the 6 way mirror

Yesterday I went to buy running socks at Lululemon and came out with socks and extreme frustration with myself.  I am not sure if it was more motivating or depressing to try on a bunch of clothes on a whim at Lululemon and view myself at all angles of their two 3-way mirrors in the changeroom.  I stared in disbelief at all angles of my torso and thought, “oh my god. This is soooo bad. How have you let yourself get away with this?”  I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.  I realized I have trained my eyes to look at only certain parts of me that I like in my mirror at home.  I really did think I looked a bit better than the image that stared back at me. So for the past day I’ve been trying to put self-deprecating thoughts out of my head, and turn my energy towards something positive.  If I don’t like how I look, I alone have the power to change that.  I need to quit whining and be kind to myself instead.  I have lost 9 pounds since mid-February when I actually started trying to lose weight gained from my pregnancy. That’s a lot less than I’d hoped for, but of course I’ll take any weight loss and I suppose that’s something to celebrate.  I feel as though I’m doing as much physical activity as my lifestyle and body can withstand right now; I work out 5 to 6 days a week and 3 of those days is straight running for an hour or more. I’ve come a long way since February in this department—I can run 10K in an hour again and last week I ran 30K in 3 days. I’ll work up the courage to measure inches (and hopefully inches lost) next week and report out on that.  So that’s the good part. What is so very demotivating is thinking about all that sweat and hard work I put into working out almost every day and that it’s not really yielded a big change to my appearance.  It is totally true; losing weight is mostly about diet, not exercise.  You need both but you REALLY need to watch what you eat.

 And, my eating is just not under control.  It seems strange to have this problem given how aware I am of what my weight loss goals are.  But knowing what I want to look like isn’t motivating me to actually get myself there.  I don’t eat enough during the day and then come dinner time I am ravenous and rack up too many calories from 6pm onwards.  My discipline with eating totally shuts off on Fridays and returns on Mondays—and those weekend days basically negate any weight loss from healthy eating during the week.  It’s like I want to reward myself for eating clean for 4 days but all I’m doing is sabotaging those 4 days.  I have thought long and hard about my bad eating issues and have arrived at the conclusion that at the root of this dysfunctional behavior is fear of losing control.  Fear of trying really hard to succeed at weight loss but failing nonetheless. I think I’m afraid of doing everything I can to lose weight and at the end of the day, looking exactly the same as I do today. That would be devastating to work so hard and not have anything change.  So, if I just make myself fail at weight loss by eating like a goat (i.e. eating everything I can lay my hands on) in the evenings and on weekends , I at least could control that and be able to explain the consequences. It is a scary thing for me to give up control and just trust that what I’m doing will yield great results at the end, but until I can do that, I think I will just continue to sabotage my success. Perhaps I need to turn my perspective around: I am not giving up control—I am actually giving myself power to be successful.  I have power to make healthy choices, both in what I eat and whether I’m going to work out hard, every single minute of every single day.  That means I still am in control!

Writing this blog post has helped me refocus.  I am still not ok with what I saw in the mirror yesterday but I’m not going to let that be the main take away from that whole experience. 

Ok, this is not the reflection that was staring back at me in the mirror yesterday. Although this goat (from Beacon Hill Park) is pretty cute and I think he was trying to eat my phone.