This is not the end…

This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. -Winston Churchill

I know that it is hard sometimes – this journey. It feels like what you were so energized about day one seems so far away now. Maybe it’s becoming hard to envision your goals. Perhaps you have been on this journey for awhile now, but you aren’t quite there yet.

I understand. I’m there, too!

There are times when I feel like I’m not sure if what I’m doing is working. Sometimes the scale doesn’t reflect my hard work and other times it reflects work that I don’t think I’ve put in. It is frustrating. But I often think of my favorite quote (thank you Mr. Churchill) and I remember that journeys are not one straight path. There are ups and downs, circular options, winding roads and barriers that must be broken through in order to move on. And most of all, a journey is a process with a beginning, a middle and an end. And while I may not be at the END of my journey – I still HAVE made progress and perhaps can consider myself a little closer to the next chapter. And remembering that makes me feel better about how long it takes to reach goals.

It also reminds me that even though I’m not always personally successful, that maybe sharing my journey of ups and downs may be inspiring to others in ways that I’m not aware of. My cousin, who I have no memories of a time when she was not a part of my life, has been on a weight loss journey herself. She grew up in similar situations to me – after all, we are family. Big portions, lots of meat, eat all you want sugar fest type of world where unlimited sodas literally happened even in the home.  She now owns her own catering business which I can imagine is hard to be around delicious food all the time and not indulge. She also has three children ranging from elementary to high school. What a whirlwind her life must be. But she reached out to me a few days ago to tell me that she’s lost almost 40 pounds. She is only about a pound away from her ultimate goal and I am so impressed with her and had this moment of – “i wish I had lost 40 pounds!”Of course, I told her congrats first and foremost. But her response to me was to not be jealous because I was part of her inspiration.

That felt like winning to me, it felt like success even if it was not my own. I am so incredibly proud of the people in my life that have started to meet their own goals. Some are ahead and behind of me – but we are all on this course together. When you are feeling down and out about your own success or lack thereof at the moment, remember the people that you are inspiring around you and feel blessed. For every person who may say “you motivated me” – there are countless others who may be inspired by your dedication and never say a word. I promise you, this is true.

So keep on keeping on, friends – your success can be measured by not just your own achieved goals – but of how many others you help even just a tiny bit along the way. And that is something that makes the journey so much more rich and rewarding.

Meeting the bottom line

As I promised myself, I’ve spent some time thinking about my goals and how I’m going to reach them. If you didn’t get that memo from me, check out one of my recent posts here. Bottom line: I decided that maybe I’m not motivated by anything right now when it comes to the exercising/eating well. I know myself well enough to know that I grow tired of things pretty quickly when it comes to working out. That is good and bad, I suppose. Good because it means I’m constantly trying new things, bad because it would be cheaper to just love one thing! 🙂

As some of you may or may not know, I teach TurboKick at my gym and have done so for the past 2.5 years or so. Teaching an exercise class is an amazing form of accountability. If you let yourself go for more than a day – you can feel it when you are in front of your class trying to make it through an hour of high intensity cardio kickboxing. They are relying on you to give them quite possibly their only workout of the day and all I want to do is make them work hard for an hour and feel like they spent their time wisely with me.

The last month or so, I just haven’t felt myself in Turbo class and that is NOT OKAY! And i know that it’s because I’ve put on some weight from not watching my diet as intently as I need to. I keep living in this world where I think I’m maintaining instead of in weight loss mode – and it’s really messing with me! Anyone else have that problem? When I was close to my ideal weight and feeling good about myself – I could have an occasional splurge and compensate by getting an extra workout in, or pulling back on some of my calories later in the week. It seemed to balance out pretty naturally.

Shoes

My Life as a Fortune Teller

Apparently, I can predict the future.

Really, it’s true. Today I had a little private proof of that in my work life. It was very clear to me that if someone had found my opinion more valuable about 4-5 years ago, circumstance would be different for them now. Nothing I can do now except realize that I have been given the magical powers of knowing the future. Pretty rad, right?

