Tuesday, I was all excited about the fact that I had been recording and scanning all of my calories into my phone. I was ready to declare that my holiday struggles were over and that all was well on the fitness front–that I’d be down to my goal weight in no time and that I was a happy blogger!
That would have been a lie.
You see, not only have I really been struggling with my food intake of late, but I’ve also been struggling with my workouts. I hardly ran at all down in Los Angeles during the Christmas trip. Last week I missed a run. Tuesday, I missed a run that I made up last night on my treadmill after the kids went to bed and after I wrote this post.
I find myself depending more and more on T to keep my motivation up. I have no problems getting off my butt and heading out the door to run with her. As long as I know she’s counting on me, I’m there. I’m actually pretty certain that if T weren’t around, I’d not be running at all–maybe not even blogging.
So goes the life of a food addict/couch potato turned calorie counter/fitness aficionado I guess. I can only hope that these feelings will pass quickly. I feel as if I’m barely able to hang on to the gains that I’ve made over the past two years. Dammit I wish it were easier for me to be healthy.
My marathon training plan starts next week. That means that Eugene is only 16 weeks away! Maybe having something to actually train for will get me back in the groove.
So, I only made it two days recording all of my food intake. I’m not going to let it get me down. Tomorrow is another day to start a new streak. Last week I missed a run, but this week I won’t miss any. My streaks will improve and so will my mood. I think that it’s time to get a new scale and start weighing myself again because Taylor Precision Instruments won’t be shipping me a replacement scale any time soon. There’s nothing like a new gadget to help gadget guy get motivated again–even if it is a lousy scale!
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You might want to try the Seinfeld technique.
http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret
Don’t break the chain!
just curious – do you use a pedometer ?
Oh for the love…
You can pick apart any day you want, but it’s not about one day. It’s about trends. And I agree with you – fitness buddies are a MUST! I run with a group of gals. We are out every Tuesday & Thursday for a 5.5 – 6 mile run. We also do the Galloway program so there’s a long run on Saturday as well. We’re all doing the Disney races this weekend. Several are doing the “Goofy” – the half marathon on Saturday and the full marathon on Sunday. I’m excited – it’s going to be a lot of fun.
You also need to get it out of your head that it should be “easy”. It will get easier (you’ve probably already experienced that to a certain level) but it’s not like a switch that just flips on one day. I’ve been at this for about 10 years and I’m just now getting excited about things like grilled salmon and roasted asparagus. Have patience. Don’t worry so much about doing it right. Just do it, do it with persistence and the improvements will come. Keep up the good work!
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Alexa–No, I don’t. But JD is a big fan. Why do you ask?
I was just wondering how motivational it could be. I’m tempted.
I never have been disciplined enough to faithfully track all my calories. I figure if I can get the 80/20 rule, it should be good.
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I think having the marathon goal will help as if you don’t train it will kick your ass!
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Mac, this posts feels very familiar to me. It’s theme is: “my program isn’t working, but I’m not going to change my program.” You’ve been writing on this theme for months. Meanwhile, your weight has stayed the same, you haven’t added to your gym workouts as you have pledged to, and you’ve steadily expressed an on-going low-level dissatisfaction with where you are in all this.
Can I tell you my personal motto for 2010? “Less talking. More doing.” I spent 2009 gassing on about various endeavors I wanted to undertake in my own life — some major, some minor — without being honest with myself about how anemic my efforts were and how quickly I gave up in response to obstacles. Not in all endeavors, but enough to really make me question my own honesty and character. Your waiting to have Taylor replace your scale instead of simply buying a new one sounded very familiar to me. I’m prone to these kinds of convenient rationalizations also. Change carries a cost as well as a benefit. My first efforts when undertaking a change tend to be oriented around reducing the cost. That’s an incredibly self-defeating approach. I think you’re defeating yourself here in a similar way.
