Tag Archives: half marathon

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NEW DAY 365: One-year anniversary! đŸĨ‚

Committing to weight loss isn’t a decision you make once.

It’s a series of decisions you make every day, throughout the day, multiple times a day.
The days turn into weeks.
Then months.
Then, somehow, a year.

A year’s worth of thousands upon thousands of decisions range from seemingly inconsequential to monumental to overwhelming — as do the results.

The person I was a year ago today was shattered, tentative, reeling, and supremely unhealthy in every way. She got moving because her mind became so paralyzed by external inputs that it shut down and her body took control. She was in no way the “she believed she could, so she did!” meme; she was trapped kinetic energy, desperate to escape the confines of her physical being. A year ago today, she wasn’t trying to do anything beyond survive the next 10 minutes.

She would be floored to hear what she was about to do over the next 365 days.

She got reacquainted — painfully, slowly, and sweatily — with the elliptical, in 5-minute increments, until she could do a continuous hour. It took her 4 months to go from 6 miserable minutes to 60 manageable ones.

Then she ran 4 elliptical miles in 60 minutes.
Then 5.
Then 6.
Then 7.

Then she ran 8 elliptical miles in 70 minutes.
Then 9.
Then 9.3.

She ran 30 seconds on her bum ankle on the treadmill, at a pace barely above walking.
Then 60-second intervals.
Then 90-second intervals.
Then 2-minute, 3-minute, and 5-minute intervals.
She increased her speed and ran a full mile.
Then 2.
She dutifully iced and elevated her ankle after every run until it learned it could handle it.
So she increased her pace and kept at it.

She signed up for, self-trained for, and finished a half-marathon.
She saw her finish-line photo and, for the first time, saw a runner.
She then registered for 2 more half-marathons.

She became an athlete.

She tried 75 Hard. She got sick, got rained on, got injured, and bled through her clothes while refusing to abandon her workout. She completed the challenge.
She rediscovered her love of being outside and how restorative it is to her mind and body.
She got trapped by 14 inches of snow before vacation. She spent 4 days digging out, arrived at her destination only to have to dig that out, too. She went running on the frozen beach the next day.
She made up and tried Power 11. No one was watching. She finished it as competitor, coach, and cheerleader.
She dealt with illness, pain, interruption, inconvenience, and deterrence. She found ways to move anyway. It made her stronger.

She became someone who does not quit.

She cut added sugar completely out of her diet for several months, both in a row and in a cumulative-intermittent fashion.
She experimented and figured out what type of eating schedule her body responds best to.
She gained new nutritional knowledge.
She learned her hunger and satiety cues and no longer has cravings or urges to snack.
She found herself deaf to food noise and disinterested in consuming anything that wouldn’t support her health.
She tested new recipes and gave second, third, and fourth chances to foods she’d previously decided she didn’t like — and discovered she liked them when prepared differently.
She turned herself into an exceptional menu planner and meal prepper, and a creative experimental chef as well as a more-adventurous eater.
She learned she could be healthy by liking everything she eats, even if she doesn’t necessarily eat everything she likes.

She became someone who nourishes herself.

She eats to feed herself, not her cravings.
She keeps promises to herself first, not last.
She exercises for self-love, not self-punishment.

She became someone who takes care of herself.

If I could somehow sit beside Past-Me and tell her what her first decision one year ago would lead to today, she would hardly believe it. Looking at it now — knowing it happened — I admit there’s a small part of Present-Me that hardly believes it, too. Would vocalizing a year’s worth of select spoilers to her make it feel more real to both of us?

Hey girl. Life is about to change profoundly for you.

You’ll go through stretches of cooperation with an alacritous scale, reliably dropping pounds in a way that motivates you to keep going — yet no one notices you’re getting smaller. But you don’t care, because this feels fragile, and having other people’s voices enter the conversation you’re having with yourself feels like a possible destabilizer. You’re not trying to have that right now. This is yours. You protect it and you keep moving forward.

After about six months, you enter what feels like interminable stagnation with what the scale shows you. You seriously consider burning your scale and buying a new one that isn’t such a damn liar. Then one day, you stop to eat on your five-hour drive to your brother’s baby shower for the weekend. When you get out of the car and close the door behind you, your ring goes flying off your finger and skitters across the parking lot. You chase after it in maniacal laughter. You suddenly don’t care about the scale anymore.

