Rumspringa...My Tracy Anderson Transformation: Weigh In: What's the Truth Here?

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Weigh In: What's the Truth Here?

Whooops, over the course of level 4 I managed to gain a pound. Hmmm....I was nervous before I got on the scale. I thought maybe I had gained some, but I also thought maybe I had lost some and imagined breaking through the 160's into the 150's. I reminded myself that the scale is on my side, and cheering me on for me efforts, the scale wants to support me and wants to see me succeed. This helped calm my nerves a bit. And after all that, I am up to 162.5 which is a 1 pound gain from my previouse weigh in a little over 2 weeks ago.

Well, of course I was slightly disappointed, but I was by no means devastated. I vascillated between feelings of wanting to push my workouts even harder "just to show them, and stick it to the man" (who am I trying to prove myself to?), and thinking "maybe I'll throw in the towel cuz this isn't working after all". Fortunately my brain settled on somewhere in between recognizing the truth of the situation.

The truth is, I haven't made any dietary changes. The truth is, I have been pushing myself and been faithful in my workouts. The truth is I can feel muscle formation and well as the ability to contract muscles in places I didn't even realize muslces existed. The truth is exercising is healthy for me on many levels. The truth is losing weight takes time. The truth is my cardio endurance has improved. The truth is I like being a person who takes care of their body through fitness; I like being a person who works out. The biggest truth that brings me comfort is seeing weight loss as a line graph, starting at the top and moving down diagonally to a lower point at the end, looking like this ( \ ). However, if we were to zoom in closer, we would see there are fluctuations along the way, peaks and valleys if you will...yet the end result is the same, the average is the same.

I know the direction I'm going in, I know that I will continue to get stronger, continue to build up endurance, continue to keep moving forward. Even if I don't lose another pound (which I fully believe I will) I know what I'm doing has benefits beyond weight. A fluctuation is just that, a fluctuation. Last time I may have fluctuated on the lower end of my "average weight range" and this time I fluctuated on the higher end. It's okay, it really is okay. Don't get me wrong, I'm not gonna lie and say I'm happy I gained weight, or I'm unaffected that all my hard work would amount to 6.5 pounds in 8 weeks. No...I'm not Pollyanna.

I don't know, I mean I knew my clothes were still tight, and I didn't think I had lost weight, but to see it in black and white is something else. Hmm....hmmmm....it does feel like this might not ever happen afterall...I dont' have experience to assure me that it will work out at this point. Before, my faith was encouraged because of the results I saw from others, and the results I saw from myself, but what faith do I use to keep me motivated at this point? I guess the answer lies in not using exercise as a weight loss tool, but as a tool for gaining energy, strength, stamina, muscle and health. Same goes for healthy eating...no focus on weight, just the health benefits. Also, it feels good to be a person who exercises, and takes care of their body. It is a feeling of accomplishment in and of itself. Of course weight will probably still be in the back of my mind, in those moments where I'm pushing past the burn, but that's okay. As I separated my diet goals from my exercise goals, I'm going to do my best to take out the weight loss goal, and make it more about health, and fitness.

You know, even for someone like myself who has made improvements in my relationship with the scale, it has become clear to me over the course of my last few weigh-ins that weighing myself takes me away from my target objective which is to complete the program in its entirety. It throws my mind into loop-te-loops. It fosters unhealthy thoughts both during the times I've lost weight and gained weight. So, I'm going to make an oath here in bold black and white...

I PROMISE MYSELF TODAY THAT I WILL ONLY WEIGH MYSELF WHEN I GO DOWN A PANT SIZE.

The good thing about that is, I will know for sure at that point that I've lost weight. Once jeans don't stay on me, I will then go out to buy a new pair and weigh myself. I will repeat this process until I get to my goal of having a lean, fit body without excess weight, and then I don't see the need to weigh myself anymore after that. Since I don't have a scale, I very rarely weighed myself before starting the method anyway. Honestly, I just want to have statistics for my weight loss journey. I want to know what my weight is at the various pant sizes, but in my opinion, and for my personal benefit that is the only time I want to weigh in. Alright, enough with the weight, let's get back to fitness!

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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, October 19, 2011

Weigh In: What's the Truth Here?

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