Rest Days

 I have a big issue with fitness rest days. I know I need to take them in order to be able to push myself to perform my best but I feel guilty taking them. 

I need rest days because after a week of giving it my all every day my body is just tired. My muscles ache and sometimes I have other injuries that crop up. I am on my way to patellar dislocation so sometimes my knee just needs a rest. Doing the asymmetrical training in mbfa really woke up the arthritis in my back. I had to stop mbfa and that type of training but my back still isn’t right so rest days are integral to getting back to normal and living life pain free. 

So why would I not take rest days?  First of all I am nervous that if I stop working out, even for just one day, it would be so easy to not go back to it.  Then, I know I’m supposed to do 30 minutes of exercise every day which sometimes doesn’t happen on a rest day. Finally there is the Apple Watch. 

I love my Apple Watch but sometimes...  I just want to write my watch an email. Dear Apple Watch, I really want to close my rings every day and I appreciate your reminder that I’m usually farther along but today is a rest day. My body needs it. My body also needs you to count ALL of my minutes when I’m walking even if my pace is slow because my knee or back hurts because I’m actually moving when I could be sitting on the couch.  If you did that then my exercise ring WOULD be further along. I don’t want to have to lie and say that I’m strength training or doing yoga to get you to count all of my minutes. I want us to have an honest relationship but when I walk over a mile in a half hour and you give me 4 exercise minutes it makes me not want to walk at all and just sit on my rear end instead.  I love you and how you constantly push me to get better but your programmers need to allow for rest days because I for one need them. 

Ok, I really shouldn’t be bullied by my watch because that is ludicrous but every Saturday it’s the same thing...check your rings. Ugh. So I’m getting better about just ignoring it and taking the rest day.  What does a rest day look like for me?  I just don’t do my regular workout. I still walk and stretch but that’s about it.  It’s good for my body, especially now when I’m trying to recover from the asymmetrical training that was so NOT good for my body. 

The current program I’m doing, 9 Week Control Freak has 2 rest days per week. I’m really trying to wrap my head around that. Just 5 days of workouts a week???  I don’t know if I can handle that. I’m 2 weeks in and I’ve done a cardio workout on the 2nd rest day. I should probably take it and just do yoga on that rest day but 2 days of the Apple Watch guilting me into closing my rings?  I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of pressure!

Mental Health

 This week our school community suffered a devastating blow when one of our own lost his battle with depression by taking his own life. 
family asked that we honor his memory by talking about mental health so I am dedicating my blog this week to mental health. 

There is such a negative stigma about getting help for our mental health but our mental health is just as important as our physical health. When we have a physical injury or ailment it is socially acceptable to go to the doctor to get it checked out but when we are hurting in an emotional or mental way we tend to suffer in silence and not go to the doctor.  As time goes on mental health is getting more attention, as it should, which is a great step in the right direction but we are nowhere near where we need to be. 

I struggled with low self esteem for years before I got help. YEARS!  When I say years I’m talking 20+ years!  I think of all that wasted time and wonder why. But I know the reason. Embarrassment. I remember hoping nobody I knew would see me going in or out of the office or happen to see my car parked outside while I was there. I even had cooked up an excuse if someone did see me... I was at yoga class which was also taught at the wellness center I went to. All because I was embarrassed to admit that I was talking through things with someone who is trained to help. I was embarrassed to admit that I had a mental illness. I never called it that. I always referred to it as low self esteem. This is the first time I’ve ever referred to it as a mental illness!

We are going through some very trying times and while many people are taking advantage of talking to a professional, there are many people who aren’t. My heart aches for those people. I want to tell those people that it doesn’t make you a weak person or crazy.  The fact that there is someone out there right now that is in so much pain and anguish that they feel like ending their life is the only way to make the pain go away is absolutely heart wrenching.  Nobody should ever feel like that. 

