Rumspringa...My Tracy Anderson Transformation: Day 28: Shin Splints vs Getting Stronger vs Diet

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Day 28: Shin Splints vs Getting Stronger vs Diet

Man these shin splints don't want to let up. I am going to get some leg warmers and see if that helps. I also broke my promise of doing just the trampoline every other day...I tried to do the dance cardio and just couldn't do it. Technically, shin splints are not the type of pain you are supposed to just work through. In fact, you are supposed to avoid high impact exercise to help them heal. It's so weird that my challenge in this case is actually not a mental one but instead a physical one. So, leg warmers...and alternating jumping on the trampoline. I do also think if I were doing green juices and smoothies it would help my pains in general. When I drank only green smothies for a week, all pain and stiffness in my joints were completely gone. It was crazzzy. I'd just gotten so used to feeling stiff and in discomfort I didn't realize that my body doesn't have to feel that way.

I do feel I'm doing marginally better on the mat work. I really do. I thought I would try out some of level one today just to see if I could do a full hour of toning a day. haha. well, I'm not quite ready to do an hour of toning a day, but I can tell you that I'm definitely stronger! It's particularly funny how slow and simple the movements seem compared to what I'm doing now and I'm only on week 3 (almost week 4).

I didn't feel impatient today in regards to weight loss because, well, the truth is diet has more to do with weight loss than exercise. However, I am concerned when it comes to dieting with finding a mental balance. Also, I know personally diet has a big impact on my skin, and my energy levels. One week I was eating super healthy, and my skin was glowing!! My facial structure appareared lifted and more symmetrical. I looked so healthy. Then I got off track with it. At least I know what's possible with good clean nutrition. It truly is for me about finding a balance with healthy eating habits, and healthy mentality about my eating.

Sometimes I just get these impulses where I want to jump into all raw foods, jump into super clean eating...I know this DOES NOT WORK FOR ME. I can only keep that up minimally, and my objectives are nor short term. Again, balance in key.

I would classify my current diet as anything vegan goes (including lots of processed foods). However, for the most part I do eat all natural food, I have increased my fiber, beans, veggies and whole grains. I don't eat very many sweets, and I have soda maybe twice a year. So I certainly have made some improvements over the years that have served me, and I'm happy with.

Rather than going to extremes in dieting, feeling deprived, creating guilt and binge cycles, I want to add in good stuff, and substitute the less good stuff. This is doable if done slowly and if I'm enjoying everything I'm eating. So I have a few transitionary ideas for upcoming diet improvements. Thus far I simply record what I eat every day without any judgement whatsoever. That is a good first step toward healthy eating, and healthy food mentality. I also have a healthy Vega brand protein shake (whole food health optimizer as it's called) before I work out.

My future simple steps toward balanced nutrition:

1) Swap refined grains for whole grains (easy, brown rice for white rice, kamut pasta for white, whole grain breads and tortillas instead of just multigrain)
2) Add a daily green juice (cucumber, celery, lemon, apple)
3) Add a daily green smoothie (fruit + spinach, kale)

My largest sources of unhealthy calories are chips/fries, (When I buy them I go through an entire bag in two days which is about 1000 calories of 0 nutrition). Actually, I'm going to go check and see how many bags of chips I've gone through recently...Well, in the last month I've eaten chips 19 days out of 30...wowza. I had no idea it was that much. I estimated I ate one bag every two weeks. I really don't have a sweet tooth, but I'm sure got a salty tooth...no wonder I'm not losing weight! Haha. At least I have an explanation. I'm surprised I haven't gained weight. Golly, I knew I ate chips but honestly I didn't realize it was that often. Unless I can find some oil free chips, I'd really like to experiment with taking those out of my diet almost entirely. Maybe I'll try kale chips and see if those might be a good alternative. Depending on my mood, I enjoy baby carrots dipped in hummus as much as regular chips.

Additionally, I could easily swap my white grains for whole grains. I enjoy whole grains, so it's really just about buying the whole grains rather than using the white grains my parents have in the fridge. And then it's about building the habit of buying fresh produce and making it. That is easily done with a little practice.

As I've learned from doing TAM metamorphosis, building new habits is about giving myself permission to not be perfect. Then, it's about taking it one day at a time, one step at a time, and having faith that in time a positive affect will manifest from my consistent actions. Oh yeah, let's not forget that it is about consistently climbing the wall, and remembering that the wall is always on my side if I'm willing to accept its kindness.

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What has Made This Time Different?

I have attempted to try to stick to an exercise routine so many times in my life, and yet I've rarely made it past a week or two at the most. This time has been a whole new experience, and this is a list of the reasons why (subject to change). Perhaps one or all of these will resonate with you too:

1) I have a simple, mental, visual analogy to help me focus on the bigger picture: In the past I've dieted and exercised and wondered why am I not losing weight? The key was that I wasn't consistent. The truth was that my efforts were sporadic rather than stacking one on top of the other. So it felt like I had exerted so much energy (which I had), but because it was not one foot in front of the other, my efforts did not stack up to any actual results. This made the most sense to me once I understood the the visual analogy of climbing a wall. My goal (lose weight/get fit) was to get over this wall. My attempts to get over the wall included climbing up (working out, dieting). However, I was constantly climbing back down the wall without realizing it (getting off the dieting, not exercising). Over time, I was exhausted from climbing up and didn't understand why I had not yet made it over, after all I had put in a lot of effort. It was then that I realized that every time I stop exercising, I am not picking up from where I left off the next time I start up again. Instead, I have to start from the very bottom of the wall. The steps up the wall do not help you climb over unless the are consistenly moving in a forward direction upward. While this may seem simple, and easy to understand intellectually, it was something I had to understand in the form of an epiphany. It was the first step to me being able to be consistent with my Tracy Anderson Method.

