I've Fallen and I WILL Get Up (Week 9)...by Liimu

PMS hit me hard this month. I swear, I turned into a whole new person. I was so tired, I was counting the minutes to bedtime before I'd even finished breakfast. Literally. I was craving salted chocolate balls. I found myself getting weepy as I watched my kids do their homework. Worst of all, I had no idea I was suffering from PMS. It all seemed like I was just entering a new, horrific, emotionally charged phase of life and so I decided to just go with it.

When I finally realized what was happening, the damage had been done. I had already woken the sugar monster, and so I now find myself struggling to get the nasty critter to go back to sleep already. (The bowl of cereal with raisins I just ate to sustain my writing of this blog did not help matters any.) I have a wonderful, miraculous angel of a friend who is helping me to learn how to work with the Law of Attraction, seeking only joyous eating and exercising experiences. I'm still not sure how to distinguish between joy and comfort, but I am working on it.

I went to the gym today and literally looked around as if I had just hopped off the bus at Port Authority after never setting foot out of Podunk, Iowa. You'd think I had never seen a treadmill, let alone spent 6 days a week at the gym for the past 15 years. I'm not sure what's happening to me, but I know it's good. Change is always good. I've always been passionate about getting in my best shape and now is no different. It just seems to be taking shape in a different way than what I'm used to, pun intended.

As a huge fan and advocate of the Law of Attraction, I get and read daily messages from Abraham sent by Esther and Jerry Hicks, co-authors of the wonderful book, "Money and the Law of Attraction." This one I got a couple days ago and it really resonated with me:

"Don't try to recreate peak experiences. Instead, just accept them as the gift that they are, and don't beat up on yourself for not being able to stay there. Because if you stayed there, they wouldn't be peak experiences. They would be normal, every day in time hum drum boring, experiences. So, savor the peak experiences and compliment yourself upon your achieving of them, and expect more of them, and leave everything else out of the equation."

I've been trying to recreate the past experiences I've had of losing weight successfully, and I'm clear now on the fact that however it's going to happen this time, it's going to be completely different from times in the past. It's going to be joyful, gentle, and awe-inspiring. I will continue to share it with you!

BodyFit Update: Still wearing the BodyFIT band, though I don't have many steps to proclaim this week. I was interested to see that I got more exercise than I thought I had on my days "off." This weekend is the big 1/2 marathon for which I've been faithfully training all these many weeks. I look forward to wearing my arm band and logging all my steps. For more information on the BodyFIT armband, click here.

Week 5, Trust the Process by Liimu

So, this was an interesting week. Last Thursday, I snuck a peek at the scale and was PISSED to see that I was up from where I was the previous week. I started to chalk it up to a visit from Aunt Flow, but then realized that her visit was more than a week off yet. Dammit. Must just be that yet again, this whole process isn’t working. Why isn’t it working??

Now, in the past what I have done is say f*** it and hit the cupboards for anything salty or chocolate-y I can find. Well, I am happy to report that this week I took a very different approach and decided to at least eliminate the human error component of what might not be working about my plan. I tightened up my food even more and hit the gym even harder. I went through the whole weekend taking special care to watch my sodium intake and up my water to 5 liters from four, just in case I was somehow holding onto water thanks to the occasional pretzel knot I’d been enjoying along with my kids.

My weight didn’t drop much – I was still up .8 by my official weigh in day, but what did surprise me was that good old Aunt Flow showed her ugly face five days early! It was PMS, after all! Good thing I didn’t throw in the towel. In fact, if I look back on the past six months, that pattern is exactly why I still have 40 pounds of baby weight to lose. I would have an expectation of what I wanted the scale to do (an occurrence over which I have absolutely no control) and then when that expectation wasn’t met, I would get frustrated, lose faith in the process and sabotage all my efforts. There’s a saying in recovery that “an expectation is a resentment waiting to happen.”
So, just for this week, I have had a small triumph in that I pushed through the discomfort and frustration and stayed the course. I hope to have a victory as a reward for my efforts when I step on the scale next week. Either way, at least I have learned that when my body is acting like something strange is happening (like a hormonal shift due to the onset of my period), it probably is.

