Bring on the Haters!

You’re late!

I went to the gym this morning… It took me six minutes of laying in bed and debating with myself but I eventually got up and went. I dilly dallied getting my clothes on and forgot to put my gym bag together last night so I only left the house at 4:55. I sped over the bridge and careened into the parking lot at 5:03 only to find that every other 5am gymgoer was standing outside. I got out of my car thinking that maybe they were waiting for some sort of special event bus to come and pick them up and that I would just slip past them into the building. Ya, no. The girl that opens the gym ended up coming at 5:28… 28 min late! It was damn cold outside and waiting outside for 30 min to do half a workout was a bit of a slap in the face.

Now, do I wish I’d stayed in bed? No. That’s a good sign, since normally I would say yes, had I known that this would happen, I would have just slept in.

What I realized as I was doing my 28 min on the elliptical was that this has stopped being ‘kill you hard’. I ramped up the resistance and crossramp on the thing for the 2nd half of my workout so that I wasn’t just coasting along, but I wasn’t counting down every second as wanting to vomit or die… that’s a good sign… right? I recovered quicker and felt better than any other day I’ve been to the gym in the last two weeks so I was very happy. Altho I would have been happier if I could have gone and treadmilled for a few min.

Community

The one good thing about getting locked out of the gym at 5am is that because I chose to get out of bed this morning, chose to wait to get into the gym and then chose to work out as hard as I could for that measly 28 min, I felt part of a club. I chatted with the guys (cause I was the only girl there) and we commiserated about getting out of bed at that time, why we had to leave at a certain time (some of us have the science of am workouts down to the minute) and why this was ‘so stupid’. I missed being a part of a community like that. It’s a special group of people (my sister included.. of course it’s special!) who get up when everyone else is still snuggling and go put some sweat on the machines. I always liked being part of that group of people… and now I’m part of it again… It gives me a little bump up in drive and determination!

You’re no fun!

So it seems that my muscle memory for working out is coming back and with it, it’s bringing memories of other things. Like people being assholes about my personal changes. Now, I realize and learned this lesson many years ago that when YOU make changes, it’s your responsibility to help other people adapt. That seems weird to say right? Why do you have to manage other people’s reactions? Because it’s in your own best interest. When you make any sort of massive change, it rocks the boat of your world and those waves affect people around you. Normally I would say that everyone can deal with their own reactions to things outside their control but I know from experience that unless you want to just wash your life of all your friends and family that are feeling uncomfortable with the changes you’re making, you need to do a little management.

Of course by managing other people’s interaction with you, that doesn’t mean stop doing something for yourself because it makes others feel uncomfortable. But it does mean that you can help them adapt by adapting your own behavior to make the change less difficult for loved ones to deal with.

For instance, let’s pretend you’re getting married and your single friends are having a hard time dealing with it. You can help yourself by managing how the change is being presented. You can book girls nights, make sure that wedding talk doesn’t monopolize every single conversation and invite them to participate in a way that is both helpful to you and fulfilling for them etc… You’re not going to NOT get married because your single friends are upset but you can manage the change to make life easier for everyone, including yourself.

You're getting married??

Now, I’m not getting married, but the changes I’m making in my own life are starting to affect the people in my circle. I’m getting a lot of negativity and pushback from people I would have expected to be some of the biggest cheerleaders. And I’ve been declared un-fun for declining to go for cake and cookies and bottles of wine and beer. I’m still a lot of fun if you ask me but the ‘club’ I used to belong to (as opposed to the sports club I now belong to) is being shaken up. The security and security blanket of my participation being removed is rocking the boat big time!

People have other people in their lives for various reasons. Oftentimes it works for both parties. When one party changes the pieces around, the other party has now had a component of their life changed and sometimes removed. Often people do get over it in time and the change takes hold and the relationship evolves to continue to reward both parties.....but in reality, if you have friends who saw you only as a junk food eating, wine drinking, lazing about participant who potentially made them feel OK about that part of their own personality, it's possible that they will go elsewhere to fill their need for that. The part about managing this is the difficult thing. I don’t want to scrub clean my small circle of friends right off the bat without allowing a chance for the change to take hold and the relationship to evolve, so I will try to help them become more comfortable with the new me. What I will not do is work diligently on myself all the while consciously helping them adapt only to continue to get beaten up for it. A time will come when decisions have to be made about how people will fit into my new life.