You’ll become obsessed with the process. You’ll get sick of it. You’ll be nonplussed by it. You’ll be unfazed by it. And, eventually, you’ll be integrated with it.

It will challenge you. It will teach you. It will strengthen you. It will humble you. It will empower you.

It will you-ify you.

You will start to love the person you’re excavating. You’ll understand her in ways that were too inaccessible, too intense, too scary before. But they’re possible a year from now, because you trust yourself after the months of investing in yourself.

And when it feels too hard, you’ll invoke one of your two mantras:
1) “This is easy.” Not because it is, but because after everything you’ve done — like coaching yourself through those first breathless minutes on the elliptical at nearly 300 lbs — running that measly treadmill mile is nothing. Every time you push yourself, you put your arms around the version of you who truly wanted to go, but genuinely couldn’t. The person you’re becoming is doing it for the person you used to be. She lit the match. You carry the torch.
2) “I am so strong.” Because you are. And you know it.

You’ll become your own inspiration. You’ll become your own cause to honor. And you’ll become your own best friend.

As your process continues, you’ll clock the outwardly visible changes:

  • Your face is narrower. You can see the piercings in your ears without turning your head — including the 4 new ones you’ll get in the first half of 2026 that punctuate your progress.
  • Your collarbones, shoulders, and neck muscles are poppin’. You think it makes you look more feminine.
  • Bye bye, boobies / ta ta, titties — the girls have done some shrinking.
  • Your arms are thinning out. The gardening gloves that are supposed to be roomy, finally are. The wristband for your VivoFit has more excess band beyond the closure notch than it does before it. Sleeves don’t cut off circulation anymore.
  • Shirts don’t squeeze your torso anymore.
  • You’ll spend a small fortune trying to keep up with replacing the underwear that hangs and slides off your ass in a constant struggle with gravity.
  • Your legs don’t brush together with every step anymore. Your knees are bonier. Your quads and hamstrings show definition as if you’re some kind of… runner.
  • Your over-developed calves still touch when you stand, but now so do your ankles when you lie down.
  • There’s all kinds of space between your toes now.
  • You go down a half shoe size.
  • You go down 5 dress sizes.
  • You go down 6 pants sizes.
  • You go down 4 shirt sizes.
  • You lose a cup size.
  • You can wear a necklace that, when it was first gifted to you, inspired the indignant thought, “whose neck is that small?!”
  • You can wear a ring on your middle finger that, when it was first gifted to you, fit none of your fingers.
  • You can wear what you want instead of settling for what fits.
  • You look happy, not haunted.

You’ll note the things your body can do now that it couldn’t a year ago:

  • There’s not a seat you can’t sit in. Airplane. Theater. Stadium. Desk chair. Restaurant booth. Behind the wheel, you have to move the seat forward one day simply because the excess fat is no longer pushing your whole body forward and closer to the pedals, and you can’t reach the steering column without adjusting the position. When you put on your seatbelt, you pull it across your body and buckle it in one fluid motion instead of pulling it out as far as it can go in order to fasten it.
  • Regular belts? Also a thing you can fasten.
  • You can carry purses and bags with long straps without having to hold onto them the whole time so your hip isn’t bumping them off because it sticks out too far when you walk.
  • You aren’t constantly making contact with the shower curtain or running out of breath when you shower.
  • Those two creaky bottom steps that embarrass you at your parents’ house? They stop making noise when you walk on them. Actually, you don’t really walk on them; you run up and down stairs now. On your tiptoes. The way you did when you were a kid.
  • Your ankle is chatty and whiny sometimes, but it doesn’t refuse to play. In fact, it takes very little — if any — ice or elevation to recover from what you ask of it. Inflammation in general is barely even a thing for you these days.
  • You almost never get headaches anymore.
  • You do half marathons.
  • You do Pilates. It’s hard. It kinda sucks sometimes. You love it. Oh yeah — you have core strength now.
  • You do 6+ miles on the elliptical in an hour and it’s a casual cardio night.
  • Perhaps to your greatest surprise, your menstrual cycle comes back. It will come regularly, like clockwork, every month for you, starting in October. At the start of each one of the first five periods you get in a row, you will cry on the toilet. And then you will laugh at yourself for crying on the toilet.

