Tag Archives: strength

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NEW DAY 221: Blizzard!

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

And that’s fucking transformation, baby.

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NEW DAY 169: Fuckin’ nuts

It’s easy to notice certain behavioral changes during weight loss. At some point in the last 5 months, I started wearing dresses to accentuate curves instead of to disguise my whole body as an amorphous blob (and fooling nobody). I’ve become more comfortable putting my hair up in public and exposing the neck I suddenly have, which sometimes even sports a necklace. I now invite people to walk places with me in the absence of fear I’ll be panting for breath beside them the whole time, mortified. I no longer deflect positive remarks on my progress, and instead fully embraced my brother, along with his beaming exclamation when he saw me on Thanksgiving for the first time since early August. He’d had that look in his eye from the moment he saw me walk in that screamed I noticed!, and he couldn’t wait to tell me with full eye contact before he hugged me: “[Sister]! You’re so little!”

Other changes are harder to catch in action. Paradoxically, the biggest behavioral change I’ve made during my New Days is the one that completely failed to register until just a few hours ago: I’m no longer an emotional eater.

This is beyond monumental. It enters the realm of straining credulity.

Without going into a whole thing, I’ll state simply that the past month or so has been stressful, exciting, anxiety inducing, fun, sad, healing, deeply frustrating, and tiring. In short, it’s been taxing on the more-extreme ends of multiple points of my emotional range. I’ve felt it all. It’s shown up as tension in my arms and shoulders, a shorter fuse, and heightened restlessness, all exacerbated by insufficient sleep rooted in the intensity of how life is right now. How it has not shown up is in destructive behavior.

I cope by using my lunch break for a tour on the walking pad at my desk. I cope by venting my feelings in writing. I cope by commiserating with people in my support network. I cope by singing loudly while taking scalding-hot showers. I cope by running faster, or longer, or both.

I do not cope by consuming unhealthy things. (Anymore.) I don’t even have that impulse. (Anymore.)

When this realization struck me today, I froze in place. It had not occurred to me how much must have changed not only for that fundamental habit to have fallen out of my coping repertoire, but for me to have not even noticed that it had.

As if it’s not the biggest of deals.
As if it’s always been this way.
As if it was just that easy.

It is.
It hasn’t.
It was.

But here I am, reconstructed from the inside out. Because 168 days ago, I made a choice that created a chain reaction of subsequent choices that led to a change in me at the cellular level. In that tentative moment on that June day, without grasping the magnitude of what that one choice was setting in motion, I changed my life.

I am not the sad, broken, grayscale person I was for the first half of 2025. I am the centered, recovering, technicolor person on my way to becoming the happy, integrated, vibrant person I want to be.

Strength is a slow burn. You’re strong when you act on any choice you make, but it’s not until you one day realize how far you’ve come that you understand your strength now is only because of your strength then.

Anyone can make a choice: Stop eating the sugar. Train for the half marathon. Throw your hat in the ring for the opportunity. It’s every choice you make after that first one that will either honor that initial strength or not. That’s how you rebuild. That’s how you renew. That’s how you reclaim.

That’s how “never” becomes “maybe some day”, and “some day” becomes NOW.

Fuckin’ nuts.

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NEW DAY 163: Thankful

Here’s a sentence that February-Me did not think my fingers would be typing in 2025: there are a lot of things to be thankful for this year. When it was my turn to share one of my points of gratitude around the Thanksgiving table this year, the one I went with was, “I am thankful that this year will be ending so much better than it started.”

It’s the healing emotional and psychological wounds from those violent first 3 months. It’s the tangible incoming changes I went after and earned in later parts of the year. It’s the exciting events on the horizon for myself and the people I care about. It’s the ability to believe in more good to come because of the good that is already here. It’s the way it all feels as a composite.

To keep the focus on health and weight loss, I took two grueling walks while staying with my parents for this holiday. The first was around their very hilly neighborhood: a 3-mile circuit I used to power walk in my late 20s that took about an hour, with some amount of difficulty. The last time I attempted it was on day 4 of 75 Hard this past summer. With the extra 48 lbs on my August body, it was a struggle; I truncated the distance to about half the full course and had to take frequent breaks to negotiate some of the most punishing hills, just to get through it a puffy, sweaty, depleted mess.
On Thanksgiving Day, I walked that full circuit without a single stop, including the final 20 minutes when it was lightly snowing. It was challenging and it demanded full cooperation from every muscle below my waist — and as a team, we met that challenge.

