Nurturing Confidence

I'm still a long way from many of my goals, including weight loss and fitness goals, but I can already see some changes in myself. This time the changes are more in attitude and emotions than in the physical. It's a bit strange because I've been so focused on the physical but those actually aren't the first changes I notice.

In most of my life I'm a pretty confident person and, when I'm not sure, I usually will take the risk anyway. True, it does take some talking myself into it sometimes, but I often will make the leap. This has definitely shown in my work life.

But there are parts of my life where I'm really not confident and many of these revolve around either how I look or what I can physically do. I was always comparing myself to others and feeling negative about how I looked but because I had no confidence in my physical abilities, I thought I was trapped in the skin I'm in. No, I'm not sure why I thought that - because it's obvious I can make changes (and have). Maybe it's a symptom of feeling if I don't try and I'm negatively judged, I have an excuse for why?

I'm truly not sure.

What I have noticed is that I'm seeing less of these negative comparisons in myself and when I do compare myself to another person and find something lacking, I start thinking about how to get there (if possible) or how it's just the breaks that I won't ever have x attribute. I just don't seem to linger on it past a thought or two.

When something is physically hard, I seem more able to acknowledge it's hard and put aside my almost obsessive need to WIN the first time and recognize that it may take time to get there but I can do it if I both want to do it and I put the necessary work for into it. It's okay to not have things happen overnight. It's okay to have to build up to something.

Hell, it's okay not to be Wonder Woman!

Instead I'm trying to nurture this little seed of confidence in my ability to achieve my long-term goals on this fitness journey. One pound at a time. One step at a time. One new experience at a time.

Today's Walk - Sammamish River Trail (WA)

Today, despite it being my allowed "day off" of exercise, I decided I wanted to take advantage of the nice weather and walk along the Sammamish River Trail. I live in Western Washington state and we're very lucky in the number of trails, paths, parks, etc we have. Many of these are multi-use trails where bikers, walkers, runners, skaters, etc. all share the trail. For the most part, this works really well and the vast majority of people follow the basic rules and are nice to each other.

The Sammamish River Trail is 10.9 miles in full, all paved. I love the river and all the plant, insect and wildlife I get to see. In fact, I meander along it with my camera quite a bit. Today was obviously Canada Goose day as a lot of them were bobbing in the river, looking for snacks.

I enjoyed my walk and put a link to the map generated by my Garmin Forerunner during the walk at the top of this post. See - DATA!

I slathered on a lot of sunscreen, filled the smaller Camelbak with water, brought my good sunglasses and set off in my VFF.

Things I'll do differently next time:

• Burp the Camelbak. The sloshing was a bit annoying.
• Put ice in the Camelbak (we don't use much ice at my house so rarely have any - might have to stop somewhere). The water got pretty warm after a bit.
• Take chapstick. The sunscreen did well on most of my skin but my lips suffered a bit.
• Go earlier in the day. It gets a bit crowded at noonish on a weekend.
• Remember my iPod.

What a lovely day for a walk.

Oh - and I realized I got 5K done in under an hour. Woohoo!

When Food is no Longer a Comfort - Coping Mechanisms in Flux

Today has involved some interesting insights and revelations about myself and how I cope with stress now versus how I used to.

I used to have a complete reliance on comfort foods. If I was upset, I needed a treat, dammit. If I was stressed out about something, I wanted foods with huge amounts of carbs like, oh, macaroni and cheese or such. I wanted sugar and I wanted lots of it.

Right now things are a bit stressful at my house. My husband has been job hunting for several months, my ten-year-old is having the "summer sillies" and work is going well but I'm very busy. Add in some extraneous other issues as well as my health news and my "remake myself" voyage and it's a lot of concern and stress.

Normally, I'd have dived into some chips-n-dip. Maybe a cheesecake. Oh - grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup! But I realized because of a comment a friend made when she wanted to eat because of stress that things have reached upheaval in my world.

