If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
On Tuesday’s discussion about defining fitness, I mentioned that my own pursuit of that ideal had been derailed. “I’ve been eating poorly and taking no exercise,” I wrote. “Tell us more,” said a couple of readers.
After Saturday morning’s aborted attempt at a sixteen mile run, I was feeling miserable. It wasn’t just that my physical condition was poor — my mental condition had fallen off a cliff.
“We’re going out to eat,” I told Kris on Saturday afternoon. “We’re going to Buster’s barbeque and I’m going to eat whatever I want.”
But we didn’t go to Buster’s. I had a little more sense than that. I did pick up Safeway Chinese food, though, and a package of pre-formed chocolate chip cookies. Kris frowned. “You’re not going to be happy,” she told me.
“I don’t care,” I said.
At home, I ate half the Chinese food and threw the rest away. I made the chocolate chip cookies, but they sucked. I still ate too many (ten? twelve?) but most of those ended up in the trash, too. A waste of time, money, and food. And I still wasn’t in a good mental space.
On Sunday, I had okay food, but too much of it. On Monday and Tuesday, I ate whatever I wanted. Again, portion size was okay, but food choices were poor: donuts, soda, etc.
Meanwhile, I wasn’t exercising. From the end of my marathon training run until Tuesday night, I didn’t stretch, I didn’t bike, I didn’t walk. All I did was Monday morning’s pushup routine.
To top it all off, I didn’t write. I played computer games. I watched videos. I read comic books.
For four days, I turned into a wallowing mass of self-pity.
The whole time I was doing this, I knew that it was a mistake. I was even trying to put brakes on myself, limiting portions, not giving in to the worst of my impulses. But I was still eating compulsively. I was still avoiding exercise. I was still shirking my responsibilities. And all because I felt like my body had betrayed me.
None of these choices were conscious. They were just reflexes. I was doing what I felt like. I was the old J.D.
Fortunately, I woke up Wednesday with a better attitude. I ate a sensible breakfast (oatmeal and berries and a hunk of cheese). I did my pushups and then spent an hour doing my upper body workout at the gym. I got confirmation of my physical therapy appointment (which I’ll go to in a few hours). And then I began to tackle the enormous backlog of work for my web sites. (When I ignore them for a few days, things get out of control!)
In the past, I might not have been able to correct my course once I’d lost my way. This time, I did. But how do I keep from losing my way in the first place? How do I prevent setbacks from moving beyond physical and into the mental realm?
I don’t know.
I’m learning, of course, though slowly. My body actually craves exercise right now. It’s been five days since I did anything aerobic. As soon as I finish typing this, I’m going to get up from my chair, stretch, and then go for a run. I want to be able to tell the physical therapist exactly what my body feels like right now…
Mac
18 responses so far ↓
1 Scott // Jul 24, 2008 at 11:03 am
JD-
It takes a great deal of courage to face yourself honestly, and I applaud you for it. I think that one of the keys to ’surviving’ the kind of melt-down you’ve just been through is to be mindful of what you are doing and why. Which you did very well. Even when eating garbage and not working out and not doing what you were ’supposed’ to be doing, you didn’t turn a blind eye to it.
That’s where the real trouble starts.
But you’ve avoided a big pitfall. Probably one of the biggest. By maintaining your attention on what you were doing, you realized very quickly that it did not give you what you were seeking when you engaged in it. The cookies, the chinese food, the video games, all were seducing you with the siren song of ‘past pleasure.’
But you can’t get back there anymore.
You’ve changed.
*
Wow! How about that?
*
You’ve changed your mind, your body, and your emotions with hard work and dedication over the past several months, and now the ‘Old JD’ patterns that once soothed you when you were feeling stressed out and unhappy no longer bring you comfort.
Huh.
That’s interesting, isn’t it?
*
Be proud of yourself, dude. You’ve come a long, long way. And it is because of your honesty in documenting the struggles and difficulties of forward progress that we all come here. To learn, to gain confidence, to commiserate. To be inspired.
Success is inspiring, but only when it comes at a real cost.
Anyway, thanks for what you’re doing here. It makes a difference.
2 Fit Bottomed Girls // Jul 24, 2008 at 11:51 am
I couldn’t agree more with the comment above.
No one is perfect, but you’ve definitely made healthy strides and are living a healthy lifestyle, not just a diet. Kudos!
And thanks for sharing your experience. It takes big kahunas to be honest!
