Over the weekend, my mom treated us to mani-pedis at a salon I’ve been going to for years. The owner, who often staffs the front desk, has the same name as me, so we’ve been making prolonged chit-chat every since our first encounter when we figured that out. She hasn’t been around much lately, so when I saw her on Saturday, she complimented my weight loss and seemed struck by it. Then she asked, “are you taking one of those GLP-1s?” When I said no, she was even more floored. “You’re the only person I’ve asked recently who isn’t!”
I ran into another person whom I hadn’t seen since last August — before I even started 75 Hard — at the end of May. He took a moment to recognize me. Once he did and we’d gotten through the small talk portion of the conversation, he also asked me if I’ve been taking “Ozempic or something”. I awkwardly responded, in front of the friend who was there with me and is on a GLP-1, “no, I’m doing it naturally. I run all the time.” (Really, what is the etiquette here?)
It’s no secret that plenty of people are losing weight with the help of glucagon-like peptide-1 drugs. As mass-market appeal grows, so will their use continue to grow. Anyone who is using them for legitimate reasons, and is doing so safely and responsibly, has my blessing — not that they need it! I hope their GLP-1 experience is effective and 0% harmful. I have no problem with them as a general rule. They’re just not for me.
My weight loss has been rapid and drastic. I’ve lost 126 pounds since February of 2025, 106 of which have been since this time last year. Body recomposition has been further changing my shape, defining my muscle tone, and highlighting my facial bone structure pretty prominently for the past 3-4 months. Almost every time my dad sees me, he says something like “my daughter is disappearing!” My brother literally didn’t recognize me when we saw each other at the end of April for the first time since Thanksgiving. Hell, I even had a moment a couple of weeks ago when I was looking inside a storefront window I was passing by, saw someone, and thought, “that thin lady looks like me! …WAIT.“
Given the prevalence of the weight-loss wonder drugs and how prominent my transformation has been, it’s no surprise at all that people would assume I’m one of the 12% of the adult American population who’s on one. There’s a part of me that feels indignant about that. I don’t want just partial credit for my careful nutritional architecture, my self-coached running and strength training, my sweating through challenging YouTube workouts, and my newfound addiction to the pleasurable low-key torture that is Pilates. I deserve FULL credit for all of it. No GLP-1 has contributed to any of this. But hey, if the results are SO pronounced that the only logical conclusion people (who don’t know me very well) can arrive at is that I must be fast-tracking things with a GLP-1, I’ll try to view that as a compliment.
Again, no judgment here towards anyone using a GLP-1 for the right reasons. They’re meant to help people lose necessary weight who have had trouble doing so. Personally, I’ve found a way to better health without any pills, powders, or injections — and I’m proud of that. I’m proud of my body. I’m proud of my stats. And I’m VERY proud of my mind for finding the strength to push myself through the most intense and challenging parts of the process, time and time again. Nobody but me did that.
And for the person who could barely walk 5 minutes without keeling over at this time last year, yeah, I will absolutely strut it.
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.
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 andbuying 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.
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 theunderwear 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 cliché 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.
…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.
I’ve had plenty of cringe moments at my house of fitness.
I’ve danced like no one was watching — because I thought no one was — in the middle of the bathroom, only to turn around and see a half-amused, half-“I feel you” locker room co-habitant walking past while looking directly at me.
I’ve had unfortunately timed eye contact with a man stepping off the machine in front of me while I was absent-mindedly licking sweat off my lip, breaking the eye contact, but looking back to find him still looking at me while I was trapped by my run in progress on the machine. That was one of the most awkward stranger waves I’ve ever been a part of.
I’ve publicly battled a live wardrobe malfunction while my underwear fully quit on me underneath my skin-tight workout pants as I was trying to run on the treadmill. I tried to surreptitiously hike them up through, and then under, my bottoms — but it didn’t last more than a minute or two no matter what I did. And that little adventure was just yesterday.
But tonight, when I threw my bare arms up in victory pose above my sweat-soaked top, said “WOO!”, and took a selfie when I hit 9.04 miles in 70 minutes on the elliptical? No embarrassment at all.
That moment was mine.
And I’d relive it every day without changing a thing.
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 iswas 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.
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. ↩︎
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.
Six months ago, I was in the same vacation spot. But everything was different.
Then: heat of summer. Now: dead of winter.
Then: north side beach. Now: south side beach.
Then: could barely walk through the sand. Now: daily runs on the sand.
Then: 70 pounds heavier. Now: less than 70 pounds left to lose.
Those are just the easy-to-spot distinctions. It would take a lot more time to go into how very fragile, wobbly, unconfident, and ginger I was Then. Promising things were awaiting me at home after my summer trip, but I wasn’t feeling steady about them. I had lost trust in the universe, while slowly clawing my way out from under the pile of collapsed rubble that had been my worldview, and bargaining with myself to keep going.
I didn’t know why to keep going. I had taken the part of my brain that asks and tries to answer that question, offline. I just… did.
Running on the hardened sand at the very end of January was a much more meaningful experience than sunning on the gritty sand at the very beginning of August. It’s hard to compare two experiences that are so drastically different, but what makes it possible is me. I’m more different than any side-by-side pictures of the coast separated by seasonality. My seasonal changes are also visible, but it’s the ones only I can see that are the most pronounced, the most powerful, and the most profound. But the best part of all of that is the ownership I feel. I have rebuilt and reclaimed all of it, and used it to propel me forward.
