So This Is Progress

You know when you realize you’ve been doing it wrong?

My first thought is: why didn’t anyone tell me? But the thing is, usually the world has been trying to tell me and I just wasn’t listening right. I hear words all over the place but it’s just blah blah yes-of-course-I-get-it until one day there’s a shift and I go – whoa – epiphany!

Remember when I wrote my How To Be Healthy and Wonderful post about my own journey to perfection? It wasn’t called that but that was the gist. I remember Jennifer my best Facebook friend posting something like she couldn’t wait to hear from me the next day regarding my progress. She is so sweet that she has yet to point out that there’s been radio silence on that topic ever since, and that was four months ago.

I’m 58, so I’ve had plenty of time to close in on all that is healthy and wonderful. I’ve made countless lists, set plenty of goals, done every diet and exercise, and gone in and out of many various habits – the good, the bad and the ugly. I am a little bit healthy and wonderful but there’s room for improvement like right now I’d like to have less belly and more time on my violin.

When I got all into Dr. Mark Hyman and decided to really embrace an uber-fit lifestyle I found that as good as I felt eating all the vegetables, proteins and fats and avoiding all alcohol, carbs and sweets – I eventually fell off the wagon. Eventually as in – after thirtyish days. Here I had discovered the way to radical health and I started to cheat. I cheated with a chocolate-banana croissant. I drank some hard kombucha and some whiskey. I snacked after 8 P.M. I scrolled Facebook mindlessly.

Sorry, Jennifer.

But Mark said something else. He said that it took years to get to where he is now. Two steps forward, one step back. You’ve heard that, right? You know what it means.

Well, maybe you don’t, because I didn’t. Not really.

Slap me, but if you are like most people you don’t always make space for the ole two -steps-forward-one-step-back dance. How do I know? Well….the way many of us flip-flop around getting excited about some new thing then pivoting when new thing number 54 isn’t quite the bomb it promised to be tells me that if we don’t get amazing results – and fast! – we move on.

We give up and we regress back into the distracted blob of cells we inhabit, dragging our bits and pieces through life until we decide to try the next new thing.

It’s fine to change course, necessary even. But my message today is that we don’t give things enough time in life before we chuck them. There are of course some exceptions to this. I should have chucked cigarettes long before I quit them. But many other things I abandoned too soon, like typing lessons and piano. I should have stuck with it.

If you want to really understand the actual pace of things talk to someone who’s survived cancer. These people have to nearly kill themselves with chemo then build back better while still feeling like crap. I saw an old friend recently who’s two years cancer-free and she explained to me that she still has chemo eyes and fatigue, but she is celebrating all that she can do now that she couldn’t do a year ago. She described the pain she has in all her joints from a med that she’s going to have to take for five years.

She feels well enough to rejoin life as we know it but only sometimes. She has had to surrender to the pace of things and can’t push it too hard or it will set her back. But still, she moves forward.

Little by little, off we go.

So how has it been for me the past four months? That depends on how you spin it.

In between the cheating I have adopted some much better eating habits. I am going all in with Athletic Greens, Chia seeds, broccoli and faro. When I crave something sweet I eat a frozen banana with a little peanut butter or nutella. I get what little animal protein I eat from the Butcher’s Box which is the most humane and sustainable source I can access and I buy most of the rest of what I eat at the local farmer’s market. I eat herbs in my salad and geek out on Omega-3’s.

For four months I’ve looked and felt mostly the same and that is because the changes to my health and vitality have been slow and a little zig zaggy. And it’s also because results are incremental and tiny day-by-day and it takes time.

Wait, that sounds an awful lot like two steps forward and one step back!!

In actuality I have lost ten pounds and I am moving a lot more. I have more energy but not all the time. After work I’m still toast. In a fit of wanting to do it all I signed up for Spanish two mornings a week and Banjo and Violin and……it was not fun. I was in a perpetual state of not studying Spanish and not playing music and stressing out about it all. I wasn’t writing much and my house wasn’t as clean and Marie Kondo-ed as I’d like. And that ten pounds? The scale didn’t budge for weeks and weeks so it’s not like I felt much in the reward department.

That’s a lot of nots.

I had big ideas and wasn’t pulling off much of anything, or so it seemed. Not even if I made a list. Not even if I made a schedule. I wasn’t morphing into the new and better person I had envisioned. (or so it seemed)

What actually happened is that I noodled around not doing all that I wanted to do but I kept trying. I kept circling back to what I wanted to accomplish and I’d do some little thing long enough that I’d make one little new habit that would stick.

I started drinking a morning drink that starts my day off right. It is both healthy and symbolic of a commitment to feeling good and living large. It’s a ritual and a ceremony and it gives me focus and strength. A glass of lemon water might do the same thing – it may just be the intention that’s working.

It’s taken four months for me to find a way to make progress. I had to quit the Spanish because there was no way I could find balance starting my Tuesday and Thursday mornings off on Zoom freaked out over not having studied. It scrambled my brain to try and study even though I loved my teacher and even though in some ways it was a good exercise for my noggin. Wordle is going to have to be enough right now because that’s all the daily braining I can legit do.

I had to also accept that after work I can do nothing. Accepting that lead me to embrace the one thing I can do – read. I have my books and I’m no longer fretting about what I can’t accomplish. I can also put one load of laundry in the washer so I do that – but I don’t necessarily move it over and I don’t fold anything…..too much pressure!

I have wanted to get up earlier but it takes me a long time to wakey wakey. My eyes flutter open at 6:30 but I generally have not been able to start moving until 8:30 or 9 a.m. I looked it up and there’s a name for it – sleep inertia. I first developed this condition when I was anemic and now that I’m no longer sick I expected it to improve but it hasn’t. I am slow in the morning. I changed my work start time to 10 and it’s going to have to remain there. I just can’t get it together before then says the mom that had her kids to school for band practice at 7 a.m. No idea how I did that, or how I’d go for a run before my kids got up.

Yeah well, that was then.

I do write best in the morning so I finally figured out that I can stay in bed and blog on my laptop instead of surfing Facebook and snoozing and if I do this from 7-8 a.m. I can start moving earlier and get up having written a little. The writing transitions me from sleepy to awake enough to stand up and that little discovery is a win. All I have to do is resist the urge to fall back asleep. It’s a little tricky because morning sleep is my favorite (as opposed to nighttime sleep, which I fight off to the bitter end)

Next the animals need feeding and the plants need watering. I have to feed the five dogs and the pig and that’s a bit of a slog but the watering can happen at night. I’m playing with whether I have the bandwidth for that after work. It’s a WIP to figure out where all the parts go.

Fitting in violin has been disappointing. It’s the thing I most want to do and yet the most elusive. I finally am starting it up in the 9-9:30 morning slot and it’s working. Turns out when I play in the morning it also paves the way for playing throughout the day.

I still haven’t figured out the weightlifting piece. That’s next.

Enough about me.

All I really want to say is never give up, and keep shifting things around until you hit on what works. Keep your eye on the prize but don’t feel impatient because all the little bumps and valleys are trying to teach you something about yourself. Stop trying to shove a square peg into a round hole but don’t stop pushing forward. Let go of goals that aren’t working but hang on to what matters most. Don’t throw out the baby with bathwater!

Most importantly, give yourself time and celebrate the little successes. And when it seems like nothing is happening realize that internally you are working things out. More on that later but for now surrender to the process that is life. Two steps forward, one step back – a zig and a zag and off we go!

Namaste!