I Don't Want Comfort Food.

Seriously. I just don't care. I'm not hungry. This morning I actually woke up a bit stressed and found myself eager to get to the gym to let go of some of that stress!

I thought about it while driving to the gym and while on the treadmill, including some discussions with one of my BFFs (who valiantly meets me at the gym two days a week - even though I'm not up to her pace but, boy, do I appreciate the encouragement and the sanity checks!).

My coping mechanisms are in a weird state of flux.

Food seems to have come off the table as a comfort/coping item because:

1. When I was diagnosed with celiac disease, some comfort foods went onto the forbidden list right away and others I had to find gluten-free substitutes for. Even more than that, eating was now fraught with suspicion and concern. Very few foods could just be trusted, everything had to be examined in detail. Spontenaity was pretty much GONE.
2. When I then had to go low carb as well, all the substitutes had to be re-examined and most had to be discarded.
3. The biggest thing, though, is that after a month on low carb, my tastes and have changed and I'm just not hungry. I just don't care. In fact, there are days I think I was stalling my own weight loss by not eating enough food. Not because I enjoy or want to feel hungry but because I just don't feel hungry.

I had to stop and think. What is my coping mechanism now? I don't think I'm just leaving stress bottled up inside me or I'd be (a lot more) nuts.

Then it dawned on me - my newly minted coping mechanism seems to be activity of some sort. At work I've been getting up from my desk and walking around the floor/building. This morning I wanted to get to the gym to get over my mad-on with my husband.

I can live with this.

Remaking Myself - To Tell or Not To Tell

Once I made up my mind to remake myself, I began to struggle with a question I'd not anticipated. Do I tell people what I'm doing and how or not?

On the one hand, if I don't tell people and just keep it as a secret to myself, I wouldn't have to explain any success or failure. I wouldn't be called to task if I'm failing somehow. I could just smile a secretive little smile when people ask me why I look slimmer.

But.... if I don't tell people, I am possibly creating an all-too-easy out for myself?

On the other hand, if I tell people, I will be judged (or at least feel as it I'm being judged) constantly. This can be on my exercise level, my current "look", my food intake - just about anything. I leave myself open to embarassment if I fail or bobble on my journey.

I did a lot of thinking about this and, as you can tell by this blog, I decided to make my goals and my thoughts, struggles, successes and failures public. I think this will both keep me more honest and maybe (if anyone else reads this besides close friends and family), it might help encourage someone else.

So, we'll see. In the meantime, I'm forging onward!

Patience is Not My Forte

I'm not sure if my personality is just strange to me when I try to examine it or if it's truly unusual. Maybe there are other people out there who are quite similar to me but I've not really discovered one yet.

I'm a mix of very type-A and driven with a good dash of really lazy thrown in. If I decide to tackle something, I'm very gung ho and want to fix/resolve/decide immediately but if I don't want to do something or decide it's not worth my full efforts, I can be an ostrich with my head firmly underground. This often means that I will put off little things until they become big things and I get fed up enough to make them a focus. I can't say it's particulary healthy or the best way to deal with things but it's a part of my personality.

Being driven is a key part of my success at work but the ostrich part of me is why I got so fat. Now I'm driven to FIX the fat and get fit again. Be a runner again. The hinderance is that little thing called "patience" - not something I have in much of any quantity and certainly something I'm going to need on this journey.

Today I got to the gym and got on the treadmill. I started out at (for me) a brisk walk of 3.0 mph (20 min/mile) but after about ten to fifteen minutes, my shins started to complain. I dialed the treadmill back to 2.8 (22 min/mile) and walked but kept catching myself reaching for the button to speed up the treadmill. I really had to force myself to not go faster. The shin splints need time to heal and complaining does not equal healing.

I'm going to try to make myself complete this week only walking and reassess how my shins are doing on Sunday. Right now they have some lumps and are tender to the touch.

