Oct
6
There’s no trick to finding the discipline to be fit. Or more accurately, there are a thousand tricks, but they don’t all work for every single person and even when something does work for you at one point in your life there’s no guarantee it will work forever.
Lately, nothing much has been working for me. The transition from working in an office to being home full time has resulted in my complete and total inability to keep out of the kitchen at night. I eat healthfully during the day, but after 9:30 PM all bets are off. Once the laptop is finally shut for the night, I sit and snack in front of the TV until it’s time to head to bed.
I know why this is going on—it’s a reward, it’s a habit, it’s about so much more than the food itself—but I don’t seem to be able to stop. Even last night, after a weekend of crappy food and telling myself I had to get on top of this thing, I still dug into kids’ chocolate bunny crackers while JB and I watched a kung fu movie.
I mean, we’re talking a full movie’s worth of bunny crackers, okay? Not, like, a small serving-sized handful.
(And I don’t even really like bunny crackers.)
(Well, and also. Also, there were Reese’s Pieces, Saltines, and a pile of dried banana chips.)
I’ve been asking myself how much I really care about this. Like I said, I do eat well most of the time, and I work myself to the max at CrossFit a few days per week. I am, in general, a strong and healthy person. So I’ve been thinking, well, maybe I can have this one goddamned thing, you know? I don’t drink, I don’t shop, I don’t even have date nights anymore. I spend my days corralling two hyper kids and chasing down celebrity news and cleaning the house and cooking dinner and writing corporate newsletters and planning homeschool activities. Maybe I can just own that nightly carb-fest, say yeah, this is my vice and it makes me happy and you know what, I’m okay with that.
The thing is, though, it doesn’t make me happy. I suppose it makes me happy while I’m mindlessly gnawing my way through an episode of 30 Rock, but the repercussions are piling up. There’s the weight gain, which I could almost see as worth-it collateral damage except there’s no sign that I’ll just hit some acceptable set point and level off. There’s the way all my clothes feel, and the way I find myself tugging at my waistlines and shirts and abandoning certain outfits altogether under the excuse that it’s just more comfortable now to dress casually, instead of admitting the truth: those jeans just don’t fucking fit any more.
Worse, there’s the increasing fatigue and my reliance on Red Bulls and coffee and iced teas throughout the day. There’s the chemical fuckery of high-glycemic foods that results in headaches and sinus issues and ongoing crabbiness and impatience with the kids. There’s the feeling that I’m losing something important to me, that even though I feel good about everything I accomplish during the day I am continually losing control every night, and I hate that most of all. I hate stepping in the bath at night and catching sight of my puffy self and thinking, oh god, why. Why did you do that again.
I think, where’s that girl who gutted out the pain of training for a marathon? Where’s the girl who learned that all the very best things in life are hard as hell? Since when can a bag of crackers kick my ass?
Maybe the one trick that always works is deciding to say yes, I do care about this. Yes, it’s worth giving up something I don’t want to give up. Yes, I’m willing to start over for the thousandth time.
Yes, I want to feel better, and I know what I need to do so.
Oct
5
Dylan has started leaving his room in the morning before I wake up, which is something I have no experience in dealing with. Today he was in his brother’s room and they were happily playing together, but I can imagine more nefarious outcomes of Dylan’s early-hour wanderings. Like the fact that he knows how to open the front door, say. I’m not sure what the right solution is, though. Locking his door seems bad, or at least it seems like one of those parenting things you’d never admit to actually doing (even if you do) (like allowing your kid to eat fish sticks 4 days a week) (which of course does not happen at our house as my children subsist exclusively on locally-produced sustainably-harvested organic HA HA HA I CAN’T EVEN FINISH THAT SENTENCE).
Maybe I should just grease his doorknob, therefore making it difficult for him to escape while not technically locking him inside.
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On the subject of challenging toddler stages, I have a new potty training post up. It’s a video, and I had a terrible time recording it and had to edit out about a thousand “UHHHHs” and weird tangents and I’m fairly horrified at how I look and sound but anyway: video posted, come by if you want to laugh at me.
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That leads me to the last thing on my mind this morning, which is sponsorships and paid blogging and all that crap. I’ve been seeing a resurgence of talk about Selling Out and how we need to Charge What We’re Worth or We’ll All Going to Die in a Fire. Here’s what I suggest for every blogger who’s all worked up over this topic: learn how to set a fee. There’s a great freelance book that walks you through the process of determining your expenses, evaluating the work, and figuring out what kind of rate you should charge. Then you can do this crazy thing called minding your own business—and I mean that in the literal sense rather than the snarky one—and no one else’s arrangements need bother you at all. I don’t believe that having variety in the market devalues anyone’s potential. If anything, it makes room for very inexperienced people who wouldn’t have a shot otherwise.
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