Sisterly Love

There are few things I count on in life more than my relationship with my sister. I sent her a portion of this post that sounded like it was written by someone for whom English is their third language. She understood what I was trying to say and was able to put it into words. It’s incredibly comforting for me to know that she’s been down this road… I’ve been down this road in the past too, but I was young then and things important then are certainly not important now. She knows the hurdles and boulders that will be in my path and even tho I know I’m equipped to deal with them, having travelled this path before, she walked it more recently. I’m incredibly thankful for having someone in the world that can make my own thoughts sound coherent and who will cheer me on for every life circumstance, regardless if it potentially makes her feel uncomfortable for a minute. And I do the same for her!

Credit goes to my beautiful sister at  FittyvsFatty for writing portions of the ‘You’re No Fun!’ section!

No FanFare?

Where’s my parade?

Yesterday was Day 30 of my 1st Whole 30. I’m not sure what I expected? A parade I guess… or a big pat on the back for doing something ‘so amazing’ as has been mentioned by my work friends on numerous occasions. But it’s not amazing really. In the grand scheme of all the crap that I’ve dealt with in the last few years, this was no amazing feat of anything. This was a month of doing what felt right and natural and what I should have been doing all along. I know that processed food isn’t good for you. I know that dairy makes me itchy and additives, sodium, and all the wrong kinds of fat make me bloated, uncomfortable and well… fat. It was just a matter of getting my mind around the fact that I deserved better dammit! That I didn’t have to live in my old life anymore and that no one but me made decisions for me. Once I had that figured out (right before the W30 started), I realized I could easily do whatever I wanted to. So I guess that’s why there was no parade… no fan fare for finishing… because it’s not finished. You’re not expected to (or encouraged to) spend every day for the rest of your life on the W30. As they say, it’s not called W365 for a reason. However, I believe that for now, this is where I belong. Eventually something worth it will come along and I will indulge in something off plan but for now, I expect nothing will be worth it when considered in contrast to how I feel being in charge of my own everything!

Moderator or Abstainer?

I just read on the Happiness Project about two styles of people… moderators (those who can have ‘some, sometimes’) and abstainers (those who are better at an all or nothing approach). I’m a sure fire, all or nothing abstainer! I don’t do well with ‘some, sometimes’… because ‘some, sometimes’ turns into lots all the time. It’s true, it would probably be more strong of me to learn how to manage myself so that I could have ‘some, sometimes’, but as I say to people who wonder why I don’t only eat organic if I’m so ‘worried about my health’… I can only do so much… I’m not a saint and I can’t do everything perfect so I’m going to do the best I can. And the best for now is recognizing that I’m not good at moderation and an all or nothing approach is certainly the wise choice for me!

What’s Next?


Well, more of the same really. I have a commitment till April 3 to stay strictly on the W30 program. April 4-7th I’m going away on a teeny tiny vacation. All our food is planned for and it’s all W30 approved but I will probably consume some wine with dinner and some Bailey’s with my morning coffee, so even tho I’d like to go a full 60 days stoppage free, as I said above, I can only do what I can do and since I haven’t been anywhere but work and home since the end of December, it’s not reasonable to expect to not indulge a bit.

So April 8 begins the 2nd phase of my All or Nothing way of eating. Only this time I’m going to make dates, berries, fruit and Larabars on the ‘nothing’ list… because my sense of moderation doesn’t work well and I’d really like to be able to curb the ‘need’ for evening snacking.

I’m not alone! (and neither are you)

I’m sure you know if you’ve read along over the past couple of years, or dug back through the archives that I gave up a lot of things that I enjoyed and that were good for me in the last few years… I gave up eating well, I gave up exercise, I gave up a lot of control and self esteem and I gave up my faith in God.

I’ve talked about all of them so far except for the last one.

I guess it would be good for ‘ratings’ to say that I stood in my living room one day and screamed to the Heavens ‘Why God have You abandoned me?’. ‘Why have You left me here to suffer this alone… I don’t know how to fix this!’

There’s no such story. Because, in fact it should have been God standing in my living room and asking ME ‘Why have you forgotten about Me? I can help you if only you’ll ask You don’t have to go through this alone’. I can’t say for sure that that didn’t happen… that in the years of struggle He didn’t come to me and offer to put an end to my suffering… to save me from what my life had become. I certainly was in no place to hear it, for I was so busy trying to fix everything myself.

I remember having conversations (multitudes) with my friends and saying ‘I don’t know what else to do. I’ve tried everything’ and then consistently listing off all the things I tried to do to fix the relationship, to make him respect me, to stop the manipulative and abusive behavior. I can still feel it now, the feeling I had during those conversations. It was like I was standing still in a vortex of insanity… everything I ‘tried’ swirling around me, too fast to catch… too messy to make sense out of. I don’t know what else to do… I don’t know what else to do… That thought went around and around me in a never ending spiral of grief and frustration. I can still feel the anxiety now when I recall those moments… and then the creeping thought that maybe I deserved this. Maybe I WASN’T fun… maybe I WAS a bitch… maybe I WASN’T a good housekeeper, cook, laundry doer, friend…PERSON!

