No More Excuses

A couple months ago, I had one of those horrible, terrible, awful, no good, very bad days. Plans to go camping were thwarted by a severe storm that left the ground quite soggy, and I was in the kind of mood that takes a small disappointment and turns it into an opportunity to enumerate Everything That Sucks About Me. But at some point in the midst of despairing my body and the fact that I was well on my way to gaining back all the weight I had lost while nursing, I had an epiphany.

Nothing will change until I make big changes in my life.

For everyone else in the world who has found exercise and healthy eating to be a fact of life: SUCK IT. Between undiagnosed asthma and my devotion to food as coping mechanism, I had spent my life completely convinced that exercise would always be uncomfortable and crap-tastic, and that I was incapable of eating like a normal human being. Why bother, when life is clearly better when you're not getting sweaty and those pesky feelings of inadequacy can be stuffed with a giant gooey chocolate chip cookie?!

So I made a choice to try something, ANYTHING, because I couldn't bear the thought of feeling so unhappy with myself for the rest of my life. I had considered trying the Couch to 5K program in the past, but that voice in the back of my head held me back. "what if you can't do it? then you'll be fat AND a failure. and with that asthma? bad idea. better go get a snack instead." Sometimes I countered [what, you don't have conversations with yourself in your head?] that I could probably walk a 5K with some training, and maybe even run a bit of one too! And this time, the positive voice won.

I started training the very next day. Had a few stumbles. Figured out how to make it work and why carrying a smartphone in your pocket is not, in fact, a smart idea. And then really started to enjoy it. Sometimes unfamiliar phrases would just pop out, like "I bet I can push harder on this interval!" and "I wish it were my running day already..." and "I hope this foot injury doesn't keep me from running!" There were some setbacks along the way. Days that it felt like I would never get stronger, and always be that slow poke from middle school gym class that doesn't finish her mile until after everyone else has already done their cool-down. In a perfect world, I would have done the program in 9 weeks. In reality, I took 13 weeks, and I still haven't reached the point of running five kilometers. But I kept at it until it was a habit, despite the heat and the sweat. In October I'll be running the AIDS Walk Washington 5th Annual 5K Run to raise money to fight HIV/AIDS in DC, a city that has extremely high rates of infection.

And once the running was well underway, I started watching what I eat. It was rarely about denying myself something, or staying under a calorie limit. Mostly, it was about being aware of the impact that different foods had to my diet and making conscious choices instead of saying "why not? who cares how bad it is for me when it's soooo tasty?". I've stopped using food for comfort, as an emotional fix when I'm upset or bored.

So now I'm a runner. I'm stronger. I'm healthier. I have a goal, and I'm seeing it through. I'm finding ways to keep going, even when it feels like I can't. And perhaps most important of all, I'm giving myself permission to be less than perfect. To need a slow day sometimes. To take a breather. To accept that starting from almost zero capability doesn't mean I can't, it means I can't yet. But I will keep trying, and I won't let myself make excuses about why I can't.