3 azphx1972 // Jul 24, 2008 at 11:52 am
Hang in there, JD. You’re bound to fall off the horse every once in a while-we all do-but as long as you pick yourself up and get back in the saddle, you’ll reach your goal eventually. Don’t beat yourself up too badly if you fail; it happens to the best of us.
I’ve been working out for 10 years now with pretty successful results, and have just started to share some of what I learned on my blog. I plan to share my own safe, efficient, and effective workout routine, and maybe some of my tips will be helpful to you.
Good luck!
4 Peter // Jul 24, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Hey JD, don’t beat yourself up man, your “breakdown” may not have been such a bad thing. After you’ve been on a diet for a long time, a sense of “diet-fatigue” creeps in. For months now you’ve been working on a deficit, eating less than your body really needs. It’s both a mental and a physical battle. From time to time you should really give yourself a break. Eat at your maintenance or even a little over (say 10-20%). That way you also “reset” your metabolism, which has been slowing down from all the dieting. That way, when you get back on your diet, you get a nice second boost in weight loss. Taking a break once in a while is fine, as long as you get right back to exercising afterwards.
5 Anne Keckler, Personal Trainer // Jul 24, 2008 at 12:29 pm
I think it’s important to have planned splurges to prevent diet-fatigue. This also keeps your metabolism high. Some people call it a refeed. Plan it well, make it something you will truly enjoy (rather than stuff you will throw out because it wasn’t really that good and/or not what you really wanted), enjoy it thoroughly (in moderate quantity), and then get back on the wagon.
That’s my best advice for how to prevent such a meltdown. It may not always work, but it keeps me in a better place mentally than if I just diet constantly.
6 Grounded Fitness // Jul 24, 2008 at 12:47 pm
The best advice i can give is “always do the next right thing.”
if you screw up, just make sure the next decision you make is what you would normally do, ie. you pigged out before dinner, still eat your sensible healthy dinner, otherwise you’ll just get caught up in the restrict and overcompensate cycle.
weirdly enough, the whole “eat donughts, play video games and read comic books” thing is all my boyfriend ever does. I wish he’d feel bad about it every once in a while.
except the donuts are actually usually bacon. that boy loves bacon.
http://www.everygymsnightmare.com
7 Dave // Jul 24, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I think that’s a part of what fitness is: being able to deal with the occasional bout of excess. You fell off, but you know it, and you’re correcting it before it carries you away again. That’s admirable, because I think that’s what most people who achieve their fitness goal after being sedentary, obese, or whatever, ultimately find to be the biggest challenge. I know I did. I reached my weight loss goal, was becoming a runner, lifting weights regularly, and loving it, and then I moved to a new city, a new university, a new way of life, and de-prioritized fitness. I’m only recovering from that now, over a year and a half later, and every now and then I can’t help but think, “If only I had put myself back on track after I gained the first five pounds. I could have dealt with that in a couple of weeks!” Now I’m looking at a whole summer of working just to get back what I once had.
I’m reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson here: to paraphrase, he reminds us that a ship crossing the ocean must change its course many times over the journey to reach its destination. The important thing, though, is that it gets there.
8 macdaddy // Jul 24, 2008 at 1:13 pm
JD. This is a great post. I think Scott has hit it right on the head too. “The Old JD”–the one that I, and A VERY few readers know–would have fallen off the wagon too. But instead of falling off and then getting back on after a few days, those days would have turned into weeks, months, or even years. I commend you for that. Not only are we working on this blog together, but we’re supposed to be working on our fitness together. I don’t think we’ve been supporting each other enough in that aspect. Let me know if you need anything, even if it’s as simple as a phone call saying, “Put that donut down!”–mac
9 David // Jul 24, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Hey man keep it up I have been reading you for almost 6 months now, and you have helped me so much. I cut coupons, and for the third day in a row I have kept record of what I am eating. Three days in a row! That is the longest I have ever done this, now get your self up and get back to work!
10 Judy // Jul 24, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Congrats on getting back on track! I’d suggest you spend some time reflecting on your feelings related to the “aborted 16 mile run.” That’s where the slide began. Learning to recognize the physical, emotional and mental signs that occur before a slip can help you be prepared with a plan the next time something like this occurs. After all, life gives us the “opportunity” to experience these things again and again!
11 greenman2001 // Jul 24, 2008 at 2:30 pm
I think this may be the most important post of the blog to date.
We’ve spent some useful time here kicking around the definition of “fitness” recently. I think it’s important to discuss the meaning of “sustainable” now.
