Revelation: Balance

Today’s Happy Note: Discovering wood sculptures along the river during my morning run!  There were quite a lot of them, made from tree stumps and driftwood; they were really artistic.  I wonder who did them?

I was proud of myself for getting  up to run this morning.  The humidity was practically deadly and my legs were tired from yesterday’s workout (hello squats and lunges!) but I made it through 4.5 miles.  I also walked about 4.5 miles throughout the day.  So I ended up getting in 9 miles without even trying to! Weird.

Work was productive at both jobs.  Busy busy busy day (although I did get a break from 3-5).  I’m now watching Bethenny Getting Married (aka the best reality TV show ever).

I had a revelation on the way home from work this evening.  I have been feeling a lot of anxiety about the weight loss; I have gained and lost the same 10 or 15 pounds several times in the last three or four years, each time ending up weighing a little more than when I started.    Every time I would weigh myself and see a number close to the overweight range, I would freak out and go into “extreme thinking” mode for a few days — I would not eat anything at all, then eat a big meal, then starve myself the next day.

On my walk home, there was a beautiful cool breeze blowing into my face.  I relaxed and loosened up for a moment. And I said to myself: this time it is not about starving myself or having rules.  It’s about finding the balance.  For the first time in my life, I am approaching weight loss (however minimal) in a balanced way. It’s about finding real, healthful, satisfying foods that nurture my body and my soul.   I have never thought of weight loss like this before.  Certainly I have had a good grasp of healthy eating, but I have always reverted back to restrictive habits and destructive rules.  And you know what?  It has never worked.

So here I am.  Twenty years old.  Having a little breakthrough.

Enough of that.  Onto my balanced eats from today!

Banana-berry smoothie made with vanilla hemp/whey protein, soy milk/kefir, and topped with flax AB.

Salad the size of my head with greens, sprouts, cucumbers, eggplant, and leftover meatballs.  Diet peach iced tea snapple.

Farmer’s market bounty!

Kinda random afternoon snack, but it was exactly what I wanted.  Half of a cream cheese chocolate chip bread with PB and chocolate AB.  Hey, at least there were some serious healthy fats going on.  I also had a few tiny handfuls of trail mix.

Evening snack (I don’t get home from second job until almost nine so I always pack two or three snacks):

Best.  Flavor.  Ever.  I’m not a huge Larabar lover but these new flavors are awesome.  Peanut butter+chocolate is obviously the best flavor combo ever, as we all know.

I was hangry for dinner!  Good thing I knew exactly what I wanted. 🙂

Greens, cukes, eggs, salt, iced tea.

Can’t forget dessert!

Chocolate-peanut-caramel protein powder blender with a cup of vanilla soy milk, xantham gum, and an entire tray of ice cubes.  Topped with Lindt dark chocolate.  This was really good.  I love the volume factor!

Another day of delicious, clean eating.  I know that I don’t need to deprive myself or get so anxious over the weight.  I am doing just fine.  Not to mention the fact that who I am on the inside hasn’t changed at all.  I’m still my same self: writer, believer, dreamer, dancer, runner, yogini, lover, friend, woman.  Thanks so much to all of you who have pointed this out over the last few weeks while I have struggled over my body image.  You are all such wonderful friends!

Goodnight and happy Friday to you all!

Edited to add: just had some more chocolate and a glass of soy milk.  I think it was actual hunger and my 9 miles just caught up to me.  I feel more satisfied now and I know I don’t want anything else!  Time to close the kitchen. 🙂

A Thing About Cravings.

Today’s Happy Note: Well, you might say that I am msot definitely caught up on my sleep….

I went to bed at eleven last night, planning to get up at 7:45 for a run and be at work by 10.  When my alarm went off, I decided to sleep in until 8:30…okay, no problem, I would still get to work on time.  8:45 rolled around and I dragged myself into the kitchen for a pretty awesome smoothie (Silk vanilla soy milk, 1/2 scoop chocolate/peanut/caramel protein powder,loads of ice, and half a banana.  All topped with Kashi heart to heart and some crunchy PB).

And then I went to my room to check email and promptly feel back asleep…until 2:00.

I have not done that since high school!  I would wake up every hour or two and think, okay, it’s time to get up now, but it was like I was in a stupor.  It was the deepest exhaustion I have felt in a long while.  So I basically slept for 15 hours.  I know I am still “sick” on the inside, so I guess it kind of makes sense, given that I have been doing a lot in the last week or so.

