Amateur Hour

Today the husband, pup and I went for a run. Boy it doesn’t take long to lose your level of fitness, does it? It was rookie ball out there! It’s been a few weeks since I’ve done any real exercise and it showed. I was out of breath within minutes, I had no pacing, no rhythm, and I felt so out of it. We were going to run about a mile and a half but I ended up having to walk some of it. But I’m so glad I went out! It showed me how much I love exercise. While I may not really love it in the sense that I love chocolate or long naps, I love it for what it does for my peace of mind. As I alluded to in my previous post, I got kind of frustrated and down on myself on Friday. I’ve kind of hit this point where I’m not sure where to go with my weight loss. I feel like I’m the size that I want to be and the actual number on the scale is healthy but still I’m afraid of something. Doesn’t that sound silly? But something about this actually scares me. I think it’s the fact that I’m so close to the end (I should actually say goal because this journey doesn’t have a real “end”) and I’m afraid of what the last few pounds are going to take. I definitely believe that whole thing about how the last ten are the hardest. When I was thirty pounds away from goal I was frustrated at being far away but in some ways it was easier to put my head back down and keep trudging along. Now that I’m so close all these things keep popping up into the back of my mind. Things like, “Will I actually be able to make it?” and “Do I have what it takes to get there?” and “Oh my gosh, if I actually do make it, am I going to stay there?” I was going over all this stuff on Friday and it kind of got to me; I kind of felt like the answer to those questions was a big fat no. But today as I was out dragging myself around the jogging trail I felt a renewed sense of “I can do this”. Exercise gives you hope. It makes you feel like so much of this is within your control if you just really put yourself into it. While the past few weeks’ break from exercise was nice and probably something I needed, it made me feel like I was putting everything on keeping my eating perfect. Well as you can see from the last few posts, that didn’t work out so well. My eating actually got worse and who knows if somehow it’s connected to putting too much focus on the food, so much that it actually backfired. Either way, starting this week I’m back to regular workouts. Even though exercise isn’t my absolute favorite thing to do, it does so much for me in so many ways.