I’m afraid you may have the idea that when things go wrong in your fitness routine, that a sustainable routine will keep right on going, like the rising and setting of the sun. As Mac’s chocolate cake post yesterday shows, a strong routine may in fact be able to handle minor problems. But what happened to you, JD, isn’t minor. It was and is catastrophic. Marathon training has been at the center of your fitness routine and the center of this blog. I would argue that your success in training and moving toward your goal serves a much bigger purpose in your life than mere fitness. It is a central element in the transformation you’re undertaking in your life. This transformation started with looking in the mirror one day and realizing the depth of your financial problems. It continued when you realized that your career in the box factory – a family business, no less – wasn’t satisfying and that you were going to have to leave it to find professional fulfillment as well having the time to exercise. Then, the third leg: transforming your body and, on a deeper level, your old way of living in the world – turning to passive kinds of entertainment, taking comfort in overeating and playing games when there was work to be done, and so on and so forth. Although your fitness plan has been somewhat vague, your exercise goals have been ambitious and have been focused on high-performance endurance activities, capped by the marathon. Your diet and weight-training have been oriented around supporting your marathon training. Just as your debt-free status and your successful new career have been proof of your success in those areas, running the marathon was the proof of your success in becoming fit.
This is a tremendous project you’ve undertaken, enormous in its scope: the renovation of your entire life (and, I would argue, your entire SELF). You’ve been courageous and dogged and self-disciplined, you’ve sacrificed and taken risks. And you’ve been successful at it! Up until now. You haven’t really paid a price for any of this, until developing IT Band Syndrome. ITBS has made running a marathon much more complicated and difficult, and put you off schedule. (I’ve noticed that both the debt and career components of this project have met your schedule deadlines. I think clear goals and schedule deadlines are very important to you, both as motivators and also as measures of success.)
This is the context in which your recent derailment has taken place. This isn’t a matter of avoiding a plate of brownies left over from a party. You’re confronting the specter of real failure, and the way forward isn’t entirely clear. A problem like this requires heavy-duty comforting and reassurance, the tools that always worked for you in the past: food, lots of it, cookies of the chocolate kind, computer games, videos, comic books. Those are the big guns. When that stuff comes out, you know you’re in trouble.
But what happened? It didn’t work. Although you haven’t talked in detail about past derailments, we know that they were long-lasting. You turned to your comfort system and didn’t turn away from it for months or years: that’s proof of how effective they were in making you feel better. This time, they worked for about four days, and even then they weren’t really satisfying. This time, to feel better, you needed to get back to work, to start exercising, to resume better eating, and to write about what happened. You’ve made fundamental changes in your life, and the old ways don’t feel right anymore. You can’t go home again, JD.
I would argue that you have the framework of a sustainable system in place, but that this marathon goal that you have, and all of the feelings around it — it’s place in making you feel successful in your life and perhaps even as a man in this absurdly achievement-centered culture we live in — is a huge threat to the sustainability of your system. I would also argue that you’re in a very vulnerable situation right now, because the way forward to the goal that matters so much to you is, at least temporarily, blocked, but it’s also the case that the old tools you use to comfort yourself are no longer adequate. This is a time when I would be looking for lots of small successes to reinforce healthy habits.
I’d also like to split hairs with some other commenters. I think that “beating yourself up” was EXACTLY what saved you. There are deep feelings at work here: your success in doing what you set out to do is a huge part of what motivates you. When you fail, it’s important to you to feel that fully and reorient yourself. Those feelings are ugly and unpleasant but essential. On the other hand, I think that blaming your body is extremely dangerous. “I felt that my body had betrayed me,” you write. Make no mistake about this, JD: you betrayed your body. You should be grateful to your IT band for letting you know that you were hurting it. Now you can train mindfully. A huge challenge! But a gift of a lifetime of running for someone who has discovered that he loves running.
And I don’t think that “planned splurges” have any place in your fitness routine. The splurging that you engaged in happened because of a major, catastrophic threat. From what you’ve written in the blog, you don’t seem to feel the need to splurge very often, just in response to occasional, specific triggers. Unlike many people – probably because of the work on debt and career that you’ve done so far – you don’t seem to be in constant crisis. You need tools to meet those challenges when they occur, not at random times. Frankly, I’m not sure that four days of food and video game debauchery is a bad tool. The point is, you stopped using that tool when it stopped working. That may be the very definition of healthy behavior.
What you just went through was a huge learning experience, and in my opinion a great success. You woke up to the reality of your thinking about marathon training, you tested old ways of comforting yourself and saw them for the failure they’ve become, you tested new ways of comforting yourself and have found them to be successful. You’re learning and changing on a fundamental level, JD. Outstanding work.
