25 Classes

Sunstone Yoga gives wristbands for achievement. (10 & 25 classes)

25 classes. It might not seem like much, but that's 25 hours of hot yoga. It is just the beginning, really.

But this beginning is profound.

Some days are still hard. Really hard. Usually that happens when I am low on resources—dehydrated, too hungry, not enough sleep. And sometimes, it’s just random.

But I get through every single class, and that still feels like an accomplishment, although I must admit that the time goes by so fast, it blows me away.

And at the end of that hour, I am exhausted, sweaty, stinky, and serene. Not a terrible combination, if you ask me…

So, what has changed? What has shifted in me?

I’m up to going to classes at least 4-5 times a week. It was remarkably easy to get there, even though I was really skeptical at first. I haven’t posted to Facebook for accountability because I actually haven’t needed it.

I am solely accountable to myself.

Holy shit!

This might just be the first endeavor in my entire life where I haven’t needed to be accountable to anyone but me. That’s huge! And I didn’t actually realize it until just now, as it hit me that I’d stopped posting yoga updates to Facebook.

Wow.

As far as other changes, there are the outwardly obvious things—my posture has vastly improved. My skin looks amazing and glowy and happy. My clothes are all fitting looser because I have lost inches. And over the past 5 weeks, even though I’m not actively trying to lose weight (because on yoga days I tend to eat like a horse, or so it feels like, and I love to eat, and I eat whatever I want so long as it’s got ingredients I can pronounce and identify and feel good about eating)… I have indeed lost 5 pounds. And of course, I am more flexible, I’m getting stronger, and my balance is better (most days).

And it’s really cool when I can hold poses longer than I used to, or better, or both. It’s fascinating to see and feel my own progression and growth and change. I am enjoying this process very, very much.

But the real, soul-deep benefits are much harder to articulate.

I’ve noticed that I’m making yoga a priority, no matter what. It’s not so much the yoga as it is making taking care of me the real priority.

I’ll give you an example.

This past Monday, I knew I was going to go to my dad’s house in the evening. I normally try to catch the 8pm class on Mondays, but after 9pm would be way too late to head up to my dad’s house.

Instead of skipping class, I got up an hour earlier, went in to work earlier, left work earlier, and caught the 5pm class instead. I was done by 6pm and on my way up to my dad’s not too long after that.

In other words, I rearranged my entire day to make sure I could still get to yoga but also get to my dad’s. I fulfilled both priorities and felt great about it.

The more profound piece of that, though, is that missing my yoga wasn’t even an option that came to mind.

Which means that I have turned it into a habit to take care of me and prioritize my own health and well-being. It’s not even an option anymore for me to be sedentary, because that is so far from what I want that it doesn’t even enter my mind anymore.

Even now, that realization brings tears to my eyes.

As I anticipated, hot yoga is changing my life. I feel calmer and more in control during the day. I am sleeping harder and better. I’m not waking up at random times of the night anymore. I am able to fall asleep immediately once I’m in bed—and that is a gift, considering falling asleep fast (or sometimes at all) eluded me after my mom’s death.

Oh yeah!

There's one other thing. A really big thing, too.

I’ve stopped drinking coffee.

Yes. You read that right… this life-long coffee lover (coffee obsessor, more like) has actually stopped drinking coffee altogether.

Before—I drank about 20 ounces of coffee.

That’s a lot of caffeine, y’all.

So now it’s one or two cups of tea (or perhaps a chai latte using almond milk), and if I drink any tea in the afternoon or evening (and I often do), it’s herbal and caffeine free.

And I honestly couldn’t feel better about it than I do. I feel great! I love the smell of coffee, and I do still enjoy the taste (provided there’s enough cream and sugar), but even after a couple of sips, I can recognize that my system just doesn’t like it anymore. In fact, my system all but completely rejects coffee, now that I’ve stopped consuming it.

These changes in me are profound.

And there are more (good! happy!) changes, too—not having anything to do with yoga.

But you’ll have to wait for another post…

A Pound of Flesh

I might as well come out and admit it.

I have a feeling that others have noticed, but what exactly do you say when you see that someone has gained a few pounds?

From May 2010 to March 2011, I lost 75 pounds.

