Healthy Living

Healthy Living Shifts and Changes

I used to be obsessed with healthy living.

I used to follow healthy living bloggers religiously, counted calories like it was my job, and beat myself up if I missed a day of exercise.

I was at my skinniest during my freshman year of college. I walked everywhere, went to the gym five days a week for an hour, and ate Subway nearly every day. I was around 120 lbs, a size two in jeans and a size small in dresses.

I joked that if I were to lose any more weight – and of course I wanted to lose 10 more lbs – I’d have to start shopping in the kid’s section.

Then real life intruded and I started commuting to school. I was taking a full course load, working 30 hours a week, and doing an internship. I didn’t have time to exercise, I spent more time sitting around, and I just shoved junk food in my mouth whenever I had a free moment to breathe.

The weight began to slowly creep on.

5 lbs… 10 lbs… 15 lbs… 20 lbs…

Every time I looked in the mirror, I hated that girl more and more. I hated her for who she couldn’t be. I hated her for not having more self-control or motivation or respect for herself.

I whispered lies to that girl in the mirror. Lies that told her she wasn’t good enough. That she’d never find someone who would love her. That she wasn’t worthy of that.

As I look back on that time of my life, that time when I hated who I was because my mirror didn’t reflect the societal ideal, my heart breaks for my younger self. I want to go back to her, wrap her up in my arms, and whisper that it’s all going to be okay. I want to tell her that what she looks like has no bearing on who she is as a person and that anyone who would judge a person based on the size of their pants wasn’t worthy of her.

It would be nice to get back to that 19-year-old skinny girl (though, of course, I never saw myself as skinny back then, as women are wont to do), but do I want to commit to 1,200 calorie days and five hour-long workouts every week? Or daily Subway? No, not really.

There’s very little enjoyment in that kind of life. When your days are spent carefully measuring out every morsel of food you eat and tracking everything you consume… it leaves little room for spontaneity. It makes social functions difficult because all you can do is worry about what you can eat which will keep you at my ideal calorie limit for the day. And let’s not even get into all the different ways to beat yourself up when you don’t eat in the way you were supposed to. Like ordering chicken wings with dinner instead of a side salad. I want to enjoy the chicken wings because good goddamn, chicken wings are delicious! And life is not lived on side salads alone.

I want to be able to eat those chicken wings, enjoy every single taste, and then move on with my life. I don’t want to spend the rest of the night fretting about how to input them into MyFitnessPal or beating myself up for not following my meal plan or, even worse, combating the chicken wings calories by eating less the next day. (<– Which used to be my M.O. and a habit I certainly do not condone.)

I just want more from my life. Food is meant for fuel, but it is also meant to be enjoyed. That is, essentially, what it is biologically designed to do. When I’m counting calories or measuring out specific servings, food becomes less about enjoyment and more about punishment. It turns eating into a moral dilemma and makes me feel as if I’m being a good, disciplined person when I eat healthy foods and a bad, unmotivated person when I opt for the more fattening or carb-heavy foods.

Food is not inherently good or bad. It is just food. Following my meal plan doesn’t make me a good person any more than having a 2,000-calorie day makes me a bad one. It just makes me a person who eats. Some days, my meals will be healthy and some days, the chicken wings will be ordered with my dinner. And I refuse to feel bad about making that call. It’s just not worth it to me.

It means I’ll probably never be that size-two skinny girl I was at 19. But that girl also couldn’t see past the 10 lbs she still wanted to lose, the stomach that wasn’t quite as flat as she wished it to be, the legs that still hadn’t acquired thigh gap. She was thin, but she didn’t accept her body as it was.

That’s what this all comes down to: body acceptance. Once we can learn to accept our bodies, love them for what they look like and do for us, that’s where the magic happens. That’s when we begin to look at healthy living as something we do, not something we strive for.

Think about it this way: when we diet, we’re acting out of a place of fear. Fear of gaining weight and therefore appearing less worthy in the eyes of society, fear of not making the morally conscious choice when we eat. But when we take diets out of the equation and just eat in a way that intuitively feels good – meaning, some nights you want the chicken wings and other nights you want the side salad and not beating yourself up for ordering the wings or praising yourself for ordering the salad – we can truly start living in freedom. Freedom from worrying about how we’re eating and what we’re eating… freedom to just eat what feels good at the moment and owning our decisions.