In a lot of ways, we CAN predict our futures. Or at least pieces of them, right? What we do today impacts what will come next. Not exercising today may make it easier to not exercise tomorrow – all of a sudden several weeks have passed and you haven’t hit the gym. It happens all the time. One bad decision for a meal can make it seem easier to order something bad at the next one. After all, why bother when you’ve already ruined your plan for the day.

Give me a B…A..L..A..N.. C..E

Balance.

What is that anyway? Perfect alignment? The ability to hold things in place for just long enough? Not falling. Compromise…..in the middle.

I have a lot of thoughts about the word balance. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. At work….at home…in my personal life. My relationships, my family, God, in my work outs. How does it all balance out? Or is that possible?

Tonight I tried out a new workout class at this place called SkyHigh Sports – a ton of people have been talking about it here in the area as it’s brand new. But they have a class called Airobics. Essentially, the entire center is a huge trampoline. The walls are trampolines as well. So they have classes a few times a week that are about 50 minutes in length and you go through a warm up, some jumping exercises and then some more intense cardio, then you do some core work.The new class falls in line with my goal to try a new workout every so often to keep things interesting.

More to the point, it had been a long time since I last graced a trampoline. I have fond memories of going over to a neighbor’s house to jump on theirs – in fact, I’m quite sure that in 2nd grade I only be-friended this neighbor on the far corner of our neighborhood due to the fact she had access to a trampoline.

There is something about jumping with so little resistance – that lack of hard impact no matter how high you jump that always makes me feel like a super hero. We got to class a bit early (I talked my husband into joining me for my first class) – and I immediately found my square on the trampoline and couldn’t resist starting to jumpi higher and higher. I remembered when I was little how I could jump and do the splits in the air and I wondered after all these years if I could still manage it. I could! It was like being 8 years old again.

It was like being transported back to a time when you didn’t fear falling off the trampoline (although we all knew some poor kid who broke his leg doing so), when we didn’t think about pulling a muscle or tweaking our knees.

A little me time

It seems like I can’t remember the last time that I slept in late on a Saturday and watched endless amounts of tv. I look around and the floor needs to be swept, there is laundry waiting to be folded. I could be working on filling out my tax forms. I could be going for a walk.

There are about a million other things that i could be doing…but right now, I’m not worried about it. This is me time. I have it so rarely, and if that means I get to watch my beloved Vampire Diaries, followed by the thrilling Fringe, and then lighten the mood with a little American Idol – I can down with that. No regrets.

Life is so busy – don’t forget to take time for yourself. I sometimes feel like I lack the energy to keep going and going and going – and after just spending some time alone today with my puppies and the tv, it is weirdly healing even if it’s not my most productive day.

But I spend my week being super busy, and I’d say MOSTLY productive – so a little down time is a nice change of pace.

I’d highly  recommend it, and I’d tell you a bit more, but my DVR awaits. 🙂

Happy weekend, folks!

The Most Important Relationship of All

On a day focused on romance, love, and things covered in pink or red hearts – it’s got me thinking about relationships. Relationships are as diverse as the chocolates in that sampler box shaped like a heart that will be half price tomorrow at your local grocer. Some are bitter, some are too sweet, some make you feel all gooey in the middle, and some leave you wondering “what the heck was that?”

We'll work on it.

I have been privileged in my life to have many great relationships – my friends are amazing, my family is wonderful, and my husband is not just my husband, he’s also a best friend. My dogs are even good to me (most the time). I have been blessed. But I don’t really want to talk about any of those relationships today.

The one relationship we often overlook is the relationship we have with ourselves. We spend so much time worrying about other people, taking care of our families and all these other things that we forget to really work on loving ourselves.

As much as we may be surrounded with people, in the end – you have to live with YOU. That is the only common denominator for life. 

While I Was Gone…

Wow – I keep trying to find a moment in my day to write a blog. I never thought it would be so hard to find a little blip of time every day to update here but the past few weeks have been ridiculous.

Life has truly been a whirlwind since I got back from Mexico. Work has been pushing me to the brink of totally losing it and then to some really awesome highs where I feel like students are amazing and grateful and it reminds me why I do what i do.