Since March of 2011, I have gone up-down-up-down-up in my weight. I have done a fair job of maintaining an approximation of the weight I’d lost, but I’ve noticed an alarming trend over the past six months or so. I’ll get to that in a minute.

For most of that time, I weighed myself every single morning. I was vigilant about not eating bread—only allowing myself to have wheat tortillas now and then. I never ate restaurant bread. I rarely indulged in one of my favorite things, fresh English muffins. I rarely ate dessert—another of my favorite things.

Food became something I portioned out. It became something I had to think about, all the time, because I didn’t want to put bad food into my body.

At first it was a game I played with myself, to see if I could do it. To see how far I could take it, to see how far I could go with the weight loss. And since I’m piss-poor at holding myself accountable (apparently this is a trap “artist-types” often fall into), I posted my progress each week on Facebook. The encouragement and kind words I received helped keep me going, even when it was hard.

For a while the game was fun, but I got really tired of it.

So, I quit. I quit playing the game. I have really wanted to learn how to have a healthy relationship with food—all food, not just the food I “allowed” myself to eat. I wanted to learn how to allow myself to eat anything I wanted, but in moderation, so that I wouldn’t gain what I had worked so very hard to lose.

And another thing. During all that time of weight loss, something unexpected happened. People started coming up to me and telling me I was an inspiration to them.

Me? An inspiration?

Somehow, that set the bar higher. In a weird way, I can identify (just a teensy, tiny bit) with celebrities who seemingly overnight turn into role models for young people. It’s a difficult façade that’s tough to maintain. Impossible, if you ask me… it goes completely against the notion that what others think of me is none of my business, and it also goes completely against the mentality I’ve been working hard to embrace—that imperfection is truly a gift.

Life is a journey and it’s a process, yada yada yada.

So, it’s hard for me to admit that in the last months (I’m not exactly sure how many months, but definitely since last fall/winter) I have gained 15 pounds.

Fifteen.

I could list a whole host of reasons, excuses, and explanations, but the reality of it was on the scale for my sleepy eyes this morning. I have, indeed, gained 15 pounds.

As a recovering perfectionist, it’s extremely difficult to silence all of those tapes that are currently screaming in the background. Here’s a brief sample: You idiot! How could you let this happen? You can’t let all those people down! You look fat again! Fatty! Time to break out the fat clothes again! Oh look, another failure! Another thing you quit! You suck! You’re not good at anything! Might as well give up now!

Etc.

It goes on and on… and really, the tapes just get nastier.

So now, I’m not sure where I go.

I want to lose that 15 pounds I’ve gained, and more. I never hit the actual weight I wanted to hit, which is now officially 35 pounds away.

But I want to do it in a way that really works. I want to eat what I want to and not deprive myself of things I truly enjoy. I want to eat to take care of my body. I want to exercise regularly and get enough sleep most nights, not just a few.

Over the past months I have officially put my own health on the back burner. I know the reasons, but at some point reasons just turn into excuses, and it’s about time I own up to this and take accountability, because then I can’t sit in denial any longer.

It would be easy to say I’m angry at myself, but anger is such an easy emotion. It goes so much deeper than that.

The truth is, I’m heartbroken. I’ve let myself down in a way I never thought I would.

Weight, eating, sleeping, and exercise take so much energy to focus on, and now that I have a lot of other, new (and yes, exciting) things to focus on (job, boyfriend, writing group, volunteering, etc.), it’s been easy to let it slide.

No more.

By posting this, I am committing to move it all back to the top of my priority list. My very life depends on keeping myself healthy and that includes keeping my weight under control and making sure I sleep and move enough. It’s so easy to let it all go… too easy. It’s easy to forget why I did this in the first place, because I’ve come so far… and yet—despite all the health problems that run in my family, I have managed to lose focus.

I don’t know how people keep balance in their lives. I’m not sure I’ve ever had balance. I can keep one thing going strong, and the rest of it falls away. For a long time, that one thing was my health.

I’m not sure how to keep all the balls in the air, all at once. I have so much practice at dropping them…

But… I keep picking them up and dusting them off and trying again.

I guess that’s something.

The Scale Fiasco

A few months ago, I had a humiliating experience with my bathroom scale.

I bought my new scale in March, when I moved into my apartment. My bathroom has hand-laid yet slightly uneven tiles. You can see, already, where this is going...