I used to be obsessed with healthy living because I used to be obsessed with thinness. Aren’t we all, living in a thin-privileged, fat-phobic world? To be thin is to be beautiful, to be thin is to be on the right path. But I don’t want to be the girl who obsesses over calories, over good foods and bad foods, over the number on the scale. That’s not healthy living to me.

Healthy living to me is loving my body as it is today and treating it well by making sure it gets exercise and good foods and plenty of water. It means eating food as it is biologically designed – for pleasure and for enjoyment. It means not worrying so much about being thin and perfectly toned, but instead appreciating and celebrating my body for what it does for me right now.

Categories: Healthy Living

Motivation is a Myth

This month, I made a promise to myself to intentionally move my body every day. I hesitate to say “work out daily” because my reason for this isn’t to lose a ton of weight and get super fit. I just know that I feel really good about myself when I am consistently exercising, and my workouts as of late have been lackluster. I wanted to feel better, so committing to daily intentional movement seemed like a good place to start.

I’m not working out hardcore. I’m not pushing my body to its limits. That’s not the point. The point is to intentionally move my body in a way that feels good once a day. That could mean spending 45 minutes on the spin bike or walking for a half-hour on the treadmill. It’s my decision, and it’s not tied to future results, and that feels incredibly empowering.

This past Friday, though, I was seriously unmotivated about my workout. I couldn’t even put a finger on why, but I just felt a bit overwhelmed by life. I felt overstimulated from the past few days. All I wanted to do was crawl into my bed for the entire day and not move, but I also knew that I had committed myself to daily workouts and that not being motivated to work out didn’t give me a free pass. I still had to get out there.

And I did. I went to the gym and did a workout. Was it my best workout? Absolutely not. Could I have pushed myself harder? Yes. But in the grand scheme of things, that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I forced myself to go to the gym when I didn’t want to. What mattered was that I didn’t let a little thing called “not being motivated” provide me with an excuse to quit on myself.

And isn’t it interesting how we’re always waiting for motivation to just… show up… to give us permission to do the thing we want to do? If we’re not feeling motivated to do that thing, oh well then! Guess it just wasn’t meant to be.

We buy into the lie that we must be motivated in order to work towards our goals. Motivation becomes this magical little word that can combat any sort of resistance we’ve faced in the past. The resistance to not wanting to work out or finish the novel or apply for that job. But when motivation shows up, then we are given new life! The resistance is gone! We can go after our goals and stop letting the excuses pile up!

But what happens when that motivation that previously felt so strong and so mighty… wanes? What happens when we feel unmotivated, when that resistance to doing the thing starts to build up strength again? What then?

The truth is that we don’t need motivation. It’s not this necessary piece of the puzzle like we think it is. You don’t need motivation to get up in the morning and go to the gym. Or to spend your weekend working on your novel. Or to eat healthier or apply for jobs or write a blog post.

You just have to do it. You can be completely unmotivated and still get out there and do it.

And isn’t that a freeing thought? Motivation has no power over whether or not you do something. You hold sole power.

You can say to yourself, “It’s okay that today I am not motivated. It’s okay that I feel a little tired and overwhelmed and crabby. It’s okay that this isn’t how I want to spend this time.” And still do the thing you don’t want to do.

You aren’t lacking in anything because you don’t have motivation. Other people aren’t stronger or more dedicated or more committed than you are. You don’t need motivation in order to do the thing you told yourself you would do. You just have to get out there and do it.

And, look, sometimes we just need a day off. We just need to cut ourselves a break. That happens. That’s necessary. Some days, we do need to sleep in and forget about our workout. Or take a weekend to hang out with friends and let your writing and blog posts fall to the back burner. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the propensity for us to use motivation as the key that unlocks whether or not we do the thing we said we were going to do.

So, look, let’s stop quitting on ourselves. Let’s stop believing that motivation is necessary to achieve our goals. And let’s also stop thinking something is wrong with us or we’re just not as strong as other people because we lack motivation. Everyone lacks it at some point. It’s how you press forward when you are unmotivated and discouraged that means something.

