So my plan seemed pretty simple–I would abandon anything remotely related to the idea of diet. However, I would try to increase my daily consumption of fruits and vegetables.
This started out by me having a banana with peanut butter for breakfast. I liked it–I got protein, fat, and a enough energy to last me till lunch. This lasted about as long as it took to get a really bad banana, and then I was off bananas for a while. After that, I switched back to cereal, raisin bran, hoping the raisins counted.
Lunch started out as a some sort of diet frozen mean with a salad (since I am never full enough from those meals). But then the salad became the more interesting part of lunch, so now I have a not-so-dietetic salad with dried cranberries, glazed walnuts, feta cheese, and the best blend of spinach and baby lettuces I could find. Yeah, I’m missing carbs somewhat, but that’s what the Tricuits are for…
Dinner was not dietetic, by design, but was supposed to have veggies, if possible. Made a pot pie that was great. Aimed for things I could have salad, or at least avocado with.
The flip side to all this healthy eating was that I was supposed to work out. Started a new log that would track my work out hours per week, with a goal of working out 120 minutes (that’s two hours) every week. Since most of my stuff is 20 minute videos or the like, that seemed like a decent goal.
Week one of “Operation Be Healthy” actually went really well. Thanks to an hour and a half yoga class, went well over my minutes goal. Manages to greatly increase my fruits and vegetables consumption. Week two hit a snag thanks to Valentines Day weekend (aka, stay home, eat, and try not to feel depressed weekend) and I didn’t make my minutes goal. But, I did have lots of avocado and salsa…
So now it’s week three and I’m having another set back, another photo taken when I wasn’t expecting it, another shot of me looking plumper than I’d like to look. It’s hard not to want to immediately start a brand new diet, to not swear that I’ll up my working out to 40 minutes a day, every day, to not take the drastic measures toward weight loss that always lead me to ultimately feeling crappy about myself again. I’m trying really hard to focus on being healthy, but it’s hard to remember what healthy is in the face of “feeling fat.”
Healthy is not taking extreme measures. Healthy is not trying to conform to some prepackaged idea of what attractive is. Healthy is not hating your body. Healthy is not massive calorie restriction for the sake of rapid weight loss. Healthy is not lingering on a photo that makes me feel bad about how I look. Healthy, in fact, really has nothing to do with how I look.
I just have to remember that, focus on that, and keep up my mission to be healthy–not skinny, not thinner, not some gym-body-goddess. Just–healthy. Healthier, at any rate.
Eye on the prize. Fruits and veggies, regular exercise, a slow build up to a healthier lifestyle. But some days, it’s really hard.
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