Could I do a play on words here with you? Is that ok? Because I would never do a play on words, right? I chose the name of my post to be ‘managed care’. I could not get away from that title and if you are subscribed to my emails you know that I get the titles of my blogs first and then I write them based on the title. No title, no blog. But managed care, in this day and age, refers to (as Wikipedia puts it):

Managed care is used in the United States to describe a variety of techniques intended to reduce the cost of providing health benefits and improve the quality of care.

Well obviously that’s not what I am referring to in this series so I was annoyed with myself when I couldn’t get rid of the title and find another. So I looked up the definition of managed and one of the meanings was:

to bring about or succeed in accomplishing, sometimes despite difficulty or hardship

and I looked up the meaning for care and saw that one of the choices was this:

a state of mind in which one is troubled; worry, anxiety, or concern

Could I just be so bold as to stick the two together and create my own definition of managed care which is a representation of the story I am going to tell today? Managed care in today’s post means:

A lifestyle that succeeds in accomplishing, sometimes despite difficulty, a state of mind in which one is troubled.

Yeah…that’s it. And you ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie with this one!

I went to a house party/gathering/get together kind of thing. There were a lot of people there. It was a mixed crowd of singles and married couples, all colors, all occupations but mostly my age range. It was good conversation for the most part and I had a really good time. I, also, had an interesting “fly on the wall” moment with one of the girls at the party.

There are about 4 of us sitting around chatting, just enjoying the night and having a good laugh. Somehow, and I never pay attention to how until it’s too late, we got to yapping about weight, dieting and everything that it entails. I clam up. I got nuttin’. I want to have this conversation like I want to glide my tongue down a splintered piece of wood. Who understands what I’m saying right now? If it wouldn’t have been so obvious, I would have gotten up and moved elsewhere but I was stuck. So it begins…

Let me start by saying it was not the actual conversation that bothered me. To be honest, I cannot for the life of me remember what we were talking about so the topic wasn’t the problem—the girl that was speaking was the problem.  I will venture further and say, I like her, actually, so it wasn’t her per se as much as it was what she was trying to convince us of. Have you ever been in one of these conversations where you start wondering if the person you are talking to is really even talking to you or not? Or are they talking to themselves, convincing themselves of the things that are coming out of their mouth? And that wouldn’t be a big deal either because we’ve all done it at least once in our lives but most of the time we are honest about it. What was going on here was a total travesty.

Somehow—again, no idea how—we start talking about daily regimens and how we manage eating in general when there are all these bad choices around us. I should be more specific here and say “they” because I ain’t sayin’ nuttin’. Like nuttin’. So they get into how they all have dieted and how maintenance is tough—yadda, yadda—and the girl launches into how life is so wonderful now that she eats “this way” (I’ll explain in a minute) and she doesn’t know why it took her this long to do this and so on. “This way” means that she eats all organic food, nothing refined in any form, she makes all her own [insert whatever you may buy readymade like salad dressing], she eats very little meat and so on and so forth. There is nothing wrong with the choices of what she eats, I have no organic/whole food agenda here and it is working for her wonderfully because she has dropped a good amount of weight. Here is what you need to know: she is much like “Dr. Mercola” from yesterday in terms of extreme eating, and she is one of the most critical/harsh women I have met in a long time—she’s polarizing to be exact. Her claim here is that she is now ‘happy’, yet she is happy like I’m a domestic housewife (sounds good in theory but never comes to fruition). What she described is a life that is absolutely bound to her eating regimen to live day to day ‘happily’. Change anything in her eating and you have upset her balance.

I know what you are thinking: sounds like a lot of folks I know. Yes, I’m sure, but my issue here is much like the one of yesterday in that she had an agenda and she was recruiting. Unlike “Dr. Mercola” whose agenda was the extreme eating itself, this girl’s agenda was ‘now I am happy and you can be, too’. Suddenly, we were all miserable, shameful creatures because we just couldn’t see how happy and stable her life is now that she changed her food choices. The conversation began to get tense simply because she was trying to convince us that this is the life to live and the rest of us weren’t going for it. No one opposed her but no one supported her either. It was just dead air, she was miffed and just like yesterday’s post I said nothing. (When I go that silent, just know there’s something up.)