If I’ve observed one pattern in your journey over the last two years, it’s this: you are motivated by not letting people down. Your kids, your wife, T: you put your obligations to these people first. Your posts about working through some friction with your wife over not spending time together remain some of the most moving and inspiring I’ve ever read in a blog — your tenaciousness, self-discipline, the creativity of your problem-solving, your commitment to finding a solution no matter what it took: when you feel like you may be letting someone down, you don’t let anything stand in your way. You were probably a skilled teacher.
I think you should use this quality to break out of the rut you’re in. I think you should link up with another calorie-counting iPhone owner and have an end-of-day check-in with that person to make sure you’ve entered your data. I think you should commit — out loud in the blog — to posting that info weekly, no matter how successful or unsuccessful you’ve been. Public shame is a strong motivator for you. Use it. I think you should resume your weekly weigh-in posts — maybe even daily weigh-in posts for the next couple of weeks to reinforce the importance of this. I think you should find a workout partner in the gym, even if you have to pay someone, even if that person is a $10/hr college student who you pay to meet you there three days a week to stand there and text their friends while you work out. In fact, make her a pretty co-ed you don’t want to look like a deadbeat in front of. Be creative about this. Treat it as an experiment. Enter it into with a spirit of self-deprecating fun, and tell us all about it — they will be the best posts you write. No more posts about how good raisins are for you. That’s not helping either of us, believe me. The friend you saw again at that Christmas party who told you that your personal posts are your best ones was right, in more ways than one.
First of all, though, I think you should make a commitment — again, out loud here in the blog — to not write any more posts like this: the “oh well, I failed again” posts. Commit to posting only about what you actually, actively did that day or that week to move your fitness program forward. No more posts about what you wanted to do but failed to, or planned to do but couldn’t. No more journaling about the various obstacles that shut you down. If you couldn’t take a step forward, don’t post. Don’t less us down by failing to show us what you did.
Here’s something else to think about. When you started the blog two years ago, T wasn’t your running partner, and you didn’t even know about the calorie-counting iPhone app that’s helped you so much. You hadn’t even imagined the two most important and effective tools that have moved your fitness program forward. You started out with an entirely different program, and an entirely different set of tools; those tools turned out to be the wrong ones. What tools or methods are going to be the ones that work for you in 2010? I don’t think you’ve imagined them yet. You’re still hanging on to the old program, expecting it to work even though it’s clearly not and hasn’t been for many months. I’m asking you to stop writing about the stuff that isn’t working and try something else and write only about that. Later on you can go back and write about all the days you didn’t get it done, that you disappointed yourself, that you felt discouraged. I suspect those topics will be of far less interest to you than the topics about the concrete effort you’re actually making, though. For the next 30 days (God help me, I’m using blogosphere advice here), start each post with the words, “Today, here are the ways I executed my fitness plan:” Allow yourself one sentence posts. Post daily to reinforce the habit. You can delete them a month from now if you can’t stomach how they mess up your blog. But use this as a tool to effect change instead of a record that reinforces the failure of an old plan.
“my program isn’t working, but I’m not going to change my program.”
That was similar to what I thought when I read it – maybe it’s time to change things up? I’m in the middle of doing that with my fitness program, for many of the reasons you mentioned, mainly that I’m just not sticking to it. Even when I have something to train for (currently the LiveStrong Challenge ride in San Jose) I find I do much better if I enjoy what I’m doing or if it’s a little different.
Just for the heck of it, and as a jumpstart, I pulled down the (somewhat gimmicky perhaps) “100 push ups” and “200 sit ups” routines. If nothing else it’s something new for me to try.
Mackenzie, I’m counting on you to run the “Whiskey Hill Marathon” with me in mid-September. You going to do it?
JD–I’m in, as long as it’s end of september because I’m running the Mackenzie River 50K on 9/11.
Then alas, it will not work. It has to be the weekend of Sept 18. Maybe October 23?
Dan – great comment, but let’s not make that co-ed too cute, ok?
JD- What is this whiskey hill marathon??
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