A Healthy Ambition: The Routine Check-up

Over the past few months, I've obviously fallen off of the healthy train.  In fact, I would probably venture out to say that I jumped off the back of it, stuck a middle finger up as it took off, and began hoofing it in the opposite direction.

Not one of my better decisions.

Why this happened can be attributed to all of the usual suspects: I was too busy, lazy, stressed, lazy, tired, lazy, and so on and so forth.  When I took a look at those reasons, you can guess what the common factor I found was.  I've just been too damn lazy.  As a result, I've been eating humongous portions of food, most of which is white rice and meat products (because I come from Hawaii and that's how we do), I've been avoiding salads like they're going to kill me or something, I've canceled my gym membership (which was more for financial reasons -- that I'll divulge sometime next week -- than anything else), my treadmill has sat abandoned and lonely in the corner as it collects dust and makes me dog a little uneasy, and I've just been...wallowing.

Then I went to see my PCP for my first physical check-up in three years, and all I have to show for my incredibly poor self-care and eating/fitness habits is that I'm a 27 year old with scary-high cholesterol and an increasingly high glucose level, and that if this doesn't change I'm heading for either a heart attack and/or diabetes or cholesterol meds which will make it dangerous/impossible for me to have children.

What.  Have.  I.  Done?!

So, needless to say things are about to change in my world.  Operation "A Healthy Ambition" is way on again and this time I have a little more at stake than fitting into that cute pair of skinny jeans in my closet.  So if any of you out there on the world wide web have any suggestions for recipes, cookbooks, informational books, workouts, etc. that you've really benefited from and would like to share, believe me, I'm all ears.

Here's to a new me.

A Healthy Ambition: The Media

We all know that the media has never been particularly kind to those struggling with weight issues.  Whether it's been the uber waif-like models on the covers of magazines, the beautiful (yet skinny) actresses on TV, or the hundreds and thousands of weight loss products on the shelves promising to turn you into thinnest "you" possible, there really has been almost a war waged against the self-esteem of the overweight.

And yes, it's very true that America has a serious, life-threatening problem called obesity -- our relationship to food and exercise is appalling.  But rather than nurturing a less-obese population by way of healthier habits, we seem to knock ourselves down, call ourselves names, and generally make ourselves feel bad about being the way we are instead.

Nothing pointed this out to me more this passed week than the controversy currently going on in the Twitter-verse.  From what I can gather, Kenneth Tong of Big Brother fame has started a...campaign?...which utilizes what he calls "managed anorexia" in order to shame people into being skinny.  It's disgusting, really it is.

Some of his recent tweets have included:

• Kenneth Tong: making fat girls more irrelevant than they already are, haven't you ever heard of managed anorexia?
• Kenneth Tong: making it acceptable for skinny people globally to call fat people what they are, disgusting.
• Don't listen to them. They're all trying to make fatter. You're a mess as is. Throw the food away. You'll be so much happier then.
• Managed anorexia is not life threatening, it gives living another chance after you messed it up eating too much. 
• The beginning is always today. Managed anorexia is a lifestyle, not a diet.
• Thankful for this global opportunity to help girls all over the world know that to be skinny is to be perfect & to be fat is unacceptable.

In response to this, people have started hashtagging #NoSizeZero, and celebrities have come out quite vocally against Tong.  He's being interviewed by tons of newspapers, radio shows and blogs.  And while we can all say things like, we should just ignore him because all he wants is attention, I feel that that's somewhat irresponsible in this case.  Because not everyone will ignore him.  Those most vulnerable to his kind of poison won't ignore him and they'll think he's right.  So I think it's important to be outspoken against this sort of thing, it's important to show others that not everyone agrees and that being healthy is being beautiful.

Last week was also the first time I caught MTV's new docu-drama, "I Used To Be Fat".  When I first saw it and didn't know what was going on, my knee-jerk reaction was that this was going to be a Biggest Loser for teenagers, that these kids were going to work out for 8 hours a day, burn a billion calories, and that's how they'd lose weight.  I was pleasantly surprised that it turned out to be a little different.

Yes, these kids work out, and they work out every day.  But they work out for a couple of hours and alter other things in their lives simultaneously -- like drastically changing their diets.  Now yes, this is still scarily drastic...and I'm not saying that it's necessarily a good thing to lose 90lbs in 111 days, or that that kind of weight loss is particularly sustainable, but I appreciate that MTV is showing how real and hard weight loss can be.  Once the extreme time frame is taken out of the equation here, the message is fairly simple: There's no magic pill to weight loss.  There's just hard work and healthy lifestyle changes.

A Healthy Ambition: Benchmarks and Goals

It's been a slow couple of days for me (the fact that I was home - in the land of heavy foods and little exercise - didn't help) and, in the hopes of keeping my motivation up, I began thinking about what the benchmarks are for my end goal of losing weight and becoming fit.  Much like my Debt Project, working-out has obviously taken on a very general purpose and I feel like in order to actually accomplish that goal, I need more tangible benchmarks to hit and some rewards to give myself along the way.