Why didn’t I say anything?

I would have upset the eco system. One of the worst things I can ever do (and ask me how I know this…sigh) is to enter into a conversation like that, ask a question or two that would have rocked her world and then get in my car to go home and never look back. If you know that you have a friend, not a close one, who is a holy mess but you don’t want to be the one to deal with it…leave her alone. This girl is at least functioning right now. If I had said anything to her to change where she was but then did not offer any assistance when she fell flat on the floor, then I am as irresponsible as they come.

This is hard for us to understand because many of us operate from a place of compassion when we see someone we know or like or even love suffering from the choices that they are making in their lives. (There is no one there who didn’t want to scream at her, “You are not happy!”)  We want to help them and give them some good solid food advice or help them with their training routine, which is all fine and good, but we need to have super sensitive antennae up that tell us when we should leave ‘good enough’ alone. If someone has built their survival around a religious (meaning scrupulously faithful; conscientious) activity and they have gone so far as to convince themselves that this is the way to go…LEAVE THEM ALONE. Only get involved if you are in for the long haul—and I mean long haul. You may disagree with me and that is A-OK with me. I, however, have had my fair share of Humpty Dumpties who have had a great fall all because I stuck a poker in the bees nest and then high-tailed it out of Dodge before realizing I just brought Armageddon to their front lawn. Again…I am reformed.

There’s yet another for us to look at tomorrow before I wrap up via email…hang tight…

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Who wishes they were in my basement with me when this guy showed up?  He was HUGE. And he made loud clicking noises.  Ewww. Now this is a beast.  YUCK!  Thank goodness for hubby and the 6 pound med ball he dropped on it!  But then it stunk up the house for at least a day. Blech!

Clean living sounds like the most simplest of things to do; that all you have to do is stop eating processed food and voila—you are all set. Your body comes in line, your happiness is all set, your bills are paid…I mean seriously, look at the ads for living the clean lifestyle. You would think this is America’s best kept secret. On the one hand, it is. I would not go back to the way I used to eat before 2002 if you paid me. But on the other hand, I wish people told me back in the day about food cravings, mood swings, texture issues, loathing protein, loving protein, loathing green veggies, craving green veggies, metabolic chaos, hormonal troubles and the topic I’m covering this series: losing weight “the second time around”. There is so much more to eating clean than is ever talked about and I pray to cover every little dirty secret of the industry if I possibly can because most of you think you are nuts, when really, you are experiencing clean eating.

I am sure that I speak for many of us when I say nothing is more upsetting than the big diet countdown that leads to a fabulous loss of weight—at least 10 pounds or more—only to be dampened by a not-so-fabulous gain of weight less than a year later. So please allow me to set up the scene:

• You are not out of shape by any means, but you feel as if you could lose at least 10 pounds without looking like a crack fiend.
• You go to your gym at least 5 days a week and missing a workout is rarer than a Sasquatch sighting.
• Not only are you the mayor of your gym, but the front desk staff checks in with you if they do anything like change the TV settings or enact a new gym policy.
• You show up to family functions and everyone knows that you’re the “healthy one”. They ask you things like, “Does this meet your approval? I got it just for you.”
• It is not like you truly know that your girlfriends are jealous, per se, but you definitely can tell that they are secretly rooting for you to gain a pound or two and certainly don’t want you to lose more.

This is your life before you even lose any weight so what do you do? You get your act together and lose 15 pounds off of an already good looking body. It wasn’t easy. You fought for it tooth and nail but you did it. This may have been your introduction to true clean eating or maybe you have been eating clean for a while and simply got your head out of your butt and made it happen. Regardless of which one that it was, you got it together in such a way that now you look amazing and just about everyone on the planet (or so it feels) notices. This, ladies, is the beauty.