We have yearly physical exams but I think we should have yearly mental health exams as well. Until we do it is important to incorporate self care into your weekly activities. I know it can be hard to find time for you when you are busy with daily life but it is so important. You can only take care of others if you take care of you first so don’t neglect yourself.  I make sure that I find time every day to workout because it helps me feel better. It can be as simple as a walk listening to your favorite music or just enjoying nature. To do this I get up 45 minutes earlier than I would have to but it’s so important and it gets my day started on the right foot. I also try to take a relaxing bath weekly. Recently I have started stretching every night before bed. It helps me unwind, get all the kinks from the day out of my muscles and helps me sleep better. These work for me and you need to find what works for you. 

Sadly, this post will not bring our community member back but if it helps even one person out there to get the help that they deserve as a human being that is what is most important.  

Adaptability and Moderation

 I have talked a lot about nutrition and fitness on this blog. These things are really important to me. They enable me to feel good inside and out and live a full life.  But sometimes things happen that are out of our control. I have been suffering from patellar subluxation for the past few years.  That combined with arthritis in my spine which I was diagnosed with in my 20s means that there are some forms of exercises that I want to do but don’t feel good to my body. Four weeks ago I started a new fitness program that I’ve never tried before. It is a 6 week program but 4 weeks down and I’m feeling it. I have both knee and back pain which have been gradually getting worse these last few weeks. So as much as I absolutely hate giving up on a program, I need to listen to my body and my body is clearly telling me to stop. 

But, that doesn’t mean I’m going to just stop working out. No way!  I’ll just try a brand new program and see how my body feels with that one.  My equipment came today and I am ready to push play on a new 9 week program tomorrow morning. I won’t be deterred by a small setback because that’s all it is...a SMALL setback. I’ll just find something else that works for me and keep moving. 

In addition to moving my body daily I’m also eating according to my cardio metabolic eating plan. It’s amazing how much better firming up my nutrition can make me feel. That doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy a treat now and then. Today, I made ice cream!  I’ve been craving it because of the Geico commercial. Scoop, there it is!   I’m trying to pay closer attention to ingredients in the food that I’m eating.  My goal is to try to eat more foods with less ingredients and ingredients I can pronounce. I looked at some ice cream we had in our freezer to see the ingredients.  Milk, cream, sugar.  Ok.  So far so good but then cellulose gum, diglycerides, polysorbate, phosphoric acid.  Say what?  I stopped counting at 25 ingredients!  So I decided to make my own. I used only 3 ingredients. Heavy cream, sweetened condensed milk and vanilla. In 10 minutes I had made a delicious treat.  It fits into my eating plan, as does everything in moderation.

Fitness and nutrition are a lifelong journey not a destination  I finish one workout program and I don’t stop,  I find another one and keep moving forward.  You’ll notice that I don’t ever say I’m on a diet.  It’s not a diet.  Diets end.  I’m on a journey, so I have an eating plan.  It is a way of eating that I can sustain long term.  Do I fall off the wagon occasionally?  You bet!  But, I get up, dust myself off and hop right back on that wagon.  

Understanding

 I love to read. I also enjoy learning about things I don’t know about or don’t understand.  But, I like to be entertained while I’m reading.  As a result I read lots of historical fiction and non fictional stories and memoirs. I just finished The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson. I chose this book because it was about an American who moves to Egypt and converts to Islam. I’ve always been fascinated by Egyptian culture and I thought an American immersed in it would be the perfect person to help me learn more about the country and culture.  

Although, I did learn a lot about what I was hoping to learn about I took away something rather unexpected from The Butterfly Mosque.  Something that I could apply to so many things going on in my life and going on around me.  Almost all conflicts and misunderstandings come down to fear.  As human beings, we tend to fear what we don’t understand.  This fear can sometimes cause us to react in ways that we wouldn’t under normal circumstances.  