I made lunch when I woke up and did work on the computer (for the other job) for a few hours.

I had a mild freakout at lunchtime, when I realized that all I wanted was oats.  Carbs?  At lunchtime?  Never!!!!!!  But.  I wanted the damn oatmeal, with a fresh peach, cinnamon raisin PB, and melty dark chocolate.  This lunch proved to me how important it is to eat what I want: my body knows what it needs.  Oatmeal at lunchtime is not going to make me fat. I know this.

I might lose the weight a little bit faster if I ate salads for every meal, but I can guarantee that I would be a pretty miserable human being. 🙂

Lunch dessert (what, you don’t have lunch dessert?!?!):

Coconut popsicle and baby dark chocolate truffle.  This was eaten so late, I never had an afternoon snack.

I finally left the house around four.  At first, my brain went in to extreme mode and thought “geez Caronae, you have already been so lazy and immobile and gluttonous (that one’s not even true!) today that you should just stay in.  Just make yourself more miserable, you don’t deserve to go out for a walk or get to the gym.”  This is utterly ridiculous.  Does anyone else do this?  I hate my all or nothing mindset.

But I got out anyways!  I walked to the gym and lifted for about 45 minutes, then took a class called Sports Conditioning.  It was really fun and a great workout!  Not quite as good as my beloved kixkboxing, but still awesome.  We did lots  of cardio/strength mixtures, with jumping, abs, and running thrown in.

I was happy that I got out of the house (apartment) and did something.  No effort to move is ever too small.

I did some house tasks before dinner.  We started here…

And ended here:

Yes, that is the biggest pile of sauteed rainbow chard (and spinach!) man has ever seen.  I ate about half of what I cooked.  It was pretty spectacular.  Topped with two sunny-side up eggs (I love love love runny yolks) and bell pepper strips.  With a peach on the side!

This dinner was pure love.  I was craving some fresh veg and protein.  The chard and the eggs were from the farmer’s market.  Can’t wait to go restock my veggies (and chocolate milk of course) tomorrow!

Funny thing about dark leafy greens: as we all know, our greens are good for us.  They are rich in Vitamin K and I actually really enjoy them; cooked, raw, in omelets, stir-fries, smoothies, salads, wraps.  But.  Vitamin K interferes with the coagulation coefficient of the blood thinners I have to take (namely, the Coumadin).  In the past, Coumadin patients were advised to totally avoid greens and other veggies rich in Vitamin K.  But then, people like me, for whom that would not be possible, came around.  Okay, so maybe it’s not that simple, but you get the point.

The solution?  I can either eat no dark leafy greens at all or eat lots.  I chose the latter. 🙂  That way, it will still interfere with the drug, but they can simply give me a higher dose consistently.  My dosage is still creeping up; we’ll see how high I have to go.  I am not giving up my chard, bok choy, spinach, collards, arugula, etc.  Never!

I made a giant batch of iced tea and have already had two huge classes.  I use chamomile tea bags, a packet of stevia, and a few teaspoons of honey.  Summer perfection.

Dessert was of course consumed:

Raspberry chobani with Godiva raspberry dark chocolate and a tablespoon of Justin’s chocolate almond butter.  There are no words.  This was like a decadent ice cream sundae.  I’m in love.

Another thing I have learned about cravings: if I don’t eat what I want for dessert, I will end up overeating/emotional eating afterwards.  So I ate this “big dessert”, but now I know I won’t be raiding the cupboard in an hour or two!  So simple.

I hope everyone is having a most wonderful week.

Here’s to hoping that my 15 hours of sleep last night means I am wide awake tomorrow!

Goodnight!

Therapy Tuesday

Today’s Happy Note: Despite my long, stressful day I was able to consciously take some time for myself.  I got up early to do a little workout and ate a quick dinner when I got home at nine so I could read/blog/read blogs. These few small moments have made a big difference in my anxiety level (compared to the middle of the day).

So. I ended up at four different doctors today.  Four.  That’s more doctor’s appointments than I would like in a year. Yuck.  I had two in the morning, then therapy, then went to my office for a whopping half hour, scarfed lunch, then headed to see my doctor for lab stuff, then went to another doctor/radiology for more labs, then rushed to my other job.  So, long day.  Not a bad day, just exhausting, physically and emotionally.