Everyone had something to say about it:

• Gym goers named a piece of cardio after you because you look so good.
• Your mother “just knows” you’re doing drugs. How could you be so skinny?
• Your girlfriends now give you attitude over anything that you say. Somehow it’s all about you. (Although…they may be right!)
• Your partner may or may not be onboard depending on whether he’s all about “skinny” or “meat on the bones”.
• The mailman asked if you if you lost weight! I mean seriously!

For a few months you are walking on air. As far as you’re concerned, life has never been so good and you can’t remember a time when you didn’t feel insecure about your weight. This is great…kind of… While you were busy losing weight, life was unhappily going on around you and somewhere in your euphoria you woke up and noticed. Your boss was laid off and now you and your co-workers are picking up the slack; your mother got ill—nothing life threatening, but now you are taking care of her and her affairs; you and yours truly are suddenly fighting and you have no desire to hang out with your girlfriends right now. It has only been 5 months since you lost 13 pounds but somewhere in all of this hoopla, you have gained back 10 of it. You’re actually not sure if it is a full ten or not because you are afraid to step on the scale. And you can’t really tell in your clothes because you immediately went back to the baggy pants just in case someone notices. Your gym buddies can’t really help you because now you don’t want to go back to the gym. Now what? Do you crawl under a rug and disappear? Do you change gyms? Of course not! You simply lose that weight again. If you just get right back on to cardio and fire that ole’ menu up again, you’ll be back down to your diet weight right away. Right? Wrong!! This, ladies, is the beast!

The most hardcore eye opener you will ever have is that you cannot lose weight the ‘second time around’ without either taking an organ out to make the scale drop or selling your soul to the cardio demon just to take off an ounce. It is the most helpless you will ever feel when you have to diet the second time around. So what defines “second time around”?

Having to lose weight again within one year of a 10 to 15 pound weight loss.
Having to lose weight again within two years of a 20 plus pound weight loss.
Having to lose weight again after a 12 week hardcore diet countdown of any kind losing ANY amount of weight.
Having to continue to lose weight when you have a sizable weight loss goal of 30 pounds or more.

If you have any of those scenarios in place right now, this is the series for you. We need to talk about 4 things:

• What got you here in the first place.
• What it looks like losing again because it is very different than the first time.
• How to get past the emotions you go through looking “fabulous” one day to looking…well…like what you used to the next.
• The rules and guidelines of dieting the second time around.

I am not sure I am going to go in that order, but I do know I will cover all four of those topics. This is a big deal because how you handle this determines whether you keep your metabolism healthy or not. Most girls get themselves in trouble here and almost all girls think that they have “metabolic damage” when they are stuck here which is pure nonsense. Trust me when I say, when you have true metabolic damage, you have far more indicators than gaining back a few pounds. You typically have an apocalyptic event on your hands.

Hang tight for more. See you here tomorrow! Woop woop!

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We’ve had four posts in the Summer Time series and instead of reviewing them for you and dragging this out with a 1200 word post (which by the way I try so hard not to go on that long), I’m going to give you the goods like I promised in bullet form:

Perfection Vs Excellence

Your weight, your shape, your progress and so on are based on a COLLECTION of what you do in the week, NOT on a single workout or cardio session.  If you get into that mindset of thinking you gained or lost weight based on a meal/cheat or cardio session, you will go bonkers trying to lose weight.  You actually lose/gain weight over several days.  It can be over a few days or as much as 8 or 9 days but not over 1 meal or missed cardio session.

SUMMER GUIDELINES

• You can faithfully miss 1 cardio session/week and it will not do a thing to you short term.
• Trust me when I say this, ease up on your schedule.  It will begin to feel like a grind if you give up too many fun things to make sure you make the gym.  Schedule in one fun thing per week.
• If you relax on the workout, make sure that you are not relaxing too much on the food.  It’s either or—not both.  See alcohol for what I mean by this.

