gained weight; I’m now sitting at 168, but I already knew this was coming - steak, chocolate, lattees and deserts will do that to you.

I’ve been in a bad place mentally the past few days; I’ve been trying to answer the questions, Am I 100% Willing to Change? and How badly do I want this?

Both questions have obvious answers, but I think I need to sit down and really think about each question, because right now I want to say ‘I’m 100% willing to change,” but part of me thinks that’s a lie.

I’m sitting on the fence and terrified I’m going to topple the wrong way.

I’ll be recording my food this week in a pretty, colour coordinated excel spreadsheet, so y’all will be seeing what goes into my gut this week.

I’m going to try to remember that every moment in life I have a choice to correct my mistakes, to avoid future mistakes, to change myself and thus change the outcome of all my actions and my entire life. This doesn’t need to be my life, I have potential for awesomeness, greatness healthiness.  

The best thing I can do is the right thing and the worst thing I can do? nothing, hence I’ll trudge forward in this journey that OH.MY.GOD is becoming incredibly tedious.

I’ve been trying to answer the questions, Am I 100% Willing to Change? and How badly do I want this?
[…]
I’m sitting on the fence and terrified I’m going to topple the wrong way.

Though I’m not sure if you meant it this way, I think your sentiments perfectly reflect how a lot of us approach the pursuit of health as an all or nothing thing.

A lot of times, we let things slide until we reach the point where we feel like we have to absolutely reverse everything 100%, RIGHT NOW.

To me, the fact that you’re writing this means there’s no way you’re going to topple the wrong way. Sure, you might make some bad decisions along the way (we all do), but if you’re committed to the long haul, then you’ll get there eventually.

It sounds like it might be time to switch trainers. You want people in your corner who are going to fight for you not with you.

If things are getting boring and tedious, then I think that could be a sign that you’re headed down the wrong path, and it’s time to switch things up.

You could consider dropping your personal trainer altogether and becoming your own personal trainer. Perhaps that extra knowledge and control you’ll gain from being the one setting up your workouts, is just what you need to pull yourself out of the tedium.

The further I get into my own weight loss journey, the more I’m finding out how important it is, to really figure out what works for your own self. So much of what has worked for me has been the opposite of the traditional methods (probably the biggest thing being that I lost the first 30 pounds without regularly exercising (I only started regularly exercising when I became a raw vegan and suddenly had all this excess energy that had to go somewhere)).

Though this probably won’t work for everyone, I think it would be awesome if we all became a little bit more like… scientists and treated the whole world as our laboratory. We’d become more curious and do things like track down the original information from a study and read it ourselves, rather than reading it through some magazine article’s “filter”. We’d pay attention to how certain foods made us feel and whether they seemed to trigger weight gain. We’d measure how certain exercise made us feel and even ask the tough questions like “Is this particular exercise actually helping me to lose weight or am I doing it because it helped someone else lose weight?”

My big point is that, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all became our own best advocates for our health? Just because something worked for 9 out of 10 people doesn’t mean you’ll be one of those 9, so wouldn’t it be nice to be armed with some “experiments” and other knowledge for what to do when you find out that you’re the 1 out of 10?

Yeah, I’ve probably strayed far off-topic by now. :)