My Fitness Foe, Part 365

These posts are getting more & more sporadic.  My last one in October talked about breaking through a plateau.  Since then, I gained about 6 lbs of holiday weight, registered for Ironman 70.3 Augusta, lost the 6 lbs & hired a triathlon coach.  Oh, & I hit 365 days on MyFitnessPal, which is NUTS.

Honestly, I've (A) been too busy to blog & (B) not convinced this is still something worth talking about.  Then I ran into Mari-Etta, dietitian to the stars, & by stars, I mean me (& the Titans) (& the Predators).  Over this past year, I've sent about a million people to Mari-Etta.  She told me two things this weekend:  1) that everyone thinks what I'm doing is easy & 2) that I need to keep talking about it.

After running into Mari-Etta, I went back & re-read the post I wrote after meeting her for the first time last year.  I had forgotten how miserable I was & how mad I was that I had to work to lose weight.  I thought I was already doing everything right & that my inability to lose weight was punishment from the cosmos.  It's almost funny how indignant I was.

I have no idea how I've made this look easy, but I assure you that it's not.  Every weekend, I decide what I'm going to eat for the week, how many calories it is, when I'm eating out & how to adjust the rest of my day around that.  I eat out for lunch a lot, which means dinner on those nights needs to be low-calorie.  And I work-out.  A lot.  Right now, I'm working out 9-10 hours a week.  That will increase as I get closer to my race in September.

I also do some serious data entry.  I log everything I eat into MyFitnessPal.  I log my work-outs into MyFitnessPal, but also into training software for my coach, which includes uploading the data from my Garmin after every run.  AND...  let's not forget my fancy Erin Condren planner, which I'm using as a journal for my year of Half Iron training, in the event that I ever want to write a book.

Y'all, this shit is hard.  If it were as easy as running a few times a week & eating a salad for lunch, we'd all be Olsens.  I am 100% for self acceptance & you deciding what's happy & healthy for you.  I wasn't happy at 198 lbs, & I had long-term athletic goals that I couldn't achieve to my satisfaction at that size.  So I did something about it.  And here I am a year later, 20+ lbs lighter, about to turn 38 & training for a half Ironman, on a team no-less.

If you want this, you can have it.  Quit telling yourself that it's too hard, or that you don't have time.  Ain't none of us got time.  Go get it!  It's worth it.