You’ll log the stats:

  • You don’t randomly wake up with your heart racing anymore. Your average blood pressure is 101/68 and your average resting heart rate is 57 bpm.
  • 21 DietBets won (and you’re working on 3 more).
  • 252 total inches gone since you started tracking various body measurements1 in January 2026.
  • Your BMI drops from 50.2 (Class III obesity) to 29.5 (Overweight — just regular-fat!).
  • You’ve lost exactly 126 pounds since February 2025 as of this morning, 106.4 of them since today’s date a year ago — since you decided to try something.

But the most meaningful things you’ll notice are the unquantifiable changes in the way you behave and how you feel:

  • You stop suffering from energy spikes and collapses.
  • Your brain fog decreases significantly.
  • You don’t always sleep that well — some things never change — but the sleep you do get is more restful. At some point, you stop snoring.
  • Your relationship with food becomes so normal that it barely qualifies as a relationship. Food is fuel, not temptation.
  • Your confidence surges.
  • You remember how good success feels, and you want more of it.
  • You chase a challenge because you’re curious about how you’ll do it. Not if you’ll do it; HOW.
  • You find clarity and peace from movement. You look forward to it. It is not an instrument of suffering; it’s an instrument of regulation.
  • You take pleasure in experimenting with new exercises that strengthen you as a runner, because that’s how you see yourself now.
  • You stop using an apologetic tone when you say things like “I don’t eat sugar” or “I can’t, I’m going on a run”.
  • You actually say things like “I don’t eat sugar” or “I can’t, I’m going on a run”.
  • You stop hiding from things like cameras and mirrors. And from doctors and masseuses. And from new experiences and opportunities.
  • You know the difference between challenging and unrealistic.
  • You know the difference between discomfort from growth and discomfort from pain or risk of injury.
  • You understand your body’s limits, and you respect them.

Just last night, on the eve of your one-year anniversary as you were drafting this post, you had ice cream. It was the new Häagen-Dazs peanut butter brittle flavor that you bought over a week ago — along with 3 other pints — and kept in your freezer until you wanted some. You loaded a medium ramekin with the 6 spoonfuls that you’ve learned is the maximum amount your stomach can handle without knotting up.
You ate it slowly. It satisfied you. Then you didn’t want any more.
In fact, you determined the ice cream was too sweet.
You decided to drop what’s left of the pint at your parents’.

Who even are you?

You’re you, you-ified.

Thank you for taking that first step. We did this. We are doing this.


Happy first anniversary to all my Mes: past, present, and future.

Same time next year?

  1. upper arm (L), forearm (L), wrist (L), ring finger (L), bust, upper waist, lower waist/stomach, hips, upper thigh (L), calf (L), ankle (L) ↩ī¸Ž
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NEW DAY 353: Regular-fat

It’s been a while since I came around these parts. In the time since, I’ve completed a half-marathon, fallen in love with Pilates, and — as of this morning — gleefully surrendered my obese status.

For the first time as an adult, I am just regular-fat.

Body recomposition is a helluva phase, and I am in it. Several weeks ago, I sprang for a body-scan scale. I know they aren’t foolproof pillars of reliability, but not having any indication of whatever is going on internally as the numbers on the scale have had me stalled for 6-8 weeks per decade ever since I got into the 200s has been testing the limits of my patience and, frankly, my credulity. Even if the smart scale’s measurements aren’t perfectly accurate, they’re at least a way for me to track trends other than just weight, which isn’t showing me things like muscle:fat ratio. So, to mark the kind-of funny milestone of becoming regular-fat, here’s a side-by-side comparison of my first numbers and today’s.

There’s a lot to update on as I approach the one-year mark of this whole health improvement odyssey I’ve been on. That will all come in a huge, rambling post on the anniversary date. Until then, I’ll keep on keepin’ on… as a card-carrying Just Fat person â˜ēī¸

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NEW DAY 300: Love story

Today is my 300th day of this… thing. Nearly 10 straight months of… doing this… this.

Not “journey”. I’m already not much for euphemisms, and that one is so over-used, it’s at the living edge of clichÊ meaninglessness.

Journeys imply a trajectory with some amount of planning; a clear starting point with a clear destination. A trip of some length, but overall pleasurable.

My past 300 days have skewed positive, but that’s where the similarities end. My this has been meandering. At times haphazard, and at other times meticulous.

Uncharted. Arduous. Surprising. Surreal.