Tomfoolery Vs Jackassery

When it comes to alcohol, it is not what you mix it with that is the problem nor is it the kind you choose.  So please do not bother wasting your time getting vodka over gin because of the calories or light beer vs full flavor, etc.  The problem with alcohol IS the alcohol.  Your body cannot process it and it bogs your liver down.  Instead of burning fat, it’s trying to get the toxins out.  That’s wasted time.  I say this all the time, “You do not gain weight drinking alcohol, you just don’t lose.”  If you’re losing a ½ pound to a pound a week—there’s your plateau.

SUMMER GUIDELINES

• I do not recommend you drinking every week.  Choose your battles.  Alongside killing progress, alcohol also kills definition.  So if you have great ab lines right now and you want to drink every week, kiss them good bye.
• Still losing weight = no alcohol
• Still losing weight but patient about it = 1 drink night per month
• Want to maintain = 2 drink nights per month divvied out as 1 night every other week
• Want to gain a few pounds = after about 6-8 weeks of drinking every week, that’ll happen.
• ALCOHOL IS NOT A CHEAT MEAL.  EVER.  EVER EVER.  If you are going to drink, drink.  But don’t try to lighten up the day to do so b/c it doesn’t matter.
• If you go out to eat and want to drink, no starch with the meal, drink AFTER you eat.  You’ll be less likely to order something stupid like fried avocado.

Working Out Vs Burning Out

I wish I could tell you how long I have been doing this and I always hear, “I love to do XYZ.  I will never stop loving it.”  That’s crap.  That goes for food, workouts and all forms of cardio except running (they are a special breed).   All work and no play made Jack a dull boy but it made Jill one crabby chic!  Get out of the gym and do something different.  Unless you live in Arizona where it has been over 107 degrees for like 2 months straight—at that point, just keep keepin’ on.

SUMMER GUIDELINES

• Get in at least 2 lifts in per week.
• Go to full bodies and drop the splits if you know you’ll be missing a lot of days.  You will not mess up your progress!
• Don’t fear change.  You didn’t get that body in one workout, you won’t lose it in one either but with that being said, do not cut your current schedule by more than 50% overall.
• Boot camp is not cardio–it’s more like what I call ‘conditioning’.  Good for maintenance, not always for loss; but more importantly you shouldn’t be doing it 5 days per week.  Limit how many times per week you do plyos or high impact.
• Yoga, pilates and any mind body classes are good for maintenance, but not for progress.  So if you are where you want to be, put them in!  This goes for any other kind of class that may involve outdoors or change of pace.

Perspective Vs Introspective

I love being a woman and I love serving women.  Never a dull work week. Nuff said.

SUMMER GUIDELINES

• Realize that we all have at least one friend that we wish would accidently wake up one day with an extra 15 pounds on her, covered in acne with out of control facial hair.  It never happens, but we can fantasize.
• If someone is bragging hardcore, they are massively insecure.  Give her love instead of dirty looks—something’s up.
• Know you bring something of value to the group.  There is something about you that none of them have and they want it.  It’s the law of womanhood.  Recognize what it is and secretly smile about it.
• YOU CAN CHANGE THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE NIGHT!  If it becomes a catty, nasty night you can change it.  You do not have to chime in and if you are really good, you can make them feel bad for being that way without being all “holier-than-thou” about it.

If I missed something specific you wanted to know, ask me below.  Next series is on outdoor workouts.  Let’s put some legs to these guidelines!  Woop woop!

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My, my the months are flying by.  It seems like eons ago when you cleaned up your diet and really put your mind to getting in shape for the summer.  All those hours in the gym and kitchen have done your body some good in that you look great—probably the best you have in a long time—but you feel like crap and your absolutely petrified about stopping what you’re doing because you do not want to go backwards again.  This is the second time on the weight loss roller coaster and not only is it getting harder, but it’s truly getting old.  Peace seems to be fleeting and there has to be someone who can honestly make this happen on a daily basis.  You’re starting to think that you’ll never achieve maintenance, that it’s all a big lie and somehow you’ll be a prisoner forever of this body you once wanted.

