Rumspringa...My Tracy Anderson Transformation: Day 45: Budging the Belly Bulge with Balance

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Day 45: Budging the Belly Bulge with Balance

Wowwweee! Is it possible that I've made it halfway through Metamorphosis?!?! Apparently it is, because here I am and here we are. I just wonder...has it been worth it? Yes, of course it has. You know, I'm okay with my body changing slowly. I understand that diet plays a much greater goal in the actual getting the weight off process, and if I am not dieting one iota, well what was I expecting to happen over the course of 9 weeks, 5 hours of exercise per week? I expected half a pound per week...so I guess I can't complain because I've broken that record...hm...I guess I was I figured I was aiming low, low expectations. High expectations as an end results, but low expectations in terms of how quickly this was gonna happen. You know, for the love of goodness sakes I just want my pants to not be tight in the tummy! I'm not asking to have gone down a size, I'm asking for my pants to simply fit around my waist! Really, for all the work I've put in that doesn't seem like a lot to ask.

It kind of feels like a big joke that I would exercise for 9 weeks, and my belly bulge does not want to budge. It's stubborn and mean. Other parts of my body have shifted. There is definitely an increase in the space between my legs from the knees up to most of my thighs (minus the upper inner thighs). My lower back fat has shifted slightly, and my arms have more tone, and my face has slimmed slightly too. You know, I will still exercise....don't get me wrong, I will. This is the most fun cardio I've ever done. And I find myself stretching my arms and legs out randomly throughout the day in the ways I do in the videos cuz I like feeling my cross vectors in action. I actually really enjoy doing the arm portion of the workout. Abs, I can tolerate. But the leg moves! Ugh, being on all fours feels so degrading and pushing myself is so exhausting...all that to still have my pants tight around my stomach? Poo!

Well, I'll tell you what...I believe that the process is slow, but I still believe this process will work. I don't know how far I can get without dieting, I believe if I keep going I will get better and better results no matter how slowly that comes. More muscle will be built, more calories will get burned.

Booo, sorry for being a downer. This process is a rollercoaster, and I need to be able to see that. I need to be honest, without having an honesty bias toward only the negative. I'm gonna think about diet. Ponder more how I feel about it.

I recall in an interview of some sort Gwyneth Paltrow said it took her 9 months to get good at the method. As far as exercise goes, I will say this is my favorite. And since I want to be the type of person who exercises, I suppose I take comfort in knowing I will keep exercising regardless of how slowly or if I lose weight at all. Okay, for now that's good enough for me. But I will ponder diet and get back to you on that one. (Gotta check out that book Skinny Thinking)

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So here I am again. I got a good night's sleep, I pondered diet, and I came up with an "in progress" solution if you will, a dynamic option to get me going in the right direction.

So! My basic plan consists of 4 different vegan protein/meal replacements shakes throughout the day, plus a salad with beans at night for dinner. Additionally I will have what a call a "balancing meal" for occassions that call for it . Some people would call it a "cheat" but because I want to strive for balance in my life, I am calling it a balancing meal because honestly that's what it is. It is about finding balance in an imperfect world. Sure if we lived out in nature in peace and harmony and ate only nature foods, that would be ideal. Since I live in this world, I want to find balance so I can exist happily as things are, while still striving for something better.

With the holidays coming up (Christmas, Thanksgiving, multiple family birthdays, New Years) I want to sit down to a delicious vegan meal with those I care about, enjoy the festivites, etc etc. I actually thought to myself well, I'll just wait til New Year's when it's more socially acceptable and therefore easier to be dieting. But then...last night I hung out with a gal pal of mine, and had a great time catching up and watching a classic Halloween movie called Lace and Arsenic. Anywho, I was sitting in this super comfy chair that was also kind of sunken in. In other words, any time I would try to shift positions, or get up out of the chair, it was like I was using all my muscles to hoist myself out of this thing (it's just a chair for goodness sake and shouldn't be so difficult. I felt like a rolley polley. I felt the most discomfort in my belly bulge. That's where I felt the weight concentrated and also the least amount of muscle contributing to me getting out of that chair.

I woke up this morning, and my belly was just so protrusive. It always is, but the chair experience really helped me see that what I've gotten used to is actually a discomfort that I tolerate. My belly weighs me down, protrudes, spills over, makes my pants uncomfortable. You see, although I have fat on all my other areas of my body, they just look like I have bigger legs, bigger arms. My belly fat on the other hand is like a separate entity drooping down, and bursting out away from my body. The bottom line is that it's uncomfortable and weighs me down and the chair just helped put clarity to the situation.

Anywho, that's why I feel motivated to adjust my eating at this point (it's also a timely endeavor to start dieting because I'm exactly half-way through meta and feel it is an established habit in my life). The great thing is, it's not like "oh I hate my body, it needs to be punished with a diet". My paradigm is...it's easier to diet and be mobile, it's harder to eat whatever I want and feel immobile. Fantastic!

The other important thing about this diet is that it is super convenient to be able to mix these meal replacements with water and do whatever else I need to do throughout the day. While none of them are mouthwatering meals, none of them taste badly either. It's super nutritious, AND it's not an all liquid diet since I will have a tasty, filling salad at the end of the day. I feel like I have found a great balance in nutrients, feeling physically full not overstuffed, taste, budget, convenience, ability to socialize, not have to go to the grocery store all the time, not time consuming to prepare meals, etc.

Lastly, I'm not feeling deprived or scared. Anytime I need a reminder as to why I'm doing this I just look at my stomach struggling to let go of that extra weight if only I would give it a chance. I feel good, and I'm ready :)

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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

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Day 45: Budging the Belly Bulge with Balance

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