I don’t know exactly where I’m going. I can’t picture exactly what it will look like when I get there. I have no idea how long it will take. I’m forging a path forward by instinct and knowledge I accumulate as I go, in a self-contained world with its own rules, patterns, and logic that don’t always hold parity with anything in the larger world. The experience is changing me in every way. And I have no intention of going back to the home I left.

It’s more like an odyssey. That combination of strangeness, adventure, movement, and purposeful quest.

I’ve learned how to nourish myself well.
I’ve learned how to move my body safely, in ways that push it to new heights and help it strengthen.
I’ve learned how to channel my positive emotions into healthy pursuits.
I’ve learned how to process my negative emotions through healthy outlets.
I’ve learned how to honor the commitments I make to myself, even — especially — when it’s not convenient.
I’ve learned how to take up more space through taking up less space.
I’ve learned how to say yes.
I’ve learned how to say no.
I’ve learned how to challenge myself in the right ways.
I’ve learned that movement and self-care are gifts, not punishments.
I’ve learned what I’m really made of, because I gave myself the chance to shine in the dark.

That’s not a journey. That’s a love story. A self-love story.

The 115-pound (and counting) weight loss, the 6-size (and counting) decrease in pants sizes, the rings that fall off fingers and necklines that slip off shoulders and shoes that slide off feet… details. Minor plot points. Background noise. The main character is still venturing forth, ready to meet the future.

Will she live happily ever after? I don’t know. I certainly hope so.

More importantly than hoping, though — I believe it’s possible. Because she’s making it possible.

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NEW DAY 293: Slow burn

My weight loss has been crawwwwwwling for the past 3 months. Yes, a slow-down is normal in drastic weight loss after months of quick drops. And also yes, I’m undoubtedly in body recomposition right now. And yes again, 23.8 pounds is still arguably a respectable amount to lose in 12 weeks. Yeses and valid justifications aside, this glacial pace is not my jam.

It got to the point that for the first time since June, I lost a DietBet. Like, it wasn’t even close; in 3 weeks, I only lost 3 lbs and missed my 4% goal of 187.5 by 4.9 lbs. I hadn’t even broken into the 180s.


Unfortunately, I was on a bit of a DB sign-up spree at the time I signed up for that March Mayhem Kickstarter, so two more were a week from closing — and I was even further from those goals of exactly 187.0.

Ugh. Now I was losing more money than weight.

What could I do but lose graciously? I thought of it as rebalancing the sheet of me taking other people’s money these past 10 months. Can’t win ’em all.

What I did not do was use this VERY minor setback as an excuse to go off the rails. The thought never entered my mind. I stuck to the plan.

What was the plan? The plan was to thwart this sluggish plateau-adjacent nonsense which has overstayed its (never-really-)welcome. Historically, my body has responded well to a bit of healthy, intentional upheaval, so I decided to mix things up with a zero-sugar week — not even any fruit (RIP reliable breakfast staple). In the process of designing that menu for this week, I noticed that I had never adjusted my daily calorie intake down to account for my body’s smaller size. Since I’m being honest, I’ll confess one more cardinal sin: I haven’t been tracking my calorie intake at all. My plates have been filled with balanced whole foods and I’ve been training my body, so I never stopped to question if the food could be behind the stalling weight loss. It’s no wonder that until this moment, I didn’t realize how small my deficit had become. After crunching the numbers from my past several weeks’ worth of meals, the fact was inescapable: I was just barely outside of the maintenance zone. Honey, we are not in maintenance yet! That my body had been allowing me to burn any fat at all was a bit of a miracle. (THANK YOU, BODY!) I also decided to pump the brakes on intense cardio this week — a dubious call with a half-marathon less than a month away, but hey, I live on the edge — and switch to post-meal digestion walks coupled with a focus on strength and core work.

With all this in mind, I dutifully refined my week’s menu to stay within a daily deficit appropriate to weight loss, compiled my grocery list, made the haul, and batch-prepped all 3 meals in full on Saturday. My exercise plan shifted immediately, even with erratic temperatures and weather conditions throwing wrenches left and right. With two impending DB weigh-ins with windows of Monday-Tuesday and Tuesday-Wednesday, it wasn’t looking good when the scale spat out 191.2 at my Sunday weigh-in — a measly half-pound down from the previous week.