Categories: Healthy Living

A Week Without Dairy

Quitting dairy was the very last item on my “Find Out What’s Causing My Chronic Congestion” to-do list. I’ve been struggling with this issue since I moved to Tampa five months ago, and I am pretty sure it’s related to allergies, but I wanted to exhaust every possible scenario before opting for an ENT specialist. So far I have tried: prescription allergy meds, saline sprays, a Neti pot, hypoallergenic pillows, a humidifier, an essential oil diffuser, nasal sprays, and Breathe-Right strips. I even had the maintenance team at my apartment community do a mold inspection. Though, since these apartments were built in 2014, I was pretty certain they wouldn’t find anything. They didn’t.

So, dairy. Dairy is on the list of things to eliminate if you struggle with congestion. I’ve always had a certain sensitivity to milk, but it’s never been something that has affected my life so much that I needed to eliminate it. I just… need to be close to a bathroom after drinking a Frappuccino, is what I’m saying. But, I figured, let’s try eliminating dairy! Who knows… maybe my sensitivity morphed into a full-blown allergy and just randomly coincided with my move. Stranger things have happened, right?

Last week, I eliminated dairy from my life and it led to some really interesting epiphanies on my end. First of all, I never realized how much dairy I consume on a daily basis. I drink a cup of coffee with full-fat creamer most mornings. I like pizza and pizza rolls and cheddar-and-bacon potato skins and cereal with cow’s milk and sub sandwiches with mayo and butter on my veggies. I like cheese – string cheese, feta cheese, mozzarella cheese, all of the cheese. And chocolate. Oh, do I love chocolate. Milk chocolate, not dark chocolate. I love creamy, delicious, soothing milk chocolate. My diet? Was going to have to go through a drastic shift for this dairy-free experiment.

But I did it. I went a week without eating dairy. (Mostly, I had some oops-I-didn’t-realize-this-contained-dairy-until-I-ate-it moments.) It was a good week and it was a bad week, and I want to start with what didn’t go so well.

It was boring.

I derive a lot of enjoyment from food, and I love looking forward to a meal. I did not look forward to any of my meals during this experiment. What I ate was fine: Nutrigrain waffles with peanut butter, salads, clementines, chicken and rice, etc. But it was just… food. It tasted good, but it didn’t excite me. I want my food to excite me.

Dairy is in every good thing in this world.

Eating out was fairly impossible, which is why it only happened twice for me. I even had to turn down pizza and cake at my nephew’s birthday party, and I think I may have hurt my sister-in-law’s feelings in the process. (Oof. Not intentional!) And dairy is in everything. I didn’t realize this until I started taking a look at the ingredient list for many of my favorite foods. How does someone with a sweet tooth eat dairy-free? Riddle me this, Batman, I want to know.

I was so hungry the whole week.

This was probably the hardest part of this week. I was hungry every single day. It makes sense, though: dairy has a lot of protein and in the process of eliminating dairy, I essentially eliminated a good chunk of protein. Rookie mistake.

The first few days were outrageously hard.

But aren’t they always? It was hard not to give up. I desperately wanted to in those first few days when I was so hungry. I knew I just needed to get over a hump, and it would be smooth sailing from there, but man, getting over that hump is so damn hard.

Okay, so now that I’ve laid out the difficult parts of last week, let’s dive into the positive aspects of my dairy-free experiment!

I enjoy eating healthy

I know this contradicts my first point above, but hear me out. Eating healthy does not come naturally to me. I don’t reach for fruits and veggies, lean meats, and brown rice. I reach for the bad stuff and I love eating the bad stuff. I do not naturally love eating the good stuff, but when I do force myself to eat it, I realize I enjoy healthy foods and it’s tasty. Healthy food can taste good! (Rinse and repeat.)

I slept better and felt more energized than I have in a while

Sigh, this always happens when I clean up my diet and start exercising more frequently. My sleep improves! I feel great! My energy levels are up! And yet… I’ve never been able to stick with eating healthy for the long term. But this week… let’s just say I finally slept soundly, which leads to the next point.

My congestion (mostly) cleared up

!!!!! Okay, okay, I was sorta hoping the congestion wouldn’t clear up because I didn’t want to actually have to consider eliminating dairy full-time. But my congestion really cleared up. Not completely, but enough to make a huge difference in my sleep and, to be dramatic, my life.

So, where do I go from here?

