So, I’ve joined in a bit of a friendly competition with a country full of moms who want to make some positive changes in their lives. Fitness-wise, mostly, I presume.
This is the No Excuse Mom 12 Week Transformation contest. $40 buy-in, and three places to win in gift card and prizes. Every 3 weeks, I check in with my local NEM friends and see how we’re doing.
These past few years, I have been having a hard time relaxing into the label and the (self) image of the whole mom thing. For the past one year, I’ve been dealing with the owning of being a mom who is at least 60lbs heavier than when she started making babies. This isn’t an uncommon story. I tried so hard to let myself relax into the narrative of how sacred and beautiful my heavy, floppy, stretched-out, and sluggish mom body inherently is. Of course, it is. I know that it is.
But it feels terrible.
It FEELS like it’s full of sand.
And part of that is the sarcoidosis, yes. But I am definitely on the mend, and on steroids for the inflammation of my everything.
I’m really glad that, at least for now, I feel like I’m back on the ball. I feel like I am finally going somewhere with getting back to how I used to feel. My children deserve a mother who can gallop with them. Or, at least get her butt up off the park bench to observe them.
Now that our kids permit us to sleep sometimes, most nights, most of the night, only waking up once or twice an evening, lack of sleep is becoming less and less a thing I can blame on them. I have been trying to make an effort to be asleep before 11. I even managed to be asleep before 10 a couple times recently.
I’ve been working out.
It’s been pretty great. It feels nice. I feel great after I do. My dinners are extraordinarily scrumptious, post-workout.
I’ve been counting calories… which is anathema to my existence. It makes me feel restricted and trite. But the only other time ever that I felt good about how I felt and looked, was after a few months of counting calories on a meal plan. And I looked bangin’. And I was running 10 minute miles. And I was in the 150’s for just a second, before I started to gain it all back. So, count calories, I will. This is not forever, this is just for now. I need to get my health back.
Today is day 7 of the first week of this “transformation.” Every single day of it, I’ve been doing battle with the feeling that I just know I’ll trip and fall. Maybe I’ll complete two weeks, but I’ll become lax about something, or I’ll stop recording my food, or I’ll let a few days of rain keep me from working out and I’ll get lazy. I have a serious problem with following things through. This is my life, not just my wellness. So, now as I’m about to be 36 years old, I’m still doing battle with my greatest weakness. My lack of discipline. My lack of stick-to-it-tiveness. I see very few big projects through to the end.
So, every day, I do battle with this impostor syndrome. “Who do you think you are? Every time you look to your friends for accountability, it never matters. You always stop. You never finish. They all know it. This is just another one of those things where Jera lets herself down.”
And every day, I say, “well, not today.” And I’ll say it tomorrow, and I’ll say it the day after that. I hope. But it will be one day at a time.
Jera Sue Dean 