As someone who ignores the scale at every other time, it was a major departure when something possessed me to check that cheeky appliance on Monday morning.

And it was an even more-major departure when that little imp showed me 187.2.
As in, 0.02 lbs away from both DB goals, literally overnight.

I am not a fan of this type of suspense. I can barely tolerate it in a cozy mystery. I arguably can’t tolerate it at all cinematically. In real life, forget it. I am not built for drama.

This was a real test of mettle. I could go extreme and over-exercise and under-fuel and wring my hands for the ensuing 24 hours, or I could honor my commitment and trust my body and the process to respond well enough to result in DB victories. After all, this whole thing is about so much more than a few DietBets. Winning/keeping money is great, but it’s in no way healthy to go full nutcase at the possible expense of the broader arc. That type of compulsive behavior is the ugly cousin of what got me to over 300 lbs. So I chose responsibly and made my peace with the fact that the die was cast already, and all I had to do was stay the course — my body had just given me a loud and clear signal that it was happy with what I was doing. This was a moment to listen, not to hijack the convesation.

And, well…


I just love a story with a happy ending, don’t you?

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NEW DAY 291: Still Bad

Sometimes stuff just hits.

I’m spending more time outside now, taking as many opportunities as I can to walk outside and maximize my time on my feet now that we’re inside 30 days before the half marathon. As I learned during 75 Hard, being outside lifts my spirits almost instantly — even when I have to drag myself out the door for it. On an evening walk today, I got caught in a light rain, which happened to coincide with Spotify serving me an irresistible bop. So naturally, my walk turned into a strut, which turned into a flat-out dance.

My uphill party of one went on for the remainder of the 10-minute walk between where I was and my front door, even as passing cars sporadically sped past. With about 5 minutes left, “Still Bad” by Lizzo came on and it was almost too on the nose to bear. As my boogie-ing took off into the stratosphere, a big fancy SUV started coming up the road behind me. It slowed down as it approached a stop sign, and I saw the driver look my direction as the car pulled even with me. With a slight moment of hesitation as he continued to roll forward, he gave me a couple little horn blasts. And I don’t know exactly why, but it absolutely made my day. And I… gave him a big cheesy grin and WAVED as he drove away.

Maybe I should be more self-conscious about my physical behavior in public. But you know what? I spent my entire adult life being self-conscious everywhere, with everyone, all the time. Add to that the fact that at this time last year, trying to make it up that incline would have taken me all the way out. Now, I can dance up it, for the multipleth time that day, in the rain.

Damn right I give zero fucks what anybody thinks.

This is healing.



Plot twist: I’m doing great
I make that been-through shit look sexy anyway 
đŸ”Ĩ

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NEW DAY 281: Legwork

I haven’t always been the kindest to my legs.

In addition to — and in no small part because of — the heavy load they’ve had to haul for nearly the entirety of their load-bearing lives, I’ve derided them for their too-wide-for-boots muscularity and unfeminine appearance. Disrespecting them for the appearance they took on as a direct result of the abuse I inflicted on my body, which became their burden. Classic insult to injury.

Since I’ve been losing weight and training for a half marathon, the demand on my legs has anything but lessened, even as my body mass has. The musculature is even more pronounced as my calves slim down. My knees have taken on a knobbiness they’ve never had before. There’s definition and shape developing as the muscles, tendons, and ligaments in my thighs develop and strengthen. My ankles are popping, and not in the injury-adjacent way the normally do.

My legs don’t look different, exactly; they look more unabashedly themselves.
And I’m learning to love them.

They’ve done a thankless job for decades. They may never look conventionally attractive. They may never fit into a cute autumn boot. They may never stop a speeding cab with their irresistible curvature. But they have always held me. They supported me. They carried me.
They are strong, and they are tireless.
They are perfectly mine.

Before? Hide the legs! Keep them out of others’ view! Pants year-round!
Now? Electric blue workout pants. Highlighter pink tights. Dresses. Skirts. Dare I say, SHORTS… coming soon.

This is the type of change that matters the most to me. I’m getting healthier mentally — and that’s been the entire purpose of all of this.

If I can learn to love my legs…

.

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NEW DAY 277: Spring refresh

Spring is here! Appropriately, I am springing into a new phase of this whole health revolution of mine.