I spent so many years, before that relationship and then during it thinking I had it all figured out… and then thinking I had to get it all figured out. I lied to my friends about my life at home… even my family doesn’t know the half of what went on…

I look back on it now and I can see that I COULD have saved myself… I could have just asked God for help. Those moments of desperation… of really being at the lowest low… feeling like I was going crazy and there was nothing left to try… there was always one more thing to try…

Every day is a new day and somewhere on my Christmas holidays I felt moved… things weren’t working, the year was ending and I was still seemingly stuck in a place I didn’t want to be… unhealthy, not really happy and with no prospect of massive change on the horizon…

I prayed that night. And as I prayed I felt a huge weight lift off me. It was such a feeling of renewal and peace that I wondered if I prayed again the next night would I feel the same thing… I did. Every time I spoke to God it felt as though my burden was being lifted. It all sounds so very cliché to me too… these are the things that you hear televangelists screaming into a microphone at crowds of thousands. ‘GOD WILL EASE YOUR BURDENS’. Well it’s hard to understand that as a young woman who’s never had burdens.

I’ve been a Christian all my life and I don’t recall ever feeling the weight of burden before… Back in the ‘good old days’ I prayed all the time… I thought I knew what it was supposed to feel like… But this… this was different. This commune with God was something I’d never felt before. This lightening of my load was something new… I’ve been down a long and steep road and picked up an awful lot of really ugly, dirty, unhealthy and sad burden on the way. Burden that previously in my life I’d never had to carry before. It crushed me… It filled my lungs with smoke and pulled at my muscles like hot irons. And man the moment I didn’t have to carry it alone anymore I realized just how heavy it really was… how back breaking and spirit crushing. And until that moment at Christmas I never thought that I would get the chance to stop carrying it. How amazing that I could just hand it off and be free!

I consider that time in my life a blessing now… I didn’t know just how terrible life could be… how desolate and lonely and painful… but the other thing I didn’t know was just how free and peaceful it could be. How much I didn’t have to depend only on myself to manage my life. I didn’t have to live in the pain for one more second… everything was new and clean again.

Every night I get excited to go to bed… for altho it’s not the only place; bed is where I pray. I ask for guidance, hand off my burden and feel peaceful at bedtime. Every night is not easy… my old habits get in the way and my mind wanders… trying to figure out my problems myself… So sometimes my prayer is to be reminded that I’m not in this alone anymore and I don’t have to figure it out myself.

My whole life is changing at a breakneck speed right now… I have a strength and willpower now I didn’t know I had. I have peace and harmony within my own mind and body that I honestly thought I would never have again. (if I ever had it in the first place). I feel like I’m rebuilding my life on solid ground where once I stood in quick sand. It’s a powerful feeling and I just could not help but write about it here.

All over the place

I have an incredible urge to throw things away!


In fact, as I’m thinking about it right now, I already know which drawer I’m going to start with and I know I will be doing it almost the second I get home.


I squandered the last bit of my holidays away playing with Mr. Fluffypants and watching television. I was trying to keep a cold at bay so on Friday I took the day off and slept most of it. Saturday and Sunday were both uneventful (except getting evacuated from Costco on Sunday afternoon… but that was barely an event!).


I’ve been doing very well in the past little while with ensuring that I cook and prepare all my own meals. I ate grain twice over the Christmas Holiday. Once on December 21 when I ate a piece of custom made birthday cake. It was a chocolate lazy dazy cake in which you use coffee for the liquid and it was covered in whipped peanut butter icing and garnish of more chocolate and peanut butter.

And then I ate two bites of stuffing on Christmas day because Janet makes the Canaday/Janzen stuffing recipe and it’s kind of kryptonite. I will say that I suffered IMMENSELY after both those indulgences… which relegated them right outside the indulgence category…


ANYWAY… One of my Journey Plan items is to continue to not eat grains of any sort, no legumes, no really starchy veg and a meagre amount of dairy. So far it’s working out great! I’ve been filling my freezer (soon to be deep freeze if I can figure out a way to get the effer home from Costco!) with home cooked grain free meals so that when I start into my 99 hours of training next Tuesday I’ll have good things to eat.


That said, I’m feeling in a very purgey way right now. I want to throw everything in my house away! Obviously I’m not going to but there are some areas that won’t be spared. The impetus for it was really a purchase I made on Etsy. Another one of my Journey Plan items is to continue to try and make as little impact on the planet as I can, while still remaining sane and not wasting spending all my time on worrying about it. One of the ways to do that is cloth napkins. Now, I’m sure you can go to the store and purchase some really heinous cloth napkins at Winners or Canadian Tire. But, always one for wanting something interesting and unique, I bought myself a set of four screen printed napkins from THIS ETSY VENDOR

In fact, the ACTUAL ones I bought are pictured below.

