This month’s blog is not about running, but maybe about not running. It is about aging and hormonal changes, about new and different emotional and mental health challenges, and about finding a healthy balance. Really, it’s about life.
With swimsuit season on the horizon, does anyone ever really look forward to putting a swimsuit on for the first time each year? It’s time to start a journey that will make future swimsuit seasons a little less traumatic. That includes both physical and mental resets.
While this might be the time of year many become more body conscious, working toward a healthier lifestyle can start an any time of year. It doesn’t take a special occasion – or a swimsuit – to get started.
Although I’ve tried this or something like this many, many times in an effort to drop 10 pounds, 20 pounds, 30 pounds, or to lower blood pressure, or to flatten my belly or sculpt my doubling chin – especially since climbing through middle age – this time I’m adding a new component: accountability. I am writing about my first 30 days of trying to create a healthier, more sustainable, and accountable lifestyle.
I know I will probably have some failures from the start. As much as sweet things are not my kryptonite, at the end of the day or the middle of a boring afternoon, I crave chocolate. I love salt and carbs and cheese. I worked for a short period as a bartender, and I love cocktails, a full-bodied wine or a piney IPA beer.
The fitness part? I thought I had that. I work out five to seven days most weeks, and I average 4.5 miles of walking a day. My workouts at Mary’s Health & Fitness in Hershey, a gym that offers small group classes based on timed strength exercises with some cardio and core work thrown in, are similar to HIIT workouts. I’m pretty sure my bones are strong and that I’m doing everything I can to keep my joints greased.
What I’m not doing so well at is mixing that regimen up with adequate cardio – so this is about not running and limiting portion sizes and indulgences at the table. It’s also about how these combinations change as we age, and how we can find a new synch with our bodies.
Day 1
So, this is day one of accountability. I’m not going to log my foods into MyFitnessPal or any other food logging tool. I’ve tried that and having to figure out how to log a portion of a complicated recipe makes me crazy. I enjoy cooking, and this took the joy out of cooking anything other than a three-ingredient recipe.
I believe that a sustainable lifestyle includes allowing oneself to cook and enjoy food that is tasty and complex as well as healthy. It includes being able to go out to restaurants, ordering wisely and eating the right portion. It also includes a drink here and there with others.
In the past, I have tried Weight Watchers, Noom, personal accountability, bimonthly sessions with a nutrition instructor, Mayo Clinic diet and thinking about trying. While I lost a bit with each of these methods, I never sustained it. This time, it’s time to find something that fits my lifestyle and that I can commit to.
That probably means that I won’t see fast results because I will be working to gradually adjust my approach to food and exercise. I expect that means I will see results over time, but that I will have to make a long-term commitment.
This actually is about not running
So, about not running. For most of my life, I was a runner. I jogged a bit as a teen and played softball – not very well – for three years in high school until my school started a track team my senior year. I won all of my meets and made it to districts despite very little training, which wrongly made me think of myself as a runner and someone who could succeed in track.
My freshman year of college on a track team disproved this. We had to run 12 miles on the first day of practice. I had never run more than 2-3 miles at a time before that day. At the beginning of the season, I could beat the fastest girl on the team. By the middle of the season, I was lagging, and, burned out, I quit before the season ended.
I returned to running distances that felt more comfortable and learned to love running – it was how I explored new places, kept fit and found peaceful time for my mental health as well. I gradually began entering 5Ks and 10Ks in each place we lived. My husband beat me to marathon distance while I was nursing an injured ankle, which really rankled me since he had never been a runner, hating running for exercise and trained for just six weeks with a classmate who was a world-class marathoner, meaning my husband finished with a really good time.
Of course, that was all the motivation I needed to eventually complete two marathons – the Marine Corps in DC and the New York Marathon, which I ran alongside my favorite former colleague. My time was nowhere as good as my husband’s, but it was respectable, and I had done the marathon on my own terms.
I continued to jog/run as my main form of exercise for the next 10 years until plantar fasciitis effectively ended my career. Three injections lessened the symptoms, but for someone who had always been a barefoot kind of girl, I was sad to be relegated to cushy shoes and no pounding. I can still walk, and I walk a lot to go along with my strength training, but running is behind me especially since my knees are also starting to creak.
Add to that, aging and hormone changes, and well, along with less cardio, weight keeps creeping on despite my pretty rigorous workout schedule. Oh, also add to that, my husband and I are empty nesters who eat out a lot more and have cocktails with our meals. Lifestyle changes are the culprit and I closed my eyes as long as I could. Now it’s time to regain some control.
The start
Moment of truth. Today is the start. I had to weigh in. I’ve been avoiding the scale ever since it topped a number I never thought I’d hit. I have to take control.
I also have to start taking my blood pressure regularly. For years, I have not been able to maintain it where I want when I go to doctor visits. I always said it was doctor anxiety. Lately, at home it is not what I want either. I have to acknowledge that it is diet, weight – and real. I have to work to bring it down before my next doctor visit. Yikes! I’m afraid to even look in my calendar to see how soon that might be.
OK, so I just finished a pilates/flexibility class via Zoom, and it’s 4:15 p.m., and I want to eat. This is what generally happens to me at this time of day. It is kind of my dead zone and my hungry zone all together. I need strategies to help me through this time of day.
The rest of my life
Day two, and fearing I wouldn’t hold myself accountable, I decided to spend some money – that always makes me more disciplined. It’s why a gym membership works better than self-propelled YouTube videos in the basement for exercise. For weight loss, even though I swore I didn’t want to log food, and even though I’d tried it before and found it to be a bit too cheesy, I signed up once again for Noom.
While I don’t love many of the obvious and overly cheerful lessons, nor the meal logging, I have to admit it is holding me accountable. It doesn’t take long to complete the day’s lessons and log all of the other things (meals, weight, water consumption, stress level and movement), and because of that, I do it. Because I don’t want to fail, I do it. Because I really do want to change my lifestyle, I do it.
What I’m finding is that although I don’t love it, it has made me become so much more aware of everything I eat (from types of foods to quantities). Now, that doesn’t mean that I am eating the healthiest diet yet, but I am eating less overall (staying within my Noom-recommended calorie count) and I am making better choices overall. One pitfall is that I think I may underestimate portion sizes, but another thing I don’t want to do is weigh my food. Noom and other programs offer tips for eyeballing portion sizes. I think I, like many people, still underestimate exactly how much a portion is, as research has shown. I will try to make my portions smaller and eat less dense food to help combat this.
I’m a month in now, and I have only lost a few pounds so far. That’s OK. This can no longer be a race. It has to become a sustainable lifestyle centered around food-eating strategies that don’t require me to give up things I love. Research has shown that this is what leads to the greatest success and ability to keep weight off.
Although I didn’t have enough time to get to where I’d like to be for my doctor appointment at the end of March, my provider applauded my efforts, and even suggested that because I do a lot of strength training, some of my weight can be attributed to muscle. She was not unhappy with my weight. My blood pressure numbers from home were better than the ones in the office as usual, so she suggested I try to cut back on salt, but that, for now, I was OK. Phew!
My Noom subscription goes for four months. I will give it up after that time because I hope it will have been enough to help me form the habits I need to carry forth on my own. That might mean keeping a regular food diary, finding a community and replacing one thing with another.
You, dear reader, are part of that community. By the time you read this, I will be more than two months in. Knowing you are there wondering if I’m succeeding will drive me on. Going public – now that’s accountability.