I know myself well, so I have known from the beginning that I would need to keep things interesting so I could stay engaged with the process as time went on. That’s been the philosophy behind my medium-term challenges, like 75 Hard, half-marathon training, and Power 11. As the half approaches and Power 11 draws to a close (7 days left!), I’ve also reached a new level of fitness: I feel motivated to start targeting new muscle groups to keep improving my strength, and my body is physically capable of doing more.

With that in mind, I have started getting more experimental, exploratory, and expansionist with my exercise. I’ve begun incorporating core work into my cross-training. I’ve meandered new paths on my local trails, which led to the discovery that I can walk to them from my house — a total game-changer that I will be taking full advantage of now that the weather is becoming more favorable. I’ve invested in an adjustable kettlebell that will turbo charge my sessions by combining cardio and strength for a full-body workout. In the coming weeks, my gym will begin finally offering the pilates classes I signed up for back in January when they first announced them. All of this serves the important dual purposes of giving me variety so there is no physical complacency and providing novelty so there is no mental complacency. I am genuinely looking forward to getting into all these new activities!

It feels good to be this far into my Big Change and still be enthusiastic and committed to the process, which was exactly the point of planning against boredom. It’s been 9 straight months of intensity that was always hard work — even when it didn’t feel like it — because I’ve ensured there would be fun involved. The same goes for meals: I’m eating healthy food, but I’m not eating anything I don’t like. In the gym as well as in the kitchen, you don’t have to sacrifice flavor. Keep it spicy, fam. đŸŒļī¸

A week from today, all of my Power 11 results will be in. I’ve already laid out the clothes I’ll be wearing in my final progress pics that day: the same pieces I wore in my day 1 photos and have not put on again since. I’m looking forward to seeing the outcome across several metrics of what I’ve been tracking since January 11th!

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NEW DAY 266: If the shoe (no longer) fits…

…you may be experiencing triple-digit weight loss.

For the past few weeks, my body has been doing weird new things that I would have expected at a larger size, but never encountered before. Now that I’m smaller, it’s thrown me to experience:

  • Intermittent lower back pain for stretches of days at a time with no clear trigger
  • Toenails on the big toe of each foot whose outer corners I’ve had to excavate from the nail bed every few weeks
  • Numbness on the balls of my feet setting in on long walks or runs
  • CALF SORENESS!!! Of all the strange symptoms, this has been most puzzling; my calves have always been extraordinarily muscular and never had a problem hauling wide loads all over the globe. You’d think they’d be quieter than ever now that they have 106 fewer pounds to carry!

Never one to let a mystery go unsolved, I logged these irregularities in my mental notepad and went about looking for a pattern that could link them together.

Then today, while seated at the bicep curl machine and dreading my cardio session because of the unrelenting back ache, I recalled how my feet were sliding forward into the toe boxes of the shoes I had on during my trail walk yesterday. They didn’t used to do that. It then struck me that my indoor gym shoes were making the same thing happen on the elliptical. That’s when the chain reaction of realizations connected all the recent exhibits of my body’s unusual behavior. If my shoes — every pair — are now too big, that means my feet have gotten smaller.

When there’s too much extra room in shoes, the feet slide forward against the edge of the sneaker and wreak havoc on toenails. Excess interior shoe space forces feet to try to gain traction within the shoe while also trying to use the shoe to gain traction on the ground outside of it, putting extra pressure on the balls of the feet and straining the midfoot. The legs (and ankles) have to work harder to maintain stability. Then it all travels up to the lower back, which is trying to compensate for all the shenanigans that the entire wayward muscle chain below it is causing.

No wonder my body is throwing a minor tantrum.

Needless to say, I have a pair of tennis shoes arriving soon — half a size smaller. This is such lucky timing; I have ALMOST bought new ones a few times in the past couple of weeks, and I’m so glad I didn’t because they would have been the wrong size. Even better, this gives me about 6 weeks to break in the new kicks before my half marathon the first weekend of May. It’s a shame my lower body had to mildly suffer to get my brain to figure this out, but at least it wasn’t in vain — and frankly, for the amount of avoidable silliness I put it through, its protests were quite tame (which I appreciate).

This revelation was a heckuva way to mark day 60 of Power 11.

Weight loss.
A trek through absurdity.

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NEW DAY 242: Talking body

The past full week tested me.