In other news – the hubby and I decided on a whim that we would start to re-do our kitchen. Since we cook at home a lot (I think this is essential to anyone trying to be healthier), we spend a lot of time in the kitchen. And it seems like we are always in each others way. I can think of numerous times I have tripped over either my husband or one of my dogs in the kitchen.

About a week ago, my hubby went to grab a spoon from this weird drawer thing we had in the kitchen (it was there when we bought the house so we just kept it since we literally had no other drawers in the kitchen) and the front of the top drawer ripped off in his hand.

Seriously.

Awesome, I know.

 

So now we are thinking – what choice do we have? We are hating on our kitchen, we have no storage, everything is a mess…should we just go for it?

Fortunately for us, there is an IKEA in our town (What would we do without IKEA?). So we decided we would drive and meet there after work on Friday of last week. Good thing, because we needed BOTH our cars to bring back all the boxes we ended up with.

Of COURSE we ended up buying half a kitchen it felt like. We decided to totally redo one side of our kitchen so we could put in more storage, get some additional counter space and get us on the right track for when we can afford to finish it out. It was all pretty exciting and scary. The hubs kept asking me to make the decisions but I just felt paralyzed….like, that is too big of a deal, I can’t choose. I mean, you would think I don’t actually have the ability to have an opinion sometimes when it comes to those things.

But anyway, I have some pics of our progress so far!

Before: Make Shift Pantry - Cleaned Out!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before: Rack to hold pots/pans

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Space is cleared & ready for something cooler!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Corner Cabinet with Lazy Susan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Corner Cabinet, 4 drawer cab & tall pantry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Butcher Top Counter and some doors!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pretty amazing progress if I may say so myself. Fortunately, my husband is a handy kinda guy, so he magically knows how to put things together, drill holes, cut counter tops and all these other things that mystify me. I am not a builder or a very good instruction interpreter. 🙂

We have more doors on now, and are making some final changes to get everything right…and still need to put hardware on so we can open things more easily but it’s moving in the right direction.

So now you have proof of what I was doing all weekend long instead of writing to you!

I promise a more fun or inspiring update soon!

The bottle never lies

Pushing through the “hard stuff”

Just finding a moment to WRITE this post has been reflective of the title.

A little background story and then I’ll get why it matters:

I had imagined my first week back to work after vacation to be one where I was re-energized, refreshed and ready to jump in feet first. Due to being sick at the end of our trip and through out this week – it’s been harder than I ever expected. I have had a zillion appointments, a nightmare situation with an event scheduled for next week, a trillion emails, and it’s also that crazy time of year where students are applying for leadership positions on campus & we are hosting drop in hours to help.  Having a walk in schedule on top of everything is crazy town.

Yesterday, I hit rock bottom. At one point, I tweeted that I was going to quit life for a few days. Yes, I know I can be a bit dramatic sometimes.

But after such a terrible day at work yesterday, piled on top of a mostly not-good week I was faced with teaching my TurboKick class at the gym last night. So – let’s be clear. I haven’t had a REAL workout since the last time I taught my Turbo class which was prior to my vacation. I ‘worked out’ at the gym in Mexico like once, went for a bike ride, went for a really long walk down the beach, etc – but none of those things can compare with being in the gym 5 days a week to prepare your body for instructing an exercise class. So add that lack of preparation onto being sick with a cold and cough and I was SERIOUSLY not looking forward to teaching my class yesterday.

As I walked over to get ready to change for class, I took another dose of my cough medicine hoping it would help me make it through class without having a coughing fit. I get to the locker room and realized the pants i brought, which have a little fabric string in the bottom so you can make them tighter or else they billow out really weird (it’s hard to describe) – either way, the string had come almost out of the pants. You know how annoying it is to try and weave a string back into a hoodie or whatnot – that’s basically the same idea. Of course, I’m running late due to a long walk in appointment at the end of the day. I sit there for awhile with my pants on, trying to mentally WILL the string to come back to the hole so i can tie it up. Obviously, that doesn’t work. So i decide to just pull it out completely and I jimmy rig it by tying the extra fabric up with the string right below my knee so it at least LOOKS like its supposed to. *sigh* Not a great start to a workout that I’m already worried about.

I make it to the hallway where my classroom is…and there are all these students waiting to be let in. This is where it all changes.