2) Make the goal about following through with the actions, rather than just focusing on the end results: Now that I understood that consistency was such an important factor in being successful with my goal, I had to figure out how to actually be consistent when I had never before been able to. It was so hard for me to imagine getting past level 1, because in my previous attempts I had learned how to do a few days of level 1, feel defeated, take a break, and then start over on level 1 again once I felt like I just couldn't take being overweight any more. My brain only understood how to stop and start over, so it just couldn't imagine what it felt like to move forward to L2-L9 and beyond. So, I made a commitment to myself that I did not even have to do the levels if I did not want to, but that I would play the videos every day as though I were doing them, just for the sake of my brain understanding what that would feel like. Amazingly enough, this triggered something in my brain so that it could at least entertain the possibility of experiencing the program beyond level 1.

3) Don't tell anyone I am learning to establish an exercise routine, until I'm on a roll. I understand using someone as an accountability buddy, and I do think that is helpful. But for me, I found that when I told people I was starting to exercise I diverted energy away from my goal (establish a regular exercise routine). So when I used to tell people, "oh I'm starting something new" people kindly wanted to know how it's going, how much I've lost, all these reasonable questions. For me, that added an extra pressure that I just didn't need. I didn't want to be accountable to anyone but myself, and I because I am someone who worries too much about what other people think, it just served me better to start the journey on my own and learn from my own experiences, learn to trust myself and my own instinct, and feel free to experiment without fearing judgements from others.

4) Don't make any changes to diet initially, but instead first focus on making exercise a regular part of my routine. Learning to exercise regularly and consistently & eating nutritiously are both lofty goals in and of themselves. To do both simultaneously has never ever worked for me. For my brain, my emotions, my inability to adapt to change, it was far too large an undertaking to attempt diet exercise simultaneously. For me, exercise is the easier place to start because it feels more in my control. There are only two choices (to exercise or not), and it is completely up to me, and not influenced by much else. On the other hand, food requires more preparation what with shopping, and storing and cooking, and taking food with me places. Exercise is just once a day whereas eating is something to work on multiple times throughout the day. Another thing is that if I attempted exercise and diet at the same time, if I did poorly in one area that day, it wiped out any good work I did in the other area (in my mind), and made me want to give up on BOTH. Exercise is the place to start for me.

5) Accept that my objectives are long-term and therefore no matter how hard I work, I will not be skinny in a month or two. But a year from now and for the rest of my life I will be.

6) Keep a blog or journal. For me, blogging has enabled me to see that some days are challenging, but there are also other days are easier. It is easy to forget the good days when I'm just focusing on the negative one at hand. Blogging allows me to go back and remember the positive things I've gained and learned along my journey.

7) Exercise with a buddy in the beginning to help make exercise a daily habit. While I didn't tell anyone about working out until about 2 weeks after I'd started, after that when I told my friend she was excited and wanted to try it out too. We exercised together for about two weeks, and that helped me establish a routine of exercising first thing in the morning consistenly.

8) Immerse myself in the success of others. I read others' blogs and success stories and facebook and the TA forum. www.masteringthemethod.com was such a great tool because it was the first visual I had to understand that this was going to be a journey and a process. It is so easy to see the "before" and "afters" and think that 1 week or a month of commiting will take me from before to after. Being able to see the "during" as well made such a difference to my brain because it was like the missing piece of the puzzle to understand this is not in any shape or form an overnight, overweek, or overmonth process. It showed me the bridge from "before" through "during" to "after".

9) Watch and re-watch and watch again Tracy's informercial and multiple visits to QVC. Especially the first month I watched them almost every day. Seeing the informercial is the pique of excitement in the beginning of a new exercise routine. Watching the infomercials help me remember the feelings I had in the beginnning and reminds me why I began this journey in the first place.

10) Trust Tracy, yourself, and those who have come before you, and have faith that while you can't imagine it today, each step you take will lead you to your after as it has for so many others.

11) Let go of being a perfectionist. Being a perfectionist prevented me from succeeding 100% of the other times I've attempted to exercise. It was vital to learn to only do whatever my personal abilites are and nothing more. Understanding and believing that I would build from wherever I was starting, as there is no need to exhaust myself physically and mentally by exercising beyond my capabilites was again instrumental. The very first time I tried metamorphosis, I was beyond defeated and in tears as there was no way I was gonna be able to do 40 reps of all the leg exercises as she did. I initially would pause the TV after every exercise attempting to complete 40 reps like Tracy was going. Helllllloooo, Tracy is in shape and she invented the method for goodness sake. I never exercised and was carrying around at least 50 pounds that didn't need to be there. Because I couldn't be "perfect" I thought I couldn't do the method. This was completely false. Finally, I figured out that I just had to do whatever reps I was able to do while she was doing the same exercise. Then when she moved on, I moved on to the next move. Suddenly my abilites were increasing, just by doing my personal best. It was the same thing with the cardio. It was important to me to play the whole tape, but that didn't mean I had to be jumping the whole time. Instead, I would step touch or march in place, drink some water. The point is that I got to experience what 30 minutes of cardio would feel like, and eventually be able to build up to it. I can now do an hour of cardio :)

...to be continued

Rumspringa...My Tracy Anderson Transformation

90 Day Metamorphosis with Tracy Anderson

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Day 28: Shin Splints vs Getting Stronger vs Diet

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