I saw the scale dip below 200 lbs for the first time in 10 years. I did this mid-week weigh-in specifically because I had my August 11th – February 10th weigh-out to do, which is *the* exception to my Power 11 rule about only doing once weekly weight checks (on Sundays). I handily won that Transformer, going from 268.4 pounds in August to 202.8 pounds on February 11th1 — nearly 2.5 times more than what I needed to lose. Even better, it was the most I’ve ever raked in from a Transformer bet: $343.70! Conversely, it was the smallest group of people I’ve ever played with in a Transformer bet, and possibly any DB at all — so it was a VERY pleasant surprise to clean up like that! My theory is that people signed up for it in August and either lost track of it with the calendar busy-ness between start and end dates, or they fell victim to it: back to school, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all the functions, parties, events, and promotions that come along with all those occasions.


It’s always a great day to collect. And I felt pretty proud to review these 6 months of pretty fantastic effort and results.

But the good times ended there.

At the beginning of the week, I was contending with intense lower back pain that seemed to hit out of nowhere last Saturday when I woke up. It followed me into Sunday and Monday, and finally fucked off on Tuesday after some desperate interventions I made on Monday night that either paid off quickly or perfectly coincided with the natural ending of the pain. One of those was changing from sleeping on two pillows to sleeping on only one pillow. After losing 100 pounds, my shoulders are narrower, which means I don’t need a stack of pillows to properly support my neck as a side sleeper. I never thought about it until my back started complaining, but I made that adjustment and not only slept better, but woke up on Tuesday with no pain. I felt rejuvenated enough on Tuesday to hit a PBR on the elliptical in my workout that evening: 7.05 miles in one hour on the elliptical. Woohoo!

On Thursday, I had a bit of an emotional hangover from putting myself through some mental health processing work on Wednesday night. It was a positive development overall that came from that, but it did leave me wrung out on Thursday — which consequently felt like a VERY long day. Friday also kind of dragged, but it ended with dinner with a friend I hadn’t seen since the end of June. Catching up with her was lovely and a much needed top-off of my social cup. (And yes, she was floored to see how different I look now!)

Yesterday was the roughest, though. I woke up with my period, which is a bit of a mixed-bag way to wake up. Now that my cycle has seemingly regulated itself, I feel this intense relief, joy, and gratitude when it shows up… and I also feel a bit of apprehension about it. Will it be debilitatingly heavy? Will the pain immobilize me? Then this spins out into feeling that I don’t even have the right to complain about any of the downsides, because I’m lucky to even be having a period now. (Yes, I have managed to emotionally complicate menstruation. Welcome to my mind.)

Anyway, I went for my haircut and lunch with a friend as planned, and everything was fine. Unfortunately, it all took a turn into death by a thousand cuts when I got to the gym for what was supposed to be my half-marathon training session where I’d be running 25 minutes straight for the first time, after multiple missed attempts at this since last week. Spoiler alert: it didn’t happen again. I got on the treadmill to do the damn thing, and my ankle instantly started whining. I figured I’d try to run anyway; it’s about 50/50 whether the pain subsides or not when I give it a shot when this happens. In the final minute of my warm-up walk, someone decided that the machine beside mine was The One — out of all the unoccupied machines beside absolutely no one in the gym that afternoon — they needed to use. Um, no, ma’am. So I hopped off and changed to a different machine that was apparently not good enough for her. I started my run speed, and my ankle all but tea-kettle screamed at me. I tried a couple of minutes, a couple of foot placement changes, trying to see if it would loosen up… but it wouldn’t. So I had to stop.

I was pissed.

But I was at the gym, and the second half of my planned workout for the day was strength training. I was able to complete my circuit without event, but my earbuds did die two minutes into the first exercise. That’s annoying on its own, but I had JUST charged the suckers because this same nonsense happened earlier in the week. Between reps, I was rage-ordering a USB-C wired pair when I realized that not only was my ankle was still making its displeasure known, but my head had joined in. I suddenly felt the pain of a raging headache that was going precisely nowhere. I used to get headaches pretty regularly, but since I’ve started exercising every day, they’ve been a rare misery. When they hit, though… ugh. Right on cue, I moved to my next machine and felt violent cramps join the full-on assault my body was now waging against me.

This gym session was cursed.

That’s when I decided two things:
1) I was absolutely finishing this strength training, unless my limbs fell the entire fuck off; and
2) My evening plans were not happening.