The other thing that I’m really itching to do is figure something out for my dining room. I love my dining room. When I first moved I repurposed a small loveseat to function as banquette seating on one side and two antique chairs on the other side. It looks great! The problem is that the sofa is far too low and you can literally scoop food from off the table into your mouth… no lifting necessary. It’s funny at first but it makes your stomach hurt, and it’s hard to get in and out of with the table so close. Cat toys go under there to die on a very frequent basis, which means I have to pull the two chairs, table and sofa out to rescue them for the whining machine!


So I’d like to do either two nice chairs that I can refinish and recover, or, ideally, because I like the banquette idea, I’d like to do this.

Thanks for the great idea pinterest! And if that doesn’t work, I’m considering trying to find some legs and making just the bench portion. In the scheme of things, that would work best with the way the room is designed and where the drapes are anyway!


So I went looking online just now for dining benches… and then it hit me! I have a 4’ wide incredibly sturdy coffee table that is currently the holder of stuff in my bedroom until I get a dresser! When I first got it I had them cut quite a few inches off of it, which I’m sorely regretting now, but if it’s pretty close to 18”, I should be able to shore it up with some layers of mdf or plywood and then make the bench cushion for it! The stain on the coffee table matches the chairs and I have plenty of the sofa fabric left to cover the bench!



I’m pretty happy right now because it means that my lost creative mojo (which I lost about three weeks before Christmas) seems to be coming back. Maybe I’ll even knit a little tonight, once I’ve thrown out a bunch of stuff and measured my bench (and let’s be realistic, moved the bench to the dining room, moved the sofa to the bedroom, rearranged the bedroom because the sofa won’t fit otherwise and then cleaned the whole place! Good thing dinner is in the crockpot as we speak!

Who I really am

I can feel a change coming… I can feel it scratching just inside my consciousness… just inside my soul… scratching to get out… twisting things in and out and up and down in an effort to alert my conscious self to its existence…



It seems like an odd time to be having this feeling of metamorphosis… it’s not Back to School, it’s not yet New Year’s… it’s certainly not spring… all the times that are generally the seasons of change… and yet here I am… feeling the itch to move along down the road of life.



I’ve been listening to the voice… to the scratching… to the incessant rubbing on my psyche like a burr under a saddle…. And it’s got a message.

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

Is it weird that the scratching is a Dr. Seuss quote? Maybe. I’m okay with that.



I feel as tho I am moving into the next incarnation of who I am meant to be. And the scratching is telling me to embrace it.



The voice in my heart is telling me that who I am is okay.



It’s okay to be an introvert. So the world thinks I’m an extrovert…outgoing, social and brave. I’m not. I prefer my alone time to a group of people. I don’t like loud noises or overwhelming sounds. I’m habitual to a fault and I’d rather have a scant handful of close friends than a gymnasium full of people that I only sort of know… And it’s okay to be honest with myself that I’m am a more reserved person… and I don’t necessarily always have to be a pretend extrovert… sure it’s helpful in certain situations but the more situations in which I am honest with myself, the better.



It’s okay to love yourself regardless of body shape. This is not to say that it’s not a positive endeavor to do what I can to be the most healthy I can be. What it does say is that it’s not okay to withhold self-love until I reach a goal. My grandparents have shown in the past that they value us more as people when we are housed in a thin frame. If it’s not okay for someone else to treat me like that, then it can’t be okay to treat myself like that. Maybe that’s the missing piece… maybe that’s the thought that I will finally derive success from… I am me… Can I be a better me? Sure! In all aspects… life is about self improvement and moving forward no matter what. But waiting until I am a ‘better’ me to like myself is just not okay.

It’s okay to want change. It’s okay to honor who I have been in years past and yet not want to be that person anymore. It’s okay to want to take my life in an alternate direction… even if I don’t know what that direction is exactly… It brings to mind a quote that was sent to me last year…

‘It doesn’t’ matter if the path you start down and the path you end on are the same, as long as you start down a path’.

I’ve committed my time, energy and talents to something new starting in January. I’m both nervous and excited and I’m looking so forward to putting myself out there… using my mind and my self to help others. I think to do this, I need to be an honest version of myself and while that is ever a work in progress, I need to at least be on the road there…



So I’m going to end this year… all seven weeks of it listening to the voice in my soul that is saying that I can embrace the new and better me that is itching to get out….