That’s why in the Now, I had to frequently pause during my oceanside jogs. It wasn’t to catch my breath. It wasn’t to rest tired legs. It was to let the waves of months of emotion wash over me as I involuntarily recognized how far I’ve come.
I can’t wait to see what further developments come about by the next time I find myself on a beach.
It’s not the most glamorous way to blog, but I’m propped up on a pile of pillows topped with heating pad #1 resting against my lower back while heating pad #2 hugs my neck and shoulders. Shoveling 10+ inches of snow from a driveway that seems to magically expand with each Herculean scoop can apparently have this effect. I’ve only gotten about 30% of the snow cleared after 75 laborious minutes today, and there’s more of it on the way tomorrow! God rest my s(h)oul(ders).
As much as I’m very much not loving doing this exhausting chore in sub-freezing temperatures, I’m finding motivation from a surprising source. It’s not because I’m the only one who can do it. It’s not because I’m coming up with clever rewards for myself for making progress. (I’m not, but damn, that probably would have been smart.) It’s not even because of my supreme abhorrence for feeling trapped, which I quite literally am so long as my car has no means of egress from this house.
It’s… because I need to run. Not want. Not feel like. Need.
Yup. My running addiction is officially so serious that it is now the driver for me to dig out untold cubic feet of heavy snow for hours. I am compelled to exert myself physically by the promise of moreintense exercise.
^I saw this on Instagram the other day and instinctively screen grabbed it. As unhinged as the sentence that preceded the above image sounds, it’s true — and it’s because running has saved my sanity this past year. That’s not an overstatement, an exaggeration, a hyperbole, or a dramatization; it’s a fact. I owe everything that finally started going right last summer, to running.
Excavating the snow between me and the nearest treadmill is going to take a lot of time (and heating pads and Advil) across a stretch of 2-3 days, but I’m not the least bit deterred. I’m too eager to get back to the gym to resume my training sessions. Who knew that could even be a thing?!
I’ve been reluctant to claim the title “runner” for myself; runners are lean and fit and proper athletes. The half-marathon I’m participating in selected exclusively people who meet that description as their official ambassadors for their race events, so this is not a definition I’ve invented; it’s societal. Runners look the part.
But you know what? Runners are also chonky and awkwardly built and accident-prone messes with bum ankles. They are tentative and unskilled and constantly sore. They are learning and graceless and quick to sweat. They are hopeful and resilient and tough self-coaches who are stronger than they look.
I read somewhere that if you run, you can call yourself a runner.
I’m in the huge swath of the US that’s being pummeled with 24+ straight hours of falling snow. As I write this, my internet is verging on an outage that has lasted nearly half the day, so I’m tethering my phone in order to post this lest I fail my Power 11 tasks. BUT dropped wifi is the smallest inconvenience I can imagine of the many that had the potential to occur during this storm, so I am certainly not complaining!
Knowing that this crazy weather event was coming to paralyze us for at least a day or two, I reconfigured my half-marathon training plan to give myself a rest day today, and to make tomorrow a cross-training day so that I can do it from home. (Also, I’m considering the hours of shoveling I’ll be doing tomorrow as upper-body strength training, cuz clearing an entire driveway of a foot of heavy, wet snow is nothing if not a workout.) It kinda stinks to miss this stretch of days from actual proper running, but them’s the breaks. I’m adapting as best I can and staying active even if it looks different from “usual”. Between the snow and my end-of-week travel, this whole week is going to require some creative license, so it’ll be an adventure.
It can be a chore to coax myself out the door for a gym session sometimes, but truly the toughest piece of Power 11 so far has been limiting my weight checks to once per week. It’s been getting slightly easier, but sometimes the urge to peek is pretty strong, especially when I suspect I’ll like what I see. I’ve been noticing a lot of physical changes lately, which is usually an indicator of a friendly upcoming scale reading, so I was highly anticipating today’s weigh-in. Sure enough, I posted a drop of 3.4 lbs for this week!
This means a few big things:
I am currently at my lowest weight in 10 years. My all-time lowest (real-adult) weight was from March 1st of 2016.
I’m 12.6 lbs away from that number.
By March 1st of this year, I should be below it. (🤯)
I will be below it.
I am only 3.8 lbs away from being 100 lbs down from my highest recent weight, recorded about 11 months ago.
If I hit that milestone by a specific date within the next 3 weeks, it will be the ultimate redemption for me.
I’m comfortably on track to do it.
I’m gonna do it.
I’m within spitting distance of Onederland. (Actual pounds away: 5.2 lbs. And now you know how much I weigh. And have weighed. 🫣)
Yeah — I unhid my weight on DietBet the other day.
I don’t have a specifically meaningful date in mind for this, but it’ll be sometime next month.
Something’s getting pierced after that.
I’d say I can’t believe it, except I totally can. My body is sore all over in that satisfying way that whispers, “yes, you did run 5 elliptical miles and then do 30 minutes of strength training yesterday.” My obliques are the sorest part of me, and that’s purely from actual running.
It feels so good to feel sore. I’m getting smaller, yes, but I’m also getting stronger and fitter. THAT’S what this type of soreness means. It means results. It means effectiveness. It means payoff.
Since I got serious about my health in mid-June of last year, I have lost 76.6 pounds. When June rolls back around this year, I will have lost more than 100 lbs, completed 75 Hard, finished Power 11, and crossed the finish line of a freakin’ half-marathon — all since the previous June.
January-2025 Me wouldn’t recognize Present-Day Me — physically or otherwise.
Life Can't Weight 