I did finish the arm weights. With sincere apologies, I did cancel my dinner.

And then I went home, did the barest of minimums of prep work, ate what could passably be called dinner, dosed up on Excedrin PM, and promptly passed out on the couch with my ankle icing and propped up.

When I woke up some time later, my headache had not subsided at all. The recommended amount of time between doses had not passed, but I had no energy and no fucks left to give. I popped two more pills, crawled on top of the heating pad in my bed, and was asleep before 8 PM.

And there I stayed for the next 13 hours.

I woke up today feeling a million times better: no trace of a headache, an appeased ankle, and weaker cramps. I’ve been able to be as productive as I needed to be today to make up for the total unproductiveness of yesterday, and my whole list is now accomplished as of almost 6 PM: 2 loads of laundry, 3 meals prepped and snacks pre-portioned for the week, dishes cleaned and put away, and Power 11 Sunday tasks completed. I also went on a brief social call to atone for my last-minute jilt last night, got gas in my car, and transferred the contents of my work bag that broke this week (because of course!) into the replacement for it I ordered that arrived today.

After the weird week I’ve had, it’s no surprise that my total weight loss this week was 0.6 pounds. It’s frustrating, but not terribly; I am a walking skin sack of bloat, sleepiness, and emotional wear. I did the best I could at balancing my training against what my body told me it needed this week, and I can’t expect the scale to reflect that. And now, that week is over. I am letting this Sunday sunset with my yummy dinner, then taking my cramps to bed before they start biting again.

The most important thing I have learned over the past few months is that when my body talks, I need to listen. Feeling a little behind in my training is the price of admission for ensuring I don’t sideline myself for days or weeks because I was trying to prove the wrong point.

One positive thing I can say with full force is that even though this week tried my patience, disrupted my plans, and forced me into what feels like stalled progress, I have NOT fallen into past traps.
I didn’t get angry and storm out of the gym, costing myself any amount of movement altogether.
I didn’t push myself to keep plans — with myself or with others — that would have involved suffering for me.
Most importantly, I never once reached for comfort in the form of sugar-coated sabotage.

I’ve said it before, and I repeat it for a reason: that’s how I know I’ve changed. Unhealthy food doesn’t solve my problems. It is was my problems.

My body doesn’t want bad food that tastes good. My body wants care.

Some days go smoothly.
Some days go roughly.

All I can do is keep going safely.

I trust myself now. Nothing feels better than that.

  1. If you are reading this and noticing that 202.8 pounds is not below 200 lbs — yes. My below weigh-in at 198 was at 5:30 AM, after a pee, nothing new in my system, and buck-ass naked. This is not how I usually weigh in; my typical checks are between lunch and dinner, fully clothed. I have to submit photos for DietBet, so I follow their guidelines in my normal weigh-ins for consistency across my own records. Why the change, then? Because this milestone was important for me, and I wanted to do it this way. Enough said. ↩ī¸Ž
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NEW DAY 236: Stupor Bowl Sunday

Well, I had a pretty duh moment day yesterday.

Somehow in the past 2 days or so, I managed to tweak my back. It hasn’t been debilitating, but it did inform my decision to take a rest day yesterday, opting instead to spend it and most of today laid up on top of my heating pad. After taking it easy today to not only treat my back, but also to bank on a crowdless gym during the Super Bowl when I went to complete my half-marathon running session as planned, I hit a snag: I failed to remember that the Sunday gym hours are shorter than on weekdays. By the time I got there, as the employee at the check-in desk informed me, they were 18 minutes from closing.

There went my planned 45-minute treadmill session and strength training circuit.

For a split second, I considered taking a second rest day in a row. What was the point of a 15-minute workout?

Consistency. Showing up for myself. That was the point. That’s the entire point of all of this.

So I dutifully took my place on a treadmill in the nearly empty gym, making it my purpose to log a mile. My treadmill pace has been a modest 4.3 mph; in under 15 minutes, I was not going to be able to pull off the distance I wanted, even with a truncated 1-minute walking warm-up. So my pace tonight — and from this moment until the next increase — was 4.5.

I got 1.02 miles in 14 minutes.

Seahawks. Patriots. Whatever.
After snatching a victory from the jaws of defeat, I feel like the true champion of Super Bowl Sunday 😏

This coming week is going to be about some serious pushing of limits.

I can’t wait.