As a woman, I feared many middle eastern countries because of my perception of discriminatory practices toward women in these countries and cultures.  Ms. Wilson helped me to see that I was misinformed.  Woman are treated the way they are in some cultures because they are honored and revered not because they are considered to be lesser people than men.  Women are encouraged to cover their heads and bodies because they are considered beautiful.  There are no images of God or Allah for the same reason.  He is too beautiful for humans to see. In The Butterfly Mosque, Ms. Wilson shares a story that was published in the west. It was a story about women only cars on the Cairo transit system. There are cars where men and women can ride together and there are also cars that are for women only. It is not done for discrimination purposes, it is done to protect women from bad behavior by men.  In women only cars women are not stared at or propositioned by men which is not unusual behavior in Cairo. I had feared this culture because I didn’t understand it. 

I have read many books and watched many documentaries about World War II.  No matter how hard I tried, I could not understand how something like the Holocaust could ever happen.  How could a person like Adolph Hitler ever come to power and why did the German people just go along with it and not fight against the atrocities happening around them?  Some brave people did and many of those people lost their lives.  Now I see that fear was a valuable tool utilized by the Nazi party to help keep the people complacent.

Looking at my own life, especially in this era of COVID, I can see that fear of what is not understood drove much of the behavior around me. Throughout this pandemic I have been calling for calm and reactions driven by facts not hearsay and a cry wolf mentality. This caused many people that I had considered friends to lash out at me. I now see that those people were scared of the virus that they didn’t understand and their fear caused them to act in ways that they wouldn’t under normal circumstances. 

There is so much in this world that I don’t understand.  There are many things I’m fearful of as a result of that lack of understanding but I vow to keep learning.  I’ll keep striving for that understanding because we all inhabit this planet, we all love our families and friends and we all deserve more understanding and less fear. 

New Year, new me?

 I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it will be a new me. I’m the same old me but I do have some things I want to continue to work on, like listening more, but I have made lots of progress over the past year.  Julie Ledbetter posed a question last year in her podcast #EmbraceYourReal that really made me think long and hard. What would you do or be if you loved yourself?  I couldn’t even contemplate that question at first. I was at a complete loss. I had never in my life loved myself. I didn’t know what that even LOOKED like let alone felt like. I struggled for the longest time even wrapping my brain around that question. 

I decided to start by asking myself why I didn’t love myself. I had quite a list. All of my flaws and shortcomings laid bare. But these were shortcomings and flaws I thought I had. If I had asked even one person to list my flaws the list probably wouldn’t have been nearly as long. So why did I have all of these flaws on my list?  Most of those things only mattered to me.

At the end of the day I have a husband who loves me, family and friends who care about me, a job I love and that I’m good at and coworkers and students who depend on me. So why couldn’t I love myself and what would I do or be if I loved myself?  I was making progress but I wasn’t quite there yet. Why do I have all of the above things. What are others seeing in me that I’m not?  At first I thought that they just weren’t seeing my flaws but when you spend 10 months with the same people they see your flaws, trust me. So if they saw my flaws, how could they still love and care about me.  I was perplexed. 

Is it possible that they saw the flaws but didn’t focus on them?  I on the other hand, spent every waking minute focusing on them.  Is the key to loving yourself knowing that you have flaws but not being fixated on them?  If you love yourself does that mean you can’t keep working to make yourself better?  Deep thoughts.  Questions I pondered for at least the last half of the year.  So, on January 1st, I looked myself in the mirror and I said, “I have flaws.  I’m going to continue to work on those flaws so that every day I can be a better version of me than I was the day before.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t love the me that I am today.”

A strange thing happened.  No my heart didn’t grow three sizes that day but as I stared myself down in the mirror I had a strange feeling.  Something that I’ve never felt before.  I had confidence.  I felt confident.  What would I do/be if I loved myself? I’d be confident. After long last I had the answer to the question. I’m not saying that I will have that feeling every day but it is one small building block.  If I keep adding those blocks I’ll really be building something!