Sundays at Lakeville, 400 lbs and rainbows from the rain....

"I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go. You believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so even better things can fall together" Marilyn Monroe

Life never ceases to amaze me...how the bad can reveal good, how a place of discomfort can become the greatest place of growth and how the changes we fear the most can turn into the greatest gifts. I have learned, or probably relearned, all three of these in the last 8 weeks.

Have all the lessons in all the change I have been going through been positive, no, I wont pretend they have. I have been reminding  that sometimes those you think have your best interest at heart truly can have alterior motives, that speaking your mind with some people is a waste of energy and that sometimes people you think are good at what they do were merely lucky.

But I am choosing to focus on the positive lessons, because the good far outweighs the bad over the last two months.

I guess the best way to explain what I am talking about is to recap where I am in life (along with apologizing for how long it has been since my last post).

Workouts and Trainer...

The trainer change has become a great blessing. For all my angst over needing to find a new trainer and then over trying to choose between Nick and Todd, it couldn't have turned out much better than it has. I am loving training with Nick and still have Todd as part of my "team" helping me with the metabolic side of things and an amazing support person. Instead of feeling like I had to pick one replacement in the ended up with a team of people around me and it is better than I could have imagined.

Nick has turned out to be a great trainer. In some ways a much better fit than Gui was for me. He gets what drives me, being a goal orientated person, and has worked with me to tap into that. We have come up with a list of goals for my workouts, my cardio and my longer term physical goals, and we re-evaluate/tweak them weekly (or as we cross each one)

The goals started out on Sept 6th as:

Cardio....do a 10K on the treadmill, get the 5K under an hour (at that time it was taking 73 minutes)
TRX....30 straight squats
Strength Upper Body....up my bench press max by 10 lbs a week
Strength Lower Body....leg press 400 lbs
Nutrition....1 month of all days over 1500 calories
Long term goals....getting back to down hill skiing, scuba certification, 3 day breast cancer walk and rock wall climbing

I added one other in my mind, not sure if Nick agrees with this one, but I truly want to be at 199 lb by New Year's Eve!

For me having these goals has been really empowering. I do my best when I have a focus.  I am proud do say in the almost two weeks since we have set these I have met a good number of them...

Cardio....did the 10K last weekend, on the 5K today I brought the number down to 58 minutes and 45 seconds.
TRX...done last Tuesday
Strength lower body....last Tuesday I did the 400 lbs!!
Nutrition.....12 of the last 14 days have been over 1600 calories and most were over 1700.

My goals for the next month...do a 5k outside at least twice, lose 5 lbs, get my TRX number to 50, my upper body weight goal to 100 and my lower body to 425.

I am incredibly proud of myself for these accomplishments. It is only looking back that I can see how complacent both Gui and I had become with my workouts, how I had been coasting and just doing it and really wasn't moving forward any more. I feel like I am back in the game and it feels wonderful.

And the best part is that with the changes in the people around me, I am now surrounded by people who get as excited about when I reach as milestone as I do, and that is helping me truly value my own level of pride in myself because I am not letting other people's indifference make me indifferent to it. And having that positive energy around me pushes me to try to go harder, longer, faster and reach even further.

The end to the story is I am actually glad the change happened. I still hate how it happened, and still have some anxiety over how unresolved parts of it feel to me, but I would never go back. I am glad I have the new people around me I do, they make me a better person in ways I could never have expected.

Weight...

I wish I had as much positive to say here. This is probably my greatest area of frustration now. I am still up 4 lbs from where I was 7 weeks ago and nothing I do seems to be making a difference. I am working out, I am eating all this food, I am avoiding carbs, most dairy, sugar and still nothing. I feel like I am trying so hard and not making any forward progress.

There is part of me that is really scared too. I try to fight the thought but I still wonder at times if I have lost all my body is going to let me lose or if there is something more major metabolically/biologically that we haven't addressed and unless we figure it out I am doomed to stay where I am at.

And if I am totally honest it is stressing me out that we aren't being more aggressive about trying to figure out what is going on. I know I should probably be more patient, but I feel like we are wasting a lot of time with very little action to try to find an answer to why I am stalled. I know I am seeing this with a greater sense of urgency than everyone else, but I am just scared the longer we let this go on the harder it is going to be to get it moving again.

But just like the trainer change, I am trying really hard to focus on that at some point some good will come out of this frustration also.