A Journey to Fit & Fast

This week has been an interesting one for me. I finished a workout program which kicked my booty and transformed my body, simultaneously reaching my ‘preferred weight,’ (which is slightly lower than my WW goal weight but still solidly in the ‘healthy’ range for someone of my stature. Hooray, right? Well. Sort of. Everyone who has ever lost any amount of weight or made healthy habits can speak to the fact that it’s not necessarily getting there that’s complicated or laborious, but instead the STAYING there. That’s me this week. I’m in the process of switching from ‘losing mode’ to ‘maintenance mode,’ and figuring out what that needs to look like with what and how much I am eating, and balancing it with my activity level. It’s exciting, certainly.  But also a huge learning process! I’m thankful for a network of people to reach out to, WW connect really is the bomb!! I have never  maintained my goal (the number given by my doc or otherwise).  In fact I hit it once back i...

Educated….or not? I have heard in recent days (weeks/months) several people say things such as “this person is a well educated person, how can they possibly believe x..y…z…?” I find this INCREDIBLY intriguing, mostly because I have an advanced degree in education. That is, I was taught how people learn. How to educate. How people self educate. A lot of education or learning on a topic comes from a question. Sometimes that goes into a hypothesis or a theory on the topic, followed by either an experiment or research and results in a conclusion on the topic. It’s filtered through a lens in your brain of ‘this is true for me, for my life, valuable to me’ or ‘this is essentially worthless knowledge or false for me, I can let it go.’  That is how the learning process works in a human brain.  You have to run the idea by things like morals you have in your life, data from research, applicability to your life, if you believe it to be true or useful.  No two peoples’ l...

I had to take a moment last week and ponder this question: what all can one person handle at once? I kind of was forced to do so, to be completely transparent (see last post: if you don’t deal with shit, it will deal with you).  Late last week, I started taking steps each day to ensure that I was taking care of myself emotionally and mentally again (in the wake of Covid and being everything to everyone, I had once again let this slide). I found that listening to a new podcast from my favorite self-help guru Brene Brown in the mornings set me up mentally to be able to go out into the craziness of my day (changes in policies, unknowns etc), and keep my less than calm self calm and not anxious. It is setting myself up for success each day and I saw immediate results.   It’s no secret that all of people in healthcare are struggling. Whether it be with empathy for our fellow healthcare workers fighting this good fight or the coming to work each day and seeing things and recomme...

I figured it time (really, church this morning made me realize I needed to deal with my shit) to blog again. Historically, it helps me mentally, emotionally, in just about every way to put words/feelings/etc in writing, and this was fairly long overdue considering this challenging season we all find ourselves in. In church this morning, the reference was made that freedom is often tried to be accomplished by mechanisms like pride, pleasure, wealth, cynicism, death and control, when in all actuality, salvation is the only real way to live free.  I'm not sure about any of you, but I know that I'm guilty of at least one (see: way more than one) of these mechanisms to freedom. Now, freedom can come in many, many forms and it can mean lots of different things to lots of different peoples. To me, it's peace. And in terms of salvation, I mean a form of surrender. Meaning, peace, for me, is accomplished through surrender. Surrender to control, surrender to cynicism, pride, pleasu...

Good Monday Morning!!! I started this blog wwwwaaaayyyyy back when I started my journey of health and weight loss. I say this because genuinely I lost weight because I came out of pregnancy and having a baby with high blood pressure and a thyroid condition and I knew if I didn’t change, I could fall into a trap of sickness that unfortunately runs in my family-really deeply. My grandfather died in his 50’s, several family members are unhealthy at young ages. It’s a real thing. And I knew I had to change. I received feedback yesterday on a social media post (that I since deleted and all completely well meant) but I wanted to clarify a couple things in response to comments (mostly because I’ve been kind of rethinking them since yesterday and want to put ‘pen to paper’ and work it out in my head). The post was about gaining 0.8 when weighing in at WW this week. Small potatoes, normal fluctuation in being a woman and being human. Followed the plan, did my workouts, sometimes it happen...

I think perhaps my favorite quote on this topic comes from my favorite person ever: Brene Brown. She stated ‘shame is the feeling that you are bad, guilt is the feeling that you have done something bad.’ Shame is essentially the fear that something within us makes us unworthy of love and connection. I have to admit, I spent some of my evening co-mingling with the ever negative shame gremlins. Background story: I innocently, or so I thought, stopped to pick up something from my ex husband’s home. When I did so, his girlfriend decided to verbally attack me, randomly, fiercely, completely non provoked.  She said some intensely hurtful things, and though she has literally no bearing on my life at all, I internalized some of her messages for a short bit. Now, it took me like two hours to run what she said through my ‘truth bank,’ and realize that the words are both untrue of the human that I am, but also that they come from a human who is clearly hurting in some capacity (normally f...