Generally, I think I can conquer the world; I can do all my training, eat well, take care of my responsibilities at work and at home. Some nights as I’m about to fall asleep I think back to my day: woke up at 4, ran 8 miles before I got to work at 8 AM, spent a day writing ingenious data programs (if I do say so myself :-), caught my train home so I could pick up the kids, got them to my daughter’s baseball game where I watched my daughter and played catch with my son simultaneously, got them home, fed and bathed, read them books and got them into bed, had dinner and even had time to relax with my husband (granted, it was for about 6 minutes). On those days I feel like Wonder Woman, minus the kickin’ red boots and invisible plane.
Then, there are those other days. You know them; my alarm goes off and I pretend I don’t hear it. I feel like I can’t get out of my own way all day, and I spend the whole day feeling like a failure. And the worst part is when several of these days string themselves together in a row.
Unfortunately, I’ve been experiencing more of the “Un-Wonder Woman” days lately. I don’t know why, there’s nothing significantly “bad” going on in my life. Lately it’s just been a struggle to inspire myself. I still get up early, workout, and eat (relatively) healthy, mostly because I’m hoping this funk will pass, but partly because it’s just easier to follow my current habits then it is to try to come up with new ones.
Last Friday was one of those days. My scheduled workout was 20 minutes of resistance bands and a one mile swim. My alarm went off, and I was the only person on the planet dreading a Friday of a long weekend. And I knew exactly why: Fridays are also my weigh in days at Weight Watchers. Weight Watchers changed its program about 6 months ago, and my body has been slowly telling me that it simply just doesn’t like change. Staying at my goal weight has been a battle that I have been losing. This Friday was going to be the last weigh in before my two year anniversary, and I knew full well I was going to be over my goal. For 2 years I planned the moment where I looked at that scale and knew that I had accomplished an enormous feat by staying at my goal weight for so long. When I woke up, though, I knew full well that that moment I had dreamed about for 2 years wasn’t going to happen.
I finally talked myself out of bed, and started moving in a direction. I got to the gym, and after I finished my bands I got in the pool. About midway through my 1 mile swim, another woman got into the pool in the lane next to mine. I’ve seen her a few times before. She’s overweight. She’s also an extremely fast swimmer, way faster than I am (though to be honest, I think a clean tissue could make it to the other end of the pool faster than I can). But, she can only do about 3 laps before she needs to stop and rest.
We both go about our swims, she, the hare, sprinting and then stopping, and me, the tortoise, going non-stop for 45 minutes.
I get out of the pool, and she asks me how far I just swam. I tell her, “A mile.” She looks upset, and tells me she can only swim a few minutes at a time, and she just doesn’t know what to do. I reply, “Do just that. Just swim a few minutes.” She doesn’t look like she’s feeling any better, so I let her know that I literally started by swimming 5 minutes in my first swim. For my second swim, I did 6 minutes. I kept adding one minute at a time. I told her the true story that when I was doing my 10 minute swim, I was struggling at about minute 8 until I realized how easy that first 5 minutes had been at that point. She thinks, smiles, and says, “Thanks for the idea and the motivation. I can swim for 5 minutes,” and off she goes.
Later in the day I head to my Weight Watchers meeting. I get on the scale, and I don’t need to hear the result. I know I’m over. I know that my ability to say “I’ve been at goal weight for 2 years” is gone. That anniversary will come and go unnoticed, uncelebrated, unearned. I go into the meeting and sit, being completely upset and frustrated with myself. The meeting starts, and I brighten a bit when I hear the topic: exercising and the excuses we make to avoid it. I could write a book on this subject.
One woman says that she wakes up early but then can’t get out of bed. I throw out an idea: “Sleep in your workout clothes – if they’re clean”. She looks at me strangely, and I explain that you wake up with no excuses, and if you still want to talk yourself out of working out, you have to physically get undressed and own the fact that you’re not going to work out that day. She smiles, satisfied.
Another woman declares she’s going to go for a 10 minute walk every day next week. Someone asks, “What if it rains?” The woman pauses long enough for me to jump in and say, “Then get wet.” This woman thinks for a minute, and then she also smiles before she says, “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll get wet. Thanks.”
The meeting ends and I get up to leave. An older man comes up to me. I recognize him from the meetings though we’ve never spoken before. He smiles and says, “Alison, I just wanted to let you know that you have been such an inspiration to me. Thank you!” Then he smiles again and leaves.
I stand there for a minute, dumbfounded. Here I was, struggling with my weight, my food, my workouts, and in one day I helped a few people and inspired two complete strangers. Now, if I could just remember where I parked that invisible plane…
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