The first doctor I saw (reproductive endocrinology) was The.  Biggest.  Bitch. Ever.  She treated me like I was a complete idiot who knew nothing about my condition or my body, was shockingly rude, and did a hurried and poor physical exam.  She tossed all my questions about fertility aside.  I’m not really one to complain about these things, but my hormones are one of the major components of my health affected by the PE and I just don’t want them to be screwed up.  I have PCOS, I cannot now (or ever again) take birth control or any other hormones, and I have concerns about how this will affect my ability to make babies in the future.  I think that’s valid.  She told me that concern was irrelevant, and didn’t hardly even explain why.  She then spent the rest of the visit screaming at me to lose weight, which I had told her at the very beginning I was trying to do.  She seemed to have little concern for my psychologically precarious position regarding weight and body image.

The other doctors were wonderful and understanding though.  I still need to have a lot more tests done to determine the cause of the PE.

Meh.  Not documenting all the eats today because I need to write about therapy.  But I kept track and didn’t do any unnecessary snacking.

I know I have some new readers out there!  In case any of you are wondering what Therapy Tuesday is: I go to therapy with my lovely (although sometimes we clash) psychologist L.  It has been a very important experience to me.  I know that people often don’t “get” therapy or just don’t know what it’s about.  For me, it has meant several things: I have someone who consistently cares about me, listens to me, and thinks about me; I have someone to relate to, vent to, or cry to, every week, rain or shine; I have someone who helps me understand  how the different pieces of my life fit together; I have someone who wants me to live a happy and satisfying life and will do anything to help me get there.

I usually write about both the content and the process of each session.  I don’t always share it all on the blog, for obvious reasons, although I am pretty open about it, so please feel free to ask me questions about my experience or what therapy is like.  I think it’s really important to record my feelings and thoughts from the session and from after the session.

Therapy Tuesday

The overarching theme of today was dealing with stress in healthy ways (although that is a slight oversimplification).  I have had a lot of stressors lately: being so ill, family issues, anxiety/panic about work, confusion about the future/law school, and just generally feeling a bit run down by my busy summer (not to mention the stressful doctor’s appointments I had just come from). I told L about all these things.  We had a nice back and forth thing going today.  I love that she actually talks to me and doesn’t just sit there like a piece of wood.  So I would talk a little bit about a stressor and then we would look more closely at what it felt like, what it reminded me of, how I might respond.  I felt like our conversation, particularly her responses, was very direct today (which is nice), but also very intimate/emotional.  I didn’t cry at all.  That hasn’t happened in a long time.

We also talked about how I connect with the people I love in my life.  How I reach out to them and how I perceive them and how they might perceive me.  It’s sort of funny; we tend to think that we are always doing everything “right” in a relationship, but it is so easy to overlook the intricacies of the other person’s feelings, thoughts, and concerns.  I think it’s important to really think about how our actions affect those around us, and how we might be more compassionate (always).  I am not so good at this yet, it’s just a seedling of a thought in my head right now. Friends and family are truly lifelines.

It sort of felt like we kept reaching dead ends today – we would talk about one thing and look at my feelings or concerns and then have trouble connecting that to something else.  But I don’t know that that was really the case.  Instead, I would say that we simply leafed through a lot of different “pages.”  It wasn’t necessarily disconnected, and I wasn’t uncomfortable.  Feeling physically comfortable in the moment of discussion is very important.  I have gotten better and better at this – there were times in the past where I would just sort of sit in the far corner of the couch, away from L, and not look at her, and just sort of be in my own little world.  It sounds a bit hokey, but I feel like our little physical worlds are connecting more and more, and I think that this means our emotional worlds are moving closer and closer together as well.

One other thing we talked about was yoga.  I was telling L about my newfound discovery that soothing myself or talking myself down or doing nice things for me is “allowed.” She pointed out that it’s okay for me to feel all those stresses mentioned above (they aren’t just going to disappear!), but I can learn to just be with them and not have them take over my life.  In order to do this, it is helpful to be kind to myself.  At some point she sort of randomly asked me if I do yoga.  Looking back, it wasn’t so random, since we were talking about being kind to myself and learning how to manage my feelings, and I feel like those things are absolutely tied to yoga.  I told her yes and we had a whole wonderful conversation about that: what it means to me, why I like it, what sort I like to do, when, how often, what the class is like, what the spiritual and emotional components are like.  Her curiosity made me curious and I asked her if she does yoga.  She said that she does.  We talked some more about each of our practice.  It was really nice to connect with over this.  It just felt soothing, or right, or comfortable.  And the truth is that yoga has helped both my mind and my heart grow so much in the last year or two.