I had thought I got it on just the right spot of the floor, but I had noticed that every time I stepped on it, it was incredibly sensitive and I could see the number going up or down by as much as 6 pounds just by me shifting my stance only slightly. That *should* have told me that it wasn't level, but for whatever reason, I ignored it. And then I started to tell myself, "Well, I'm still losing, so I guess I really CAN eat whatever I want!"

Oh, look—a new tape.

I think it got bumped on a Saturday in late May, when I had my combination birthday/housewarming party, because on Sunday the reading was way off. So, I reset it a couple of times and tried to find a level spot a couple of times... and I didn't think much of it.

Monday came around, and the reading was a whopping 15 pounds more than it was Saturday. I reset the damn scale at least 10 times that morning: moved it around, put it on the wood floor, etc. I tried desperately to get it to read what it had been reading before.

But this time, the scale didn’t easily fluctuate by 6 or so pounds just by the way I stood on it. This time, the scale instantly popped up a number and stayed steady as soon as I set foot on it.

And that reading was 15 pounds more than what I had gotten before.

The reality is that when I didn't watch the scale and actually shift my weight in order to manipulate it to a lower number (oh god I hate admitting that)... I was weighing in at around 71 pounds below my starting weight... not the 74-76 I had been telling myself (and of course, telling others).

So, I had not only been thinking that I really could just eat whatever I wanted to eat and not worry about it… but now that the lie was officially dispelled, it meant I couldn’t lie to myself anymore.

A few days after all this, I put on a pair of pants and noticed they felt really tight in the waist. They hadn't before. That was the bottom of the barrel for my real reality check. It hit me that I actually did gain some pounds back.

I had to look at why, and how. I realized that I've been stress-eating at work. Quite literally stuffing my face all day long. Oh, look, an 8-hour-a-day excuse to eat unconsciously… and I took full advantage of it.

So after realizing that I've been stress-eating at work, and eating far too much... I decided to scale back and go back to paying really close attention to what I'm eating, how much I'm eating, and how often I'm eating.

Back to square one with Intuitive Eating, in other words.

It sucks. And I was so down about it that I couldn’t write about it here until I came to some realizations about it. But, like everything... this is a learning experience. I've been trying to lie to myself, and I could only do that for so long before calling my own ass out.

So, what I’ve learned from this experience:

• It’s extremely easy to slip into a comfort zone, and stay there for however long it’s comfortable.
• Lying to myself makes it easier to stay in that comfort zone. I can make up any number of effective excuses to keep myself down.
• I used the scale as my crutch. For the first time, I wasn’t using it as an ally to help me keep track of what my body is doing, and how my body is doing. I was trying to manipulate a tiny machine that I had put in place to help me. How is that a mirror to my life? (Ouch.)
• And, finally… once again driving home the fact that no one is as hard on me as I am.

The reality is that I probably gained about 6 or 8 pounds back from the progress I had reached in March. It felt overwhelming at the time, but really, it was a manageable amount.

So, how about some good news?

Since recovering from the emotional depth of the scale fiasco, I’ve been doing very well, and now—I’m back to where I was before, weight-wise.

Those 6 or 8 (or 10? I don't know at this point) pounds are long gone. Only the lesson remains.

What I didn’t expect, though, is that I came to a whole new appreciation and love for my body. I put myself through emotional torture, but I somehow managed to not turn my frustration and disappointment into hate towards my body. That’s a huge step for me.

I have not lost weight in a smooth, even way. I still have strange places on my body that don’t seem to want to cooperate as well as other parts of my body have. They’re places where I am working to build some muscle tone, but it’s proving to be an uphill battle.

In the meantime, though, I have learned to accept all parts of my body. There’s this part of my mid-section that comes in and cinches… and it accentuates my hips. I am so thankful and excited to have hips! I’d always looked at hippy women with a bit of envy, because I didn’t really have hips until I had lost a significant amount of weight and I had started working out.

And my chest doesn’t seem as small as it did when I was so much heavier, either. It looks more proportionate to the rest of me.

As for the other parts that don’t quite make sense (my tummy, for example, and the very top part of my arms), it’ll get there. I’m working on it. I am, as always, a work in progress.