I am so tired of the gym.  It’s gorgeous outside.  I want to try the new bootcamp class at my gym, I heard it’s hard, but I can’t do that, lift and do my cardio.  I’m not giving up my lift, I don’t know if it’s “cardio” enough to replace my cardio.  I also want to try the outdoor standing pilates class.  Ugh!

Burning out makes you:

Irrational. Many of us think what got us here was whatever the last thing we were doing.  We cannot for the life of us see the sum total of all that we do and because of that, we are held hostage by the thought that  “I did A + B and got C” and if I don’t do it in that order and in that particular way, I’ll lose all my hard work.  If you stay at this pace and mindset, though, you’ll implode.

Working out makes you:

Confident. You realize that it wasn’t one specific thing that you have done to get here and it won’t be one specific thing that keeps you here either.  You’ll keep a close watch on how your clothes are fitting, but this is summer and you need a break from the indoors.

You begin to write out your current schedule so you can see where you can cut corners but you’re not getting anywhere.  On the one hand, you need a break.  Being inside, lifting weights, the boring cardio all bother you and you know that you can change it up a little but you’re not sure how much.  On the other hand, changing it right now sends your mind into a tail spin:  What do I keep in?  What do I get rid of?  What matters?  The more you read, the less you know and the more adamant you become that you are not doing this all over again.

Burning out makes you:

Aggravated and confused. Because you are operating out of fear, you are not making sound decisions which in turn make you feel trapped and resentful.   Ultimately, you realize that you are not going to blow up overnight but you can’t seem to shake that nagging feeling that you are making a big mistake.  This sends you on an internet/FB frenzy of seeing what other people are doing for the summer.  However, this only makes you more manic and you’re about to ‘not work out altogether’ out of pure stress.  Yes, not smart and worse than if you just went to boot camp but emotions are incredibly powerful as you are now finding out and they don’t always help us in our time of need.

Working out makes you:

Satisfied and lucid. After writing out your schedule you decide to keep 2 days/week as a lift, 3 days of boot camp and cardio on an ‘as needed’ basis.  You’ll try out the pilates first to see if it’s challenging and if it is, you may try to fit it in.  But you already know that you’ll be going away a lot on the weekends so you’ll be making lots of adjustments all summer long.  This will not be the only time you do this, this summer.

One of the biggest mistakes that we make in fitness is basing what we do off of what someone else is doing rather than basing it off of what we need.  Instead of learning what our bodies really respond to and what truly makes us tick, we blindly follow behind those we admire and stalk on the internet, not realizing that 50% of what they post is fiction and the other 50% they are not telling you because it’s a “secret”.  There are reasons you do not trust letting go of the reigns and they’re more than just worrying about the outcome:

• Not understanding what “worked” in the first place
• Putting too much value on your appearance
• Wanting to follow random people’s programs because it’s easier and heck, they look great so why not
• Wanting, needing and relying on structure but then resenting the restriction of the rigid structure

If you allow these things to continue to control you, you will struggle FOREVER every time summer, the holidays and wedding season comes around and you WILL burnout.  I know I said it before but it bears repeating because I’m not stirring this up without follow thru:  I promise I will give you some firm guidelines at the end of this series.  In the mean time, though, learn your body!  I can guarantee you that it requires much less upkeep than you think and that most of you are just continuously beating it into submission until it no longer wants to listen to you.  And that’s not good.  Woop woop!

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Before I delve into how our girl is a survivor and how she is much smarter in her attempts to diet, I want to back track a bit to yesterday’s post.  Under Stalemate, I mentioned a bevy of things our girl was no longer sticking to like she did the first time around and I failed to mention how important that was.  When we diet the second time, third time and even fourth time around, we become less and less detail oriented.  We excuse more and more of our indiscretions but yet we look for the exact same results that we had when we were following the plan to a T.  As soon as we realize that we are not progressing like we did before, we then use that as a weapon of mass destruction against ourselves, our purpose, our success in life, our relationships and so on.  So we do it half heartedly but judge it whole heartedly.  It’s a bad combo.  What can we learn from that?

