Hello! I’m just back from a week-long vacation in Texas for a family wedding. I’ve been avoiding this blog, though, because I got scared of the promises I made here in my last post. I was so excited after my grueling visit to the kickboxing class that I said I’d start going every Monday! Yeah! Woo, fitness!
Well, what happened the next Monday? I’m not really sure, but when I woke up that day I felt some combination of unprepared/scared/tired, so I didn’t go. And then the week after that I didn’t want to do kickboxing right before getting on a plane for vacation, so I skipped again. Yesterday I was in an airplane watching my feet swell, definitely in no position to kick anything. All that fun momentum just ground to a dead stop.
I feel guilty for skipping out, and in my mind I have a zillion dumb excuses. My one legitimate excuse is that I probably should not be doing high impact exercise with my left ankle, which is due to have a fragile piece of hardware removed from it on October 17th, hopefully increasing my flexibility. I run the risk of breaking this particular screw by jumping and kicking stuff, which would obviate the surgery and piss me off. Especially since I now find out that even with my insurance, I am going to pay at least $500 out of pocket. (And did I mention my $245 red light camera ticket? Arghgh!) Basically, the kickboxing class membership ($80/month) and my physical ability to participate are in direct competition with my upcoming surgery ($500) and recovery (no kicking at least until the wound heals). Also, it is nice to feel like this surgery is “protecting” me from strenuous exercise, when in fact I am kind of terrified of surgery. What is more scary, getting an IV inserted in my arm or being the least fit person in a mirrored studio? Clearly my inner poise is not up to the task of handling either, right now.
While I was in Texas, it felt like I was on a food seesaw. We were trying to be thrifty tourists, so we didn’t eat at a restaurant for every single meal, which made the first half of the trip rather healthy. During the second half, though, we hooked up with my husband’s family and went to half a dozen wedding brunches and receptions and dinners. This started to put a strain on my nice wedding outfits! Then during our last two days, we visited my husbands’ friends and had a kind of Texas Food Last Hurrah, including the famously amazing chicken tenders at Wings N More (if you’ve ever visited Aggieland, you know what I mean, and trust me when I say these are not your average fried bits of chicken), pulled pork sandwiches from a great barbecue place, and some tasty Tex Mex. My stomach was both happy and grumpy at this, even though we were skipping breakfasts left and right since we were so full from the night before. I haven’t weighed myself since returning after midnight last night, but I feel fairly secure that it won’t be an enormous gain, even with such a splurge at the end. I guess we’ll see.
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My watchword, as I establish my home and work routines for the fall, is to think about tomorrow. How do I want to feel tomorrow? It is really hard for me to stop and think this way, when I would rather get a decaf latte and a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast and maybe some kind of greasy lunch (does anyone else do this? “I deserve this greasy lunch because I’m tired.” Never mind that greasy food will only make me feel MORE tired!) This morning I had some rice cakes with my tea, and when I was hungry for lunch, I avoided the food court at work because I knew I would make a poor choice. So I took a list to the grocery store of things that would make me feel better later, like fruit, chicken salad, and some crackers to eat it with. I still wanted a cheeseburger and a bar of chocolate, but I avoided that temptation, clutching my tiny grocery list like it was holy.
I want to practice thinking like this; in a way it is just like practicing meditation. For instance, I’m focusing on a single image to help me meditate through anxiety-filled medical procedures: one blue ocean wave that rises and falls according to my breath. The more I think about this calming image, the more common it becomes: during a traffic jam, during a bumpy airplane ride, when I’m having a hard time falling asleep. Why can’t food be more like this? Some things are, like coffee. I have an instinct to avoid it because I know it makes me anxious and jittery. I want an instinct like this that helps me avoid food that makes me feel good right now (cheeseburger), and instead make choices that will make me feel good later. When I think about food, I want to stop and think about the future instinctively, just like that calm blue wave has started to appear when I’m stressed. Do I want to wake up and hate my tight clothes because I ate too much at dinner? Do I want to be so full after lunch that I hole up in my office so no one sees my stomach through my tshirt? Or do I want to feel perfectly satisfied and not stuffed? My first instinct is to give in to the anxiety — which makes trips to the doctor’s office hell, and makes my stomach unhappy with junk food. If I can learn to resist that initial tug of anxiousness, I can learn to think about what will make me happy both now and later.
My tomorrow self, my later self, is helping me think about the emotional side of eating. For me, emotional eating is all about anxiety and fake entitlements — the “I deserve this tub of ice cream because I’m tired” mindset. There are so many things about my life I want to fix — finances, food, garden, house cleaning, exercise — but today I’m just focusing on this one thing, how I want to feel tomorrow and what choices I can make to get there.