My attitude now is that my body is the only one I’ll have in this lifetime, and it’s up to me to take care of it in the best way I know how. And while this scale fiasco was something I initially saw as a set-back, what I feel now is that it was truly a valuable lesson that I needed to learn.

So, where do I go from here?

Sure—I would still like to lose more pounds, but at this point, it’s about getting my body to the point where I feel comfortable wearing a bathing suit in public. I’ll probably never have a bikini body, but I also don’t want to put limitations on myself.

The focus is no longer on watching the number on the scale get smaller.

My focus now is much broader. It’s about living my life in a way that works the best for me. And the beauty of feeling that way is that it removes expectations, limitations, and the confines of the chains I had once so securely wrapped myself in.

With each day, I learn more about what it means for me to be free.

Wordless Wednesday - Then and Now

Minus 72 pounds...

My Weight Loss Journey, Continued

I haven’t posted in forever! I know. I’m long, long overdue.

The truth is, I’ve gone through some really difficult stuff over the past several months. It really started to hit me in June, and it’s still going on now. The good thing is… I’m through the worst of it.

But, still… sometimes life throws curve balls for which you are unbelievably unprepared.

I’ll also be honest, and say that I have gone back and forth about a thousand times, trying to decide how much to say here on my blog. You’ll notice that so far, I’ve chosen to stay quiet… but I would like to share a couple of things. At some point, I’ll share more, but I need to wait until a couple of larger issues have resolution first.

 

So, as for what I will share…

I have lost 50 pounds.

Yes. Fifty.

(That's me... the "just barely overweight" me, on the right!)

I’ve done it the right way, with adjustments in diet and portion control. Now I wish I had taken progress photos from the beginning! I started this journey back at the very beginning of May, and I’m still going. I have 32 pounds left to lose, to reach my original goal.

Up until last week, I was absolutely determined to make it, but I’ve run into an unexpected snag.

I just ordered some jeans from Old Navy, and when they came in I immediately put them on and pranced around in front of the mirror for a good 15 minutes, posing and looking at myself in utter disbelief at how small the number was on the inside of those jeans, and the jeans fit me so well, and I let the belief sink in as I looked at all the shrinking parts of me, smiling wide all the while.

In other words… I’ve never been as happy with my body as I am in this moment.

In fact, I’m so happy with the way I look and feel right now that I’m having a hard time staying motivated to continue losing more weight!

Holy cow… I really wasn’t expecting that.

Last week was a wash. Intense work stress provided just the needed excuse to eat poorly. I shoveled candy and chocolate, fattening food, and higher portions than I have been eating.

Friday night, I found myself thinking, “What the hell am I doing?”

I’ve been on such a roll with losing the weight I want to lose… and I’ve done an excellent job. But, this past week… I just gave up.

I listened as my internal voice told me the same thing it’s told me time and time again, for years. 

“Just this one piece won’t hurt. 

Just one more bite won’t hurt. 

It’s no big deal.”

I realized that while I am happy with the way I look right now, it’s going to be hard to maintain (let alone continue to lose) if I go right back to the bad old eating habits I used to have.

I think one thing adding difficulty is that I don’t have a point of reference. I’ve never been the size I’m going for. Never. Not even in high school. Not even in junior high... or elementary school, for that matter. I’ve been overweight for almost my entire life, so I don’t actually know what it feels like to feel slender, or a normal size… I have no clue what it feels like (or looks like!) to fit well within the “healthy weight range” for my height. Not a clue!

So, I can see how it’s easy to stop trying. I don’t know what my goal looks like or feels like, so I’m not entirely sure how to keep it tangible.

These are the things I thought about and wrote about in my private journal on Friday.

I had a pretty significant “light bulb” or epiphany after all that thinking… and Saturday morning, I woke up with a renewed sense of motivation.

I realized that if I quit now, I would be following suit with so many decisions I’ve made in my life.

I’d be settling.

Settling for a size and weight that isn’t where I want to be. Settling for not looking as good as I know I can look… settling for not feeling as good as I can feel.

Settling… is such an ugly pattern in my life! But now that I realize what I was doing, I am absolutely resolute in my decision to plow forward and continue on with losing more weight… At least 32 more pounds to reach my original goal.

I will get there. I’m absolutely determined.

And tonight, I made a very yummy chicken and veggie soup to help support that cause…

I’m back on the wagon, y’all.

Watch out!