It's the rewards that were stumping me though.  With debt the rewards are easy, but with weight loss, what sort of rewards can you give yourself?  Eat more?  No one wants to do that in the middle of a work out frenzy.  Buy a bikini?  That prospect is so scary that I'm actually shuddering right now.  So I thought about it, and I thought about my debt rewards some more, and I came up with a few work-out goals/rewards after all.

Here they are (the goals that are crossed out have already been completed):

1. Join a gym
2. Establish initial work-out routine (working out 4-5 days a week)
3. Try out a class at the gym
4. Follow routine consistently for 2 months
5. Run 3 miles
6. Buy new work-out clothes - REWARD!
7. Re-evaluate and follow routine consistently for 2 more months
8. Run 6 miles
9. Buy new running shoes - REWARD!
10. Join a pilates class
11. Re-evaluate and follow routine consistently for 2 more months
12. Run a half marathon

A Healthy Ambition: The Work-Out Mix

I can't work out without music.  It may actually be some weird sort of cosmic impossibility.  And what I listen to doesn't have to fall into a certain category of songs, but I don't like when they're super predictable either (i.e. "Eye of the Tiger" is getting nowhere near my playlist for many, many reasons).  The music just has to be loud and high-octane, and I have to be able to think over it or about it.  Like daydreaming on car rides, I apparently tend to do my best thinking on the elliptical or treadmill when I can just stare off into space without having to worry about crashing into anything or anyone.

I've spent many hours at the gym recently listening to Lady Gaga, The Maine, Eminem and The Cab.

So while this playlist is under constant revision and construction, I thought I'd share it's current incarnation with you.  I'd love to hear what makes up your current work out mix -- maybe I'll borrow some songs and add them to mine!

A Healthy Ambition (with superficial results)

Something's come over me lately.  I can't say whether the root is a positive one, but the result definitely is.  Because I've been feeling energized lately, and motivated and restless and determined, and that's all given me a drive to tackle my weight issues in a way that I don't think I ever have before.

Let me start this way: I have a confession.  I've been unhappy with my body for as long as I can remember.  I've never, not once, honestly thought I looked good.  That whole "feel good naked" thing going around?  I don't have the faintest idea what that's like.  Since I was probably about five I've been hyper conscious of the fact that I'm overweight.  Sure, when you're a kid it's called "chubby," but it amounts to the same thing once you hit 13.  There have been times when I've been called fat to my face (probably because I called that person an equally hideous name, so I guess I had it coming), and times when I've been told quite clinically that I could stand to lose a few pounds.  Whether said in the heat of battle or with gentle concern, the words are never easy to swallow.

As a result, I've developed a relationship with my body that ill-prepared parents would develop with a child who likes to throw tantrums.  I've given in to my body's demands at times and brutally punished it at others.  I've starved, gorged, passed out from too much exercise and not enough energy, then thrown in the towel and let it go.  I've come up with a reward and deterrent system, I've tried to unsuccessfully convince myself that being healthy is more important than being skinny, and I'm fairly certain I've tried every fad diet and every semi-legit weight loss program you can think of.

I've failed at them all.

So I'm more than a little excited to be where I am right now.  As I said, something's come over me lately.  It began when I stepped on my bathroom scale a couple of weeks ago and nearly died.  I'd hit a weight I never imagined seeing under my feet.  In all honestly, I don't look like I'm that weight; I don't know how I get away with it, but the pounds distribute themselves fairly evenly across my frame.  I'm not saying I'm thin (obviously), because I definitely look like I've gained weight over the last year, but I don't look obese.  At least, I don't think I do.  (YouwouldtellmeifIdid,wouldn'tyou?)

Anyway, after stepping on that scale and seeing those magic numbers, I couldn't take it anymore.  I knew I needed to do something.  Like my finances and debt, my weight was something I needed to take control of or I would regret it for the rest of my life (very much like I'd been regretting it up until this point).  But the really surprising thing came next: rather than setting about on my more destructive tendencies -- like torture -- my mind automatically went on a very different path.

I became insanely motivated to exercise.  All of a sudden, the things I wanted to do included going to the gym, trying out that yoga class, doing pilates, running a mile (to start...I'm just beginning!), walking the mile home from work everyday, eating less and eating healthier, kicking my soda habit and drinking tons of water.  And so I've been doing them.  And I've been loving it.  It hasn't been easy, and it hasn't been all sunshine, roses and fun, but I have plans now that include a healthier lifestyle, things I want to do when I master that next step.  When I miss a day at the gym or a pilates work out, rather than begrudgingly saying that I'll just pick it back up tomorrow (and then not), I check out my calendar anxiously and make the time to fit it in. 

I'm not saying this is all about me being fit.  I'd like to pretend it is, but I'm a 26 year old woman with a healthy appreciation for consumerism and all that glitters.  I know that what I see in magazines, on tv, and in the movies is mostly airbrushed, but it doesn't stop the fact that I still envy it.  And while I may never achieve that level of tiny (those women are, after all, robots, right?), I'm still planning on looking damn good in my "thin jeans".

And I'm looking forward to the work it'll take for that to happen.