12 elisabeth // Jul 24, 2008 at 4:05 pm
This post and comments made me think about how hard it is for people to keep weight off (let alone go from unfit to fit and stay there…). I think that perhaps often the goals we set and the time lines we expect of ourselves set us up for failure instead of success. I know that some people do transform themselves, but how long does it really take? It may be that our bodies and our minds move slowly to take up new routines and practices; and we can’t really force change, we have to be really patient and accept the idea that it may take a long long time to exchange habits we think we don’t want any more for those we think we do want….
especially food — adopting a whole lot of healthy choices at once and dropping a whole lot of bad choices at once has a certain appeal, but it may not be the most lasting way to change food habits. When I was transitioning to my current trying to be healthier diet, I found that the only changes that “took” were those that I did slowly and over a long time. First, I stopped eating meat at home; and that was actually pretty easy, and then after months of that as my practice, I stopped eating beef out and that wasn’t too hard either, but I really craved fast-food chicken sandwiches for a loooong time. Then, even after I gave up chicken, I still found myself wanting — and eating — bacon.
that was years ago. I still find myself ordering bacon when I’m having breakfast out. And while over time I’ve found myself more and more conscious of what I eat, and eating better in many ways, I’m not where I’d like to be in terms of food. There’s still too much sugar and fat in my diet. I’m still eating cheez-its. (bad as I intellectually think them to be, I haven’t found a thing — not even freshly popped corn or dark chocolate, or pizza — that I enjoy eating as much…. ).
Now, I haven’t given up, but I’m also not putting a date on when my diet will be “perfect.”
13 Pete @ quicktofit // Jul 24, 2008 at 4:36 pm
It’s good to read this and know that I’m not the only one who falls of the wagon and has a few lousy days of eating, no exercise and wallowing in self-pity. Sometimes you just don’t feel like doing anything!
I got back on the horse today, did my pushups and will be playing tennis later. Enough self-pity for now.
14 Israel // Jul 24, 2008 at 8:29 pm
The fact that you are able to think about this is a big step in the right direction. Reminds me of me just a week ago.
15 James Barton // Jul 27, 2008 at 10:17 am
When I restarted a fitness program last September, I was in bad shape. I really wanted to run, but had inflamed an old persistent injury a few months earlier. This had really derailed my motivation, and I had eaten badly and done no exercise for months out of sheer self-pity.
I started back at the gym with two thoughts:
1) Whether or not I ever ran again, there was no excuse for being overweight and unfit.
2) If I injured myself, I would take care and try to heal, but I would keep exercising so long as I safely could.
Now my motivation is more basic than running any particular distance at any particular pace. I’m playing a long game - getting fit now so that I can still live the life I want to at 60, 70 or even older.
Since starting back, I have had the odd problem with shoulders and feet, but I’ve kept at it, switching exercises around when I had to.
I lost 30lbs of fat, and I’ve put back most of that weight now, but my body fat is much lower.
I still want to run long and fast, and that’s still on the horizon, but I’m working on every component of my fitness, including flexibility, strength and power. (You can tell I’ve been drinking the CrossFit kool-aid.) Having a lot of disparate goals (body weight bench press, doing the splits, a mile in the pool in 30 minutes) means I can keep moving towards some goal pretty much all the time.
16 Lazy Man and Health // Jul 28, 2008 at 8:04 am
Wait a second, you aborted a 16 mile run and it put you in a downward spiral? So many people would love to be able to run 1600 feet.
When faced with adversity, I go with two simple steps… grieve properly, take analysis of the situation, and if nothing has significantly changed, get back to the things that were important before the adversity.
Applied to this, perhaps allowing yourself some BBQ for a day wouldn’t be the worst thing. You could even fit it into a one-day Atkins diet ;-). Then you make your video games the Wii Fit or Wii Tennis and cover that area. A little time off from writing is good.
I think it’s fine to fall off every now and again. Some people plan their falls (or cheat days) specifically for that reason. I think you should just limit the damage. Four days is nothing in the grand scheme of things, people lose it for months quite often.
17 Went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival (and some weekend links) // Jul 28, 2008 at 8:15 am
[...] from Get Fit Slowly has lost his way with his health, but now he has found it. It’s a great personal story that I highly [...]
18 Sally Parrott Ashbrook // Aug 4, 2008 at 8:34 am
We all grow and learn in stops and starts. No one has a purely smooth transition.
Leave a Comment