This is suprisingly hard for me. I'm used to "work really hard, solve the problem quickly and move on" but I can't do that with my weight or my fitness. Add in the fact that although I've been eating to plan since I started, this month has been a series of up and down the same two lbs. I'm really hoping it's just because my body is adjusting but we'll see - again, the patience cames in. I can't tell any changes in clothing fit, either, so that adds to my angst.

But I want gratification NOW, dammit!

Shin Splints & Shoes

When I decided to get fit again, one of the things I really wanted to do was become a runner. I ran track in high school and really enjoyed it. I guess I'd both like some of that feeling back as well as just getting in better shape and losing weight.

Like a lot of people, this is not my first attempt to get into shape or start running but this is my first truly serious one. I remembered that last time I tried, I had a lot of knee, hip and ankle pain before long and I wasn't as heavy then as I am now. This was in spite of my podiatrist-recommended motion-control running shoes.

I'd done a lot of reading about the barefoot running movement and wondered if this would be better for me. I know many people have many opinions of it but I'm a strong believer in personal choice and this is my choice to try. So telling me how wrong I am will not make a difference, trust me. :)

I didn't want to be completely barefoot, though, because the soles of my feet are quite soft and sensitive - not a lot of callouses - so I decided to give Vibram FiveFingers a try. A trip to REI and trying on the many styles led me to the ones pictured above - the Vibram Komodosport. They fit wonderfully right off, even if friends did refer to them as "Avatar Water Socks." I never thought they'd come in periwinkle myself!

I then started to walk on the treadmill at the gym until I worked myself up to running short intervals - like run 1 minute, walk 4 minutes. I noticed that the bottom of my feet ached a bit, most likely from the combination of being weak from wearing supportive shoes and from a lot of weight landing on them. Mind you this is not the screaming pain of plantar fasciitis (been there), it's a diffuse, generalized ache that lasts about 4-5 steps when I first get up in the morning. Then it's gone.

The VFF did force me to mid-foot strike and not heel strike, another reason I wanted to try barefoot running. It's hard to heel strike when it hurts a lot and I had been told I did so in my running past. I wanted to break that habit as I re-learned how to run.

I had a few twinges of pain along the front of my shin when running but nothing bad. Then I decided to try an experiment to see what happened if I wore my motion-control running shoes. This may be the cause of my current situation.

My form was basically the same but I had quite a bit more shin pain. This was this last Saturday. Since the bottoms of my feet still ached the next morning, I decided this was not the way to go and today I went back to the VFF.

Except today I had even MORE shin pain, to the point I knocked off my run intervals after 20 minutes and just walked the other 30 minutes. Now my shins are sore to the touch along the shin bone and I think I have a case of shin splints.

Needless to say, I am NOT pleased. But I know I have to deal with it now. So it's Aleve, BioFreeze and only walking for at least a week at which time I'll see if they are still tender.

Logic says that this may have happened anyway, even without the running shoe switch. It's a very common problem and may have been caused more by my lack of slow build up to the intervals but, either way, no running for a bit.

Ah well, the Couch to 5K can wait and I can walk the 5K I have planned with a friend for Nov/Dec if I need to. But I'll stick with the VFF for now.

Welcome to the Long Road

I've now started my Slow Strides down the Long Road to health and fitness. Readers will probably see a variety of posts on this blog - everything from posts about eating right for me, to posts about running, to posts about medical disorders. Even posts that are just me yammering about my thoughts and insights.

The purpose is mostly to have an outlet for those posts for myself but I'm always happy to share them with others. I like to talk, can you tell?

That said, I am not a medical professional and am not offering advice to anyone. I can only say what I've researched and what I've chosen to do for myself. I'm not an expert, just well-read, highly motivated and very curious. I recommend everyone come up with a plan in coordination with their doctor for any health issues. My own doctor has approved of my approach and we touch base regularly.

If you'd like a bit of background on me, I have put up an About Me page you can read.