Essentially, eliminating dairy from my diet did exactly what I wanted it to do – it helped to clear up my congestion. That said, I am going to see a doctor about my congestion. My congestion never fully went away, so I think it’s time to get a specialist involved.

Even still, I am truly interested in eating mostly dairy free. It was a hard week, I won’t lie, but it also felt really good. I lost 3 lbs, which is a feat for me lately, and I was sleeping better. I want to aim for the 80/20 rule – 80% of the time I eat dairy free with 20% allowed for indulgences. Pizza with friends, dessert at book club, things like that.

My plan for the week after my dairy-free experiment was to begin reintroducing different dairy products into my diet to test how my body reacted to them. And I’ve been doing that, and in the process, my congestion has come back with a vengeance. It is quite frustrating, but it just shows me that my body is now reacting differently to dairy than it has in the past. That’s life, right? Bodies are weird, complex organisms and we have to learn how to adapt to them.

I’m really glad I experimented with eliminating dairy, and now I’m excited to figure out how to lead a dairy-free existence. I’ve already discovered vegan mayonnaise (“Veganaise”), which I find to be incredibly delicious. This weekend, I’m going to try my hand at vegan baking (<– something I never thought I’d say.)

Also? I’m really proud of myself for sticking with eating dairy-free, especially when it was intensely difficult, and not giving up. That’s something to be proud of, no matter what.

Have you ever experimented with eating dairy-free?

Categories: Healthy Living

What’s the Point of Healthy Living?

I’ve made a concentrated effort to not talk about healthy living on my blog as much as I used to. Mainly because my attempts to write about this topic never seemed to have much use, other than to complain about how hard it is. And to make excuses for why I’m not losing weight. I could write an entire post doing both right now if I wanted to.

But I don’t want to. Because I’m tired of complaining and making excuses. I’m tired of feeling that I’m just not good enough because I can’t seem to get it. I’m tired of feeling sad when I look in the mirror, discontent about who I am as a person because there’s too much of me in my reflection.

I think the crux of any healthy living journey is not so much about the physical. It’s not about exercising more, drinking more water, eating more fruits and veggies, eating less processed food, calorie counting, or portion control.

The crux of a healthy living journey begins when we start taking a good, long, hard look at ourselves and discover that the way we treat ourselves, the way we talk about ourselves, and the way we believe our worth has more to do with the number on the scale than who we are inside is where it all begins.

I’m not very kind to myself. I berate myself when I mess up and don’t work out on a day I said I would. I whisper lies to myself when I’m standing in the bathroom, looking at my naked reflection and hating every single inch of my skin. I tell myself that I am not worthy to be loved. That I am useless because I’m not following a healthy lifestyle. I wonder on a daily basis why people even like me – because I am fat. And fat equals unlikeable somehow, at least in my mind.

The truth of the matter is that I know these are lies. I know I am a wonderful person. I am smart and funny and kind to others. I make people laugh, I lift their spirits. I’m a hard worker and a go-getter. I’m understanding and trustworthy. My weight has no bearing on the person I am inside. If I lost 50 lbs and really embraced a healthy lifestyle like I keep saying I want to, my worth would not change. Skinny people are no more worthy of love, attention, and affection than overweight people. We are all worthy. We are all deserving.

For the longest time, my attempts at losing weight have been less about being healthier and more about finding my worth on the scale. I thought that if I was skinnier, if I didn’t have weight problems, my life would magically be better. As if the only thing holding me back from living a life I loved was my weight.

It’s probably because I’ve been told this, time and time again, in the media and on reality TV shows (The Biggest Loser is such a dangerous show to watch when you struggle with weight-related self-image problems). I’ve been told that being overweight holds us back from so much – love, friendship, travel, happiness – and that once we lose the weight, everything will fall into place! Like magic.

Now, in a sense, that’s true. Because you develop more self-confidence and a greater appreciation for your life and yourself by going through a tough weight loss journey. I’m not denying that. But I also think the true weight loss journey begins when we begin to unpack the lies we tell ourselves about who we are. And realize that healthy living is a form of self-care, not a form of self-torture.

Healthy living is not about denying ourselves what we want. Or pushing our bodies to the absolute limit in our workouts, yet feeling incredibly guilty for missing one day of exercise. Or following a restrictive diet (a diet that seems all too prevalent in the healthy living blogger community, if I must be honest.)