BodyMedia FIT update: I’m still enjoying the BodyMedia FIT band a lot. I wish it were thinner, as I feel a little self-conscious wearing it all the time, but fortunately I can leave it off if I need to (like when I have a meeting to attend) and then manually enter any exercise information, if necessary. They’ve recently released a new product called the BodyMedia CORE, which is a lot thinner. Lucky you all who get to purchase that one! It’s really my only complaint right now, and given the fact that I’m used to wearing my iPhone on my arm while running to track my distance, it’s a pretty minor complaint, at that. I did hit some personal bests this week. On October 16 (my long run day), I :

- burned 3840 calories
- took over 22,000 steps
- was active for nearly 2.5 hours

Coincidentally, that’s also the day I got the most sleep. Tee hee! I like having these notifications, because it motivates me to compete in what I think is the most healthy way possible: against myself.

More next week – don’t miss it!

GUEST BLOG POST: The Year of the Dog by Deb Amlen

When my kids finally get around to choosing my nursing home – I fully intend to live long enough to be a burden on them -- I am confident that they’ll be kind. She might not have been the cookie-baking type of Mom they’ll say, but she always had our backs against the naysayers. And then they will go ahead and reserve the room with the garden view and the working “Call” button and the muscular attendant named Thor, because as I’ve taught them, one hand washes the other. Cookies come and go, but emotional indebtedness lasts forever.

Intellectually, at least, I understand the importance of fitting into a society that values conformity. A round peg fits nicely into a round hole and makes life a lot easier for school administrators. But what if you give birth to a hexagon and the local nursery school says, “I’m sorry, but the only nap mats we have are round. You’ll have to take your little hexagon somewhere else”? Sometimes you have to just look at the whole hexagon and say, those points may be a bit rough now, but I can help smooth them just enough for my kid to fit in. And eventually, what’s left will be seen as a positive character trait. What’s left will be her strength and will get her through the rough spots in life.

If I’d had my kids earlier, it might not have worked out that way. It takes a certain amount of confidence to face off against people who tell you they have a lot more experience with children than you, but you know what those people ultimately taught me? No one knows my kids better than I do.

If anyone had told me that my daughter, who has grown into one of the loveliest, most well-adjusted young women I know, would spend the entire third year of her life walking on all fours and barking like a dog, I would have suggested that they up their doses of medication. But that’s exactly what she did. This included wanting to drink from a bowl on the floor (occasionally indulged) and pooping outside with our real dogs (not so much tolerated.) I knew why she was doing it; she was raised around dogs and was developing a compassion for animals that would eventually lead her to become a vegetarian.

It wasn’t always apparent to those who crossed her path that she knew she wasn’t really a dog. I had signed her up for a tots’ acting class, seeing as how she loved indulging her creative side. The teacher pulled me aside one day and suggested that perhaps my daughter would benefit from a psychiatric evaluation. My first reaction was to try to suppress the urge to vomit, because nothing makes you feel more insecure as a parent than to think that an objective adult with a graduate degree thinks there is something seriously wrong with your child.

“She thinks she’s a dog,” the teacher said. “I tried to tell her that she’s not a dog, but all she did was lift her leg on me. That’s bad.”

“Well, she shouldn’t try to mark you,” I agreed, the queasiness starting to subside. “But she knows she’s not a dog. C, are you really a dog?”

“Woof,” my little hexagon replied, wistfully shaking her head. If only, she was probably thinking.

“You see? She doesn’t think she’s a dog. She’s pretending that she’s a dog.” I added a genial smile and laugh to show her that C and I were not, in fact, clinically insane. I took my child and left without pointing out the irony that pretending was exactly what she and her graduate degree had been charged with teaching a group of kids to do.

Occasionally, we lucked out. This was around the same time that C. started pre-school, and that year she had a teacher armed with a graduate degree and a developed sense of humor. At the end of the year, this wonderful woman took me aside and congratulated me. C had spent her year in pre-school slowly convincing the unconverted that being a dog was much more fun than being human. Once the teacher was able to convince the litter that speaking was more acceptable than barking, they became quite the obedient class. Oh, and when they covered color identification, C. had gone around stumping for her personal favorite until the entire class believed that their favorite color was purple, too. She has a brilliant future ahead of her, the teacher said. Yes, I agreed, apparently as a politician. Or a cult leader.

It’s a good thing she dropped the drinking-from-a-bowl-on-the-floor thing. That would not go over well on the campaign trail.


Deb Amlen is the author of “It’s Not PMS, It’s You” (Sterling, 2010). Visit her home on the web at http://www.debamlen.com/.