Courage doesn’t always roar.
Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying,
“I will try again tomorrow.”
Mary Ann Radmacher
It has been almost two weeks since I’ve posted and all of that two weeks has been a crazy, hot, whirlwind! I drove 4 hours to participate in an amazing wedding weekend for good friends. I had an absolute blast and was going non-stop for basically four days straight. I caught up with old friends, made some new ones, worked hard to make their day truly special and relished my “vacation”. Yep…it involved a fair amount of good southern cookin’, copious amounts of sugar laden food, and enough wine to…well, let’s just leave it at “enough”! Sunday began with leftover wedding cake and Coke Zero for breakfast. Good, good times.
I knew time was going to be tight and getting away from the festivities might be difficult, so I tried to work in some extra movement wherever I could. One of the classes I’ve been to a few times ends with some basic arm work with free weights. I didn’t have any free weights, so I just did some of the same movements one arm at a time driving in the car. It is amazing how using your own muscle resistance and more repetitions works pretty well. I’ve been trying to do a few arm exercises at night with my 5 lb. hand weights at home, but since I really didn’t want to take them along, I substituted my full water bottle and did more repetitions. Could feel it! I managed to work in a couple of hours at the local YMCA there on Friday morning, (They have a hot yoga studio!) which was followed by walking across the parking lot to my favorite local deli to pick up their Greek Salad for lunch – another of my faves. I was feeling good! After that it was all, not completely down hill, but a struggle.
When I get busy or stressed, my “go to” drink is either Diet Coke or Diet Mountain Dew. I have always applauded myself that my “emotional eating” does not involve bags of chips, Oreos or buckets of ice cream. For me, though, it makes a huge difference. When I’m grabbing a soda, I’m not grabbing my water. I’ll confess that my water bottle sat in my car for three days completely empty. What this then means is that I can feel the over abundance of sodium in my system. I constantly feel thirsty. My hands and feet feel swollen and bloated. After three days of this, making the effort to move more, to go to class or even go for a walk is even more difficult. Although I will say that I danced my feet off at the reception!
I got back home and crashed. Didn’t even unpack. I was exhausted, good exhausted, but heading into an exhausting week at work. I am a retail manager and we had complete system upgrade (read: lots and lots of changes and headaches) and our annual inventory last week. We carry a lot of small products so that means lots and lots and LOTS of organizing and counting – over 100k individual items. Added to that, the YMCA where I go to my classes is refinishing the floors in the two fitness studios, so the regular schedule was a little screwy and some of my regular classes weren’t happening. Enter my stress and exhaustion coping mechanisms…
~ tired – can’t be bothered to cook, so pick up dinner on the way home. not always really bad, but not necessarily healthy options either. also can’t be bothered to make my lunch for the next day, because, of course, I’m too tired to go grocery shopping!
~ busy – because I didn’t bring my lunch, I have to go out, but it must be something quick…did good and got a McDonald’s salad a couple of days, but most days, not so much.
~ stressed – drank more Diet Coke and Diet Mountain Dew in the last week than I’ve had in the month since I started this and didn’t resist the plethora of unhealthy options when we had potluck. (read: comfort food!)
Vicious, vicious cycle.
But this morning, I got up. I got dressed and went to class. It was not easy. I woke up late, still feeling the effects of not enough water, slight headache, and I actually laid there for almost 10 minutes debating whether or not I was going to go. In the past I would have just turned over gone back to sleep and told myself I’d go for a walk later…which likely wouldn’t have happened. As I often do first thing in the morning, when I’m being lazy, I grabbed my phone to check in on Facebook…and found this:
If ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
is represented as:
123456789 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
Then:
K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E = 11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%
H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K = 8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%
But,
A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E = 1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%
I got up. I got dressed. I went to class.
It was hard, but I did it.
Some days that’s all that matters. I’ll do it again tomorrow.
Had all sorts of great intentions about being productive around the house today – laundry, grocery shopping, cleaning, etc. Instead…I took a three hour nap this afternoon. In the past a few days or a week of being off-track would have ended the process. I would have given up, decided that it was not working, it was too hard, I’d lost all my progress, excuses, etc. blah, blah, blah. But tonight as I write this, I can’t wait to get to Zumba in the morning! Here is hoping that a day of rebooting and resting is enough to get me reset and restarted!
Dancing with Derek 