Myth: We are really on point while dieting even though we’re not tracking anything or fully adhering to anything.

Fact: We know when we are on fire and we know when we are going through the motions.  We are not disappointed with the plan when we do not get results—secretly we know we shouldn’t have any.  We are actually disappointed with ourselves because we cannot stay focused.

Failing forward: The longer we diet, the better we get at knowing when to start a plan and when to cry ‘uncle’.  Much like learning how to separate emotion from the task at hand, knowing when to start a diet and knowing when to wait is an art in and of itself but it can be done.  We begin to learn that there is a difference to committing to a plan and “cleaning up our act”.  The latter is best used when it is not a good idea to diet but staying where you are is not a good idea either.

Won the Battle, Lost the War

She reached goal, folks, and you would think that she would be excited but she’s not.  In fact, not only is she not excited, she’s actually panicked about it.  For her to make goal she had to do a bunch of things with her diet and workouts she wasn’t exactly prepared to do and now doesn’t know how to back out of them.  For one thing, she does cardio 2 times a day, 7 days a week and has no idea how to back out of that.  She also eats less than 1000 cals per day, no fat, no cheat meal and hasn’t seen a starch for weeks.  She’s exhausted, cranky, weather beaten and bitter because this isn’t what she had in mind when she first started dieting.  She feels sort of trapped.  On the one hand, she loves her body but on the other hand, she feels like a slave to it and can’t imagine keeping the pace she is at indefinitely.

Myth: Maintenance is hard.  It is actually easier than you think but our girl is confused right now.  She does not realize that the only reason she is in this spot is because she forced a situation in the first place.

Fact: The longer you are at a weight, the more you *own* it.  It will take more to make you gain weight as time goes on and you will do less and less to maintain it.

Failing forward: Eventually we begin to learn that we can’t just *stop* things.  We begin to see that there is a method to this madness and that a slow taper will keep our results while we lighten the burden on our bodies.   As we do this, we start to learn what’s a trigger food, what causes us to have insomnia, what’s the least we can do and still sane and what’s the most we can do and not collapse from exhaustion.

The Smoke is Clearing

Flash forward a year and our girl is doing ok.  Not great, just ok.  She has much to learn about being lean and staying lean but seems to be up for the lessons.  She rebounded again from the last diet she did but nowhere like she did the first time.  The second rebound was about 7 pounds and the manic frenzy of eating was not nearly as dramatic as before.  However, she noticed that her body on a whole is different, her weight distribution is not close to being the same and she is developing acne for the first time in her adult life.  Something is up but she’s not sure what.

Myth: We just diet, get lean and all else stays the same.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Fact: If you want to maintain this lifestyle long term, you need to get smarter about what you are doing to your body being this lean.  There are good and bad consequences and you should know what they all are.

Failing forward: With as much drama that comes with every diet, we look better each and every time we do it.  Our weight distribution tends to even out, our body composition changes more favorably and we have less and less mood swings when done the right way.   However, when it’s not done the right way we can develop disordered eating patterns, burn ourselves out and go the complete opposite direction of health and wellness and head down a long dark corridor of confusion and disillusionment.  Failing forward is the right way.  By giving ourselves permission to not be perfect, not always be on a plan, gain a few pounds here and there and like working out for other reasons than how we look, we begin to embrace this as a lifestyle instead of a means to an end.  What I would love for us to see on a whole is that every week of your diet is a learning experience—not a test.  Therefore, you are there to take notes…not score a 100.  If you look at your dieting in this light, it will change the way you react when you “can’t get everything right”.

I wrap this all up tomorrow on audio.  I have some things I want