Who wants to try some new recipes?

I recently decided to make a conscious effort to eat better. Not like lean cuisines meals or any of that stuff. But clean, less processed, one ingredient stuff. It is the way our bodies process food as fuel the best. For the girl with a serious diet mt. dew and condiment addiction, a picky palate, this was a little scary to say the least. But I’m happy to report it’s actually going really well! I’ve found some awesome recipes that are not only healthy but insanely filling. Yes, I spend a few hours on Sunday afternoon meal prepping but it’s totally worth it. I dropped 5 pounds in the first week and feel like I have a lot more energy. I’m even eating whole wheat (homemade) bread. Say what??? If you want to try any of the recipes you can find them, along with many others, on my Testing Trendy 1, 2, 3 blog!

 

PIVOT!

My Fitbit goal is 10,000 steps a day. Some days that’s hard to reach when you’re sitting at a computer on meetings for 8-9 hours. But I’ve been crushing it this week. I had 56,994 steps Sunday-Tuesday. Yesterday, I wanted to take it over 20K. My arms were pretty sore when I woke up from various H.I.I.T, kickboxing and Tabata workouts I’d been doing the last couple days so I decided I’d take my new Asics to the gym and do a 5K on the treadmill.

I know new shoes aren’t always like walking on a cloud but this was terrible. I only lasted 30 minutes and I had to jump off. I went into the locker room and my heels were raw and red. Say what? I always buy Asics for my workout shoes. It’s the only shoe I’ll work out in. It hurt so bad I took them off in the car and walked across the driveway and into the house in my socks, even though it was 35 degrees and drizzling out. I’ll spare you the pictures of the nasty blisters that formed in the next few hours.

Anyway, I got some stuff done around the house and went in the kitchen to make dinner. My plan was to warm up a hamburger I had grilled the night before and to make some sweet potato fries. But alas, my sweet potato had gone bad. So asparagus and roasted carrots in the air fryer to the rescue.

When I finished dinner I started flipping through Youtube and different workout channels on my Roku trying to figure out what I was going to do to make up for the treadmill 5K that I couldn’t complete. I bet I flipped past 70-80 different workouts in that 15 minutes. Nothing sounded good. It was beginning to stress me out. For once, I listened to my achy, tired body and laid on the couch. I turned on some music and just laid there breathing and listening to music and not thinking about much of anything else. And apparently, I fell asleep.

I woke up on the couch at 7:30 and do you know which workout I ended up doing? NONE! I worked on a project for my friend’s birthday. I reminded myself that my step goal was 10K and I was over 16K. I told myself this is a marathon, not a race. There is no actual prize if I win the Fitbit challenge for steps every day, besides my foolish pride and competitive nature. My body needed a night to recover. So I did a 10 minute stretch before bed, barefoot, and called it a day. And that’s A-O-K!!

Days don’t always go the way we plan them. Meetings get moved. Tiny work crisis’s pop up out of nowhere and demand your attention. Workout intentions get foiled. Your body fights back. Food goes bad. Friends or family call and need to talk. But we’ve gotta roll with it. We gotta be flexible. We gotta pivot. Give yourself some grace. Get up the next day and give it your best. That’s all.

P.S. I hope someone reading this saw "pivot" and thought of the Friends episode when Ross buys the couch and is trying to move it up the stairs. 😄

Remember me?

It’s been 7 years, 2 months and 1 day since my last blog post. I’m surprised I even remembered my password to log in. Sitting down to write this was a bit terrifying. Facing cold hard truths and putting yourself out there usually is. I’ve gone through a lot since the last time I wrote here. Hell, I know we all have! For me the biggies have been the nuclear after-math of my divorce, 3 moves, surgeries, being diagnosed with an auto-immune disease, severe bouts of dark depressions, an unimaginable betrayal by someone I considered one of my absolute best friends, family feuds and a global pandemic which thrust me into working from home the last two years and has forever changed the term "normal". I’ve lost friends, lost loves, lost grandparents. And somewhere in the thick of it all, I lost myself.

And yet, I’ve found a new me. A better me is blooming. In the last 9 months I’ve made some big changes and for the first time, in a long time, I can say I’m happy. I’m at peace. I’ve removed a lot of toxicity from my life. I’m working on self-love and forgiveness. I’ve been doing some brutally honest and painful self-reflection. And I love it. I’m healing. I’m working on growing and being better every day. And while I know I’ve grown a lot from the person I was last year, there’s days I still feel weak. For me, weak is an umbrella for many emotions but there is literally no feeling in the world I hate more than feeling weak. If I’m being completely honest, there are tears in my eyes right now, threatening to spill over as I write this. But that’s not the kind of weak I’m talking about. We all need a good cry occasionally. I just didn’t plan on one today.

This weekend I started thinking about times I felt the strongest in my life. There were many to chose from. But it was easy for me to pinpoint a certain time where I felt invincible. And that time got me through so many hard times after that. I drew on that strength for years and I had to stop and ask myself a few days ago, why did I stop?

It will be 10 years next week since I spent the month of April as a “year of you winner” at the Biggest Loser Resort in Malibu, CA. Those four weeks would change my life forever. I knew that every minute I was there. But the last two years, I forgot. Or chose to block it out. For those that have been with me since the beginning, I lost 112 pounds. Since 2018, I have gained back 56. Freakishly, exactly half of what I lost. I wasn’t oblivious to it. I watched it happen. A pound here. Two there. Waving it off as the holidays or vacation or whatever the excuse of the week was. Telling myself, next week I’d get back on track. But I didn’t. It shouldn’t be that hard to find the map again, right? But it is. I think part of me didn’t want to. Why? Because doing nothing is easy. Floating along on the lazy river of life is easy. But here’s the thing. It doesn’t get you where you want to go. You just float in circles, over and over again until the ride is over. And I’m sick of the same ol’ view.

I am enough. I am strong. I deserve every happiness. I am the only one who’s been standing in my way.