Healthy living is about choosing to take care of ourselves. It’s one of the greatest acts of self-care. That’s the point of healthy living. And when healthy living becomes more about feeling better inside than it does about looking better outside, that’s when change happens. That’s when we begin to restructure the way we talk about ourselves and our bodies. And, in turn, begin to choose whole foods and find exercise routines that fulfill us because we want to, not because we feel we have to in order to live up to some skinny ideal.

I do want to lose weight. But more than that, I want to be kinder to myself. Because I deserve that. Because my worth doesn’t change, no matter what the scale says. Because good god can we stop being so damned obsessed with our bodies and our weight and how we look? Does it really matter in the long run? Is this what people on their deathbeds worry about? No. Not at all. Not even a little bit. What matters is how we lived, how we treated others and ourselves.

The point of healthy living is about so much more than the calories we consume and the workouts we accomplish. I don’t need to lose weight because it means I’ll be a better human being if I do so. It’s not about checking off a goal on the list. The point of healthy living is feeding my body good, whole foods because I appreciate my body and all it does for me, and because I want to treat it well. It’s about exercising in a way that makes me feel good – not because I feel I have to, but because I want to, because I know I am improving my heart health and overall well-being.

And the point of healthy living is also about how we treat ourselves. The words we say to ourselves, in the quiet of a bathroom as we stare at our reflection. And the berating? The whispered lies? That is something I’m no longer going to accept. I wouldn’t be friends with someone who called me fat or lazy or worthless or dumb. So why do I not hold myself to the same standards? We have to hold ourselves to the same standards.

Healthy living? It’s something I don’t have a complete grasp on. But I’m continually working towards it. And I’m working towards it because I want to treat my body – and myself – well, not because I have to in order to prove my worth.

Categories: Healthy Living

46 Days

It wasn’t until the day before Lent began that I decided what I wanted to give up. I hadn’t even been really thinking about giving up something for Lent because I’m not Catholic and every other time I’ve tried giving something up, I’ve failed miserably.

But the night before, I was sitting in the living room chatting with my mom and I just decided: I would give up sweets at work, and I would also give up soda (all the time, not just at work).

I am so proud to say that I made it through the entire Lenten season without drinking soda or eating sweets at work. Giving up sweets at work wasn’t too much of a struggle. I set up my work-from-home days so I wasn’t in the office on the days when we had cake for birthdays (something we do once a month), and I stayed far, far away from all my coworkers who have candy jars on their desks. (And, thankfully, I think there were only a handful of times when someone brought in a treat to share. I just stayed out of the kitchen until they were gone!)

Giving up soda, though… was so, so tough. I remember when I gave up soda in 2013 for 30 days that once I got over the hump of caffeine withdrawal and cravings, I was fine. No such thing happened this time around. While I didn’t go through caffeine withdrawal (since giving up soda the first time around, I don’t drink it nearly enough to be addicted to the caffeine), the cravings did. not. stop.

I really wanted to come to the end of Lent and feel as if I could cut soda out of my life completely. That was my ultimate goal. But I discovered through this journey that I derive joy from soda. And I know that’s maybe not a good thing, but it’s true. I just enjoy the taste of an ice-cold Dr. Pepper. It makes me happy. That’s what I kept realizing every time a craving hit me – I missed the joy and happiness that Dr. Pepper brings me.

So, I craved soda almost every single day. And goddddd, it was so hard to make it through those cravings. I couldn’t think of making it through six weeks without soda. I had to take it one day at a time. I just had to make it through Monday or Friday or Sunday. That was the only way I made it through the cravings because I honestly wanted to give up within the first week.

I am so proud of myself for not giving in. Because usually, I am the type to give in. Life is too short to not eat/drink/do the things you want, right? Well, sometimes. And sometimes, there’s no more empowering feeling than not giving in. To shutting down the cravings. To telling yourself no.

It’s funny how you don’t really know how capable and strong you are until you give yourself the chance to be that way. I think that’s what I learned the most from these past 46 days. I learned that I can be strong and I can see myself through a challenge, even when it’s so hard that I don’t know if I can make it through the next moment.

I guess it’s a good metaphor for life. Because life gets hard. And you have to keep going on. You have to make it through the difficult moments… the moments when you don’t think you can walk a single step further. But you do. Somehow, you do. And that’s the beauty of life.