The second walk was from their house to the nearby park for a shorter but steeper set of hills. It’s been at least a month since I last trifled with the path that goes through the park, but more than 10 years since I tried to walk to the park from their home, which is also a hilly (and not super pedestrian friendly) route. This one’s total distance is about 2 miles, but takes about as long as the neighborhood one because of the unfavorable footing conditions and sharp inclines.
Today, I not only managed it in less than an hour — also in light snow — but I remained energized throughout the trek, which was not the case 5-6 weeks back when I last trudged that path.

This illustrates my notable progress on its own, but I also have to underscore what a big deal it is to have done so while still being a little cautious while still side-eyeing this bum ankle. Most importantly, though, I wanted to tackle those hills. I wanted to scale those steep grades. I wanted to conquer those paths.

A month ago, my attitude was still tentative, still hesitant, and still unconfident. Not anymore.

AND these exercise breaks were retreats and reward for myself, not annoying interruptions that I resented for cutting into my holiday family time and taking me away from an excuse to over-indulge in poor consumption choices. I looked forward to the walks for my mental recentering and welcomed the accompanying satisfaction and relief that came from completing them, and never thought about food at all.

Add to these little triumphs the experience of the meal itself, and it feels like a work of fiction. I had one normal-sized serving of each of the dishes I wanted rather than mounds of multiple helpings of sinful components at Thanksgiving dinner. When dessert came, I did opt for a little slice of my mom’s famous cheesecake — and I didn’t freak out. I spent zero seconds calculating calories or obsessing over sugar intake. Instead, I got to be present in the holiday moments with my family rather than trapped inside my head while I engaged in some sadistic battle of wits with temptation. And I got to go to bed feeling full, but not stuffed — and not at all deprived.

I had no temptation. I just had dinner.
And then dessert.

And then, no regrets.

Will I lose weight this week? I don’t know.

And for truly the first time EVER when I’ve been in Healthy Self Mode, I truly do not care.

What mattered to me this holiday was being able to enjoy it without the creeping anxiety of being surrounded by “dangerous” options.
Because I’ve spent the past 5 months learning how to trust myself, I got to do that.
And for that, I am deeply thankful.

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NEW DAY 125: Body armor

We have this idea that armor makes you stronger. It means you’re constantly ready for battle, and you sure don’t intend to lose. Suiting up with impenetrable metals to block attacks from deadly weapons sure does sound like a power move.

Or does it?

I’m not so sure.

True toughness requires vulnerability. True strength means not yielding to and masking your weaknesses. True power demands the risk of losing it.

Loading up with body armor isn’t a show of force. It’s a projection of fear. I know because I’ve done it all my life: I’ve worn my extra weight like a protective layer to prevent anyone from getting close enough to hurt me.

The problem with this approach — and the inherent irony in it — is that being heavy does precisely nothing to shield anyone from hurt. It only invites a different kind of externally inflicted pain, and the internally inflicted kind, too.

Loneliness.
Conspicuousness.
Mockery.
Rejection.
Othering.
Embarrassment.
Ostracization.
Discomfort.
Shame.
Isolation.
Regret.
Self-disgust.

That’s great insight to have in retrospect. Cruelly, having no consciousness of it until it’s damn near too late is perhaps the most painful consequence imaginable.

Now that I’m in the process of removing a lifetime of body armor, exposing myself to the potential for the type of pain I’ve hidden myself from since before I was old enough to recognize what I was doing feels like a scary move. But what is it they say about true courage? It’s feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Not just to prove your dominion over fear — but to prove something even deeper, even bigger, and even more meaningful to yourself.

I’m discovering a whole other person beneath the physical, emotional, and psychological layers through my weight loss mission. This is a veritable existential excavation that was not the intended goal of prioritizing my health, but it’s by far the most important one. I’m giving myself something no one else can give me: another chance at living the life I want, the way I want, as the person I want to be.

True fortitude, it turns out, is learning to live without the armor. It in itself is hard work that not everyone is cut out to handle without some grit.

I’m learning this lesson more profoundly every day — one pound at a time.