A Body in Motion

When I signed up for my company's Peleton challenge Feb 15, I was coming off a month of no exercise other than walking my dog a couple times a day. I am that object that is not in motion and wants to remain that way. It's the catch-22 that I have been in so many times. It's the same with changing or exchanging habits that you have relied on for so long, when you're not in the process of change you don't want to take action. For me, I can get inspired to make change, but most of my best changes have started by pushing myself to start something or make a change before I really felt ready. Once you stick to something for a while it feels empowering and that gives you room to tweak things and come up with a plan for the next week and so on. I have realized that there are certain things that drive me. I started keto because I didn't like where my path was heading. I already had hypertension and high cholesterol, I was starting to see my kidney labs look less than perfect, and my blood sugars were at the top or just over the normal range. When I started working as a medical coder I really felt sick watching people's diseases progress to the point where maybe they started out like me with hypertension and hyperlipidemia then that progressed to diabetes, sleep apnea, kidney disease, heart failure and wounds that won't heal. I remember, before my grandmother passed away, she had diabetes and high blood pressure and she ended up with congestive heart failure and they were rationing how much water she could have in order to prevent more fluid around her heart. Oh she would cry because she was so thirsty, it was nearly as uncomfortable to watch as someone holding their breath under water for a long time. I remembered that when I had my physical in 2021, my weight had ballooned up to 206 (I'm only 5ft tall) and my BMI was nearly at 40 which is morbidly obese. I remember thinking, "I'm not going to end up like my grandma, begging for a sip of water." I started keto before I felt ready to restrict myself, but after the first few days I had already trained myself how to look at food differently. I relied heavily on cheese and sugar-free things like pudding when the cravings hit, but I really had a tough time losing weight in the beginning. I was still eating like a bodybuilder, 3 meals and 3 snacks per day because the bodybuilding world always prescribed that your metabolism would crumble if you didn't eat every 2-3 hours. Then I watched keto videos that explained that every time you eat you are spiking your insulin and sending the signal to your body to store fat. Eating less frequently leads to less insulin spikes, less glucose swimming in your blood, less stored fat. I was surprised how quickly I was able to switch to 3 meals a day and no snacking in between. I then added fasting and finally I am now in the habit of being done eating for the day by 4PM most days. I added in Dr. Mindy Pelz's fasting cycle to time my fasting and food variety to my monthly cycle to give my body an even greater advantage. Then these experiments with sweeteners and dairy are by my own design. Each layer of learning and experimentation has led me to a place where I feel much more comfortable making decisions for myself about how I want to live and eat. That's a big statement for me because I am typically a follow the rules person but in the past when I found something too restrictive in a diet, I would rebel and quit. This is the first time I have felt comfortable making my own adjustments for myself because I WANT to sustain this, not just for good lab results or losing weight but for how good I feel. Keto doesn't feel like torture to me. In fact tonight as I gobbled up a steak fajita bowl with fresh avocado, I thought about how satisfying it was compared to the pasta dish I splurged on over the weekend. Just like the way of eating, I pushed myself onto this work challenge not really wanting to. 500 minutes of Peleton workouts sounded insurmountable but with me committing to longer workouts on the weekends it has been going well. There was only one day that I didn't work out last week because we had a massive snowstorm that dropped more than 16 inches of snow in 2 days. I needed to shovel the driveway after work so my husband could get in.

I spent almost 90 minutes shoveling heavy snow before I stopped. Now that gets your heart rate pumping! As of this morning I have completed 328 minutes since Feb 15 and have 172 minutes left to workout by March 12. What can I say, challenges really motivate me. The Peleton app has their own challenges too, I might make use of them in the future. As far as my 3 experiments go, for the dairy, I am limiting it to breakfast only this week. I'm having jalapeño popper egg muffins with cheese (they have cream cheese in them too) and coffee with heavy whipping cream. I am allowing sweeteners during my entire eating window. Depending on the length of fasts, my eating window is typically from either 7am-4Pm or 9AM-4PM. I do have another 24-hour fast coming up this week too. So after a couple indulgent meals last weekend (church fundraiser fish fry on Friday with baby red potatoes, my favorite! Chicken Marsala for Saturday lunch) my weight went from 173 to 175. I expect to lose those two pounds this week but if I don't I will try a cutting back the sweeteners to only when I'm physically eating a meal. Today was my first day having no caffeine pill. Last week I took half a pill each day. I woke up feeling really run down, sore, stuffy sinuses, not in a manner that I'm sick but just worn out. So, it's hard to tell if my lethargic feeling all day had anything to do with not having the caffeine pill because I already felt off. My sinuses hate winter. I did a restorative yoga session on the Peleton app this morning then more shoveling tonight, some of the slushiest, heavy snow I've ever shoveled, it just stank! I am sure my body would love to take a break from working out tomorrow but I am going to keep working towards the goal even if it's just walking in my basement or dancing. I do like how alert it makes me feel for work. I think right now I am pushing myself outside my comfort zone so I can finally have some growth. I have lived most of my adult life feeling like I would never overcome the obstacles that kept me from losing weight, but in reality I was the one holding me back by being afraid to give up things I used for comfort because I didn't believe I could be OK without them. The thing that has made all the difference this time is trusting MYSELF to know what's right for me despite the dizzying amount of conflicting information out there. I know what I am not willing to do, and shape what I AM willing to do into a process that works for me. The more I do it, the more momentum I have to keep going. One hard thing after the next. I can do hard things. I am strong. I can overcome and improvise. I am not stuck or lazy or incompetent. I am choosing this way of life because the other way didn't make me happy, it made me feel small and shameful. And I chose this way every day by my actions, as a way of reaffirming what I want.