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!

2020 Reflections

 2020 started out like any other year, full of promise, optimism and potential for a great year ahead. I had so much to look forward to, finishing up the school year and starting a new one, volunteering with non profit organizations, celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary with a trip to somewhere I’ve never been before. I was ready to conquer it all while continuing my health and fitness journey.  Then March hit and the wind went out of my sails almost overnight. No end of the school year, no events to plan and work on, no anniversary trip. 

I’ll admit that in the beginning I was full of self pity, anger and resentment.  I was sick of not being able to make decisions for myself and being told what to do by literally everyone with a social media account.  That anger turned to sadness and could very easily have become full blown depression, but I decided that I was going to take control of my own destiny (at least what I could control).  

With no events to plan, I found myself with lots of excess time. I decided to take that time to focus on myself. I was going to try to be the best version of me that I could be. 

For years, I have been struggling with patellar subluxation or dislocation. It made it really hard to workout because I couldn’t do many of the exercises. My last round of physical therapy which ended in March thankfully, contained lots of exercises that I had remembered doing in #80DayObsession when I had done it the previous year. I remember struggling with it at the time and it being a real grind. The workouts were mostly close to an hour long which made it hard for me to do before I went to work in the morning (I’m a mid-morning person not an early riser). With more time in the mornings now, I decided to tackle it again.  I started with really light weights for the lower body exercises and lightened up when I felt knee pain. It was slow going but I didn’t get discouraged. By the end of the first 80 days I had increased my weights in every exercise. I went right to A Little More Obsessed then started 80 Day Obsession over again with no break.  By halfway through my second round I was using the same or heavier weights than the cast.  I was getting toned and I felt strong.  I went back to work and had to pick a shorter workout after I finished up my second round of 80 Day Obsession but I still feel proud of the results and that will be my summer workout of choice. 

Fitness on track, I turned to my nutrition. I was eating good, not great, just good. I was following a nutrition plan I had been using for years that had always worked for me (#21DayFix plan) but I was cheating too much. I firmed it up a bit but I wasn’t getting the results I used to get and I wasn’t feeling good. So I decided to go see a nutritionist to find out how to fix things. I had all kinds of testing and the results were eye opening. I found out that although I was eating a lot of protein, my body wasn’t digesting it properly so I was at a protein deficit. That was making me feel sluggish, bloated and sick after every meal. My nutritionist put me on an eating plan very similar to what I was doing and added in some supplements and it has made a world of difference. We tweak things here and there but the way I feel is like night and day.  I’m so glad I didn’t just accept that as the way it would be from now on and took control.

The last thing I did with my extra time was improve my mental well being. I was very focused on 80 Day Obsession so when the creator, Autumn Calabrese launched a podcast, Let’s Do Life, I had to listen. This was the first time I had listened to a podcast. I learned so much.  I decided to try others. I had always loved Chalene Johnson’s workouts so I started listening to #TheChaleneShow. I was getting such great insight and learning so much from these podcasts. Then, one day on The Chalene Show she had a guest, Julie Ledbetter on her show. I connected so much with that episode and as it turns out, Julie also had a podcast, #EmbraceYourReal.  That podcast absolutely changed my life. It felt like she was speaking right to me in every episode.  Not only did I learn a ton but Embrace Your Real has challenged me to think differently.  Julie’s podcast has really helped me be the best version of me I can be!  I still have improvements to make and I’ll continue with all of the above things in 2021 but I certainly am making progress.  At the end of the day, it’s all about continuing to put one foot in front of the other. 

So while 2020 was a disaster it did provide promise, optimism new opportunities and plenty of potential for a great year. We just had to look a little harder to find those things. Bring on 2021!

Why?

 On Sunday, I started a new fitness program titled #mbf (muscle burns fat).  I know many of you are probably asking why would you start a new program the week of Christmas.  Why wouldn’t you just wait until after the holidays?  Well, the answer is simple. Why not?  The bottom line is that there will always be a reason not to start.  This is happening or that is happening or I’ll just start after this which leads right into the next thing you will start right after.  You don’t need to wait until the start of a new year, a new month or even a new week. Just start!  

Why start in the first place?  I can tell you my why but only you can determine your own and that is what will keep you on track. I work out and try to eat nutritious foods as often as I can because I want to be healthy, I want to maintain my mobility as I age, I want to get stronger and I want to feel good.  Notice that nowhere in there did I say because I want to lose weight. That’s a nice byproduct but not a sustainable why for me.  Too much discouragement can go along with that to give me a reason to quit. Maybe I’m not losing weight fast enough, I hit a plateau or God forbid I gain weight!  So I dug a little deeper and came up with these reasons and they keep me motivated. 

What happens when I just don’t feel like working out?  It happens. It happens to everyone.  We all have those days. I have found that working out first thing in the morning works best for me. There is less possibility that something can come up to derail my plans like it could as the day progresses. Even still there are days I’m just not feeling it or I just want to stay in bed. Usually, I feel so much better after I workout so that helps to motivate me.  If I’m REALLY not feeling it, I’ll do some yoga. That never fails to make me feel better, body and soul. Plus I know if I don’t get up and work out I’ll dread it for the rest of the day. Remember, nobody ever says I’m so mad I worked out today! 

 I also happen to have a great group of people who help to keep me motivated and accountable.  We are all on this journey together so we help each other. This is a life-long journey, not a short trip. So surrounding yourself with the right people is important. If you don’t have someone, I’m happy to be your person!  

I started this new program on Sunday because I like a new adventure. It’s something different to try, a way to keep my body guessing and I’m always up for a new challenge. It helps me not to get bored.  I push myself to see what I am capable of and I’m always amazed. It may be hard at first but before long I’m knocking it out of the park. It doesn’t get easier, I get stronger and it feels so good!

The last reason I started is what better gift can I give to myself this Christmas week than the gift of health and the gift of movement for my body?  Here’s to a healthy Christmas week and beyond!  

Pandemic Winter

 As 2020 finally begins to wind down, we are entering the worst season of the year for me.  I am not a fan of winter. I never have been. I hate the snow, the cold, the constantly cloudy skies, the early darkness.  I find no joy in it whatsoever. As we enter into pandemic winter with mandates still in effect I know that this will be a hard winter for me. 

We’ve all been social distancing, quarantining at times and generally not being able to do all we would like to do. Being stuck in my house all the time, even though I love my house and the people in it, has been very trying. I am not a social person by any means but SOME social contact with others is necessary, even for me. After being home for almost 6 months straight, my sanity saver was going to work. I love my job. I love being surrounded by books and interacting with students. It has been what has gotten me through the past 4 months. 

The past couple of weeks though with our school being fully remote and only about 10% of the normal population of the building being in the building, even being at work hasn’t brought me as much joy. I know this winter is going to be tough for all of us. So, yesterday I made the friend pictured. I hope it brings a little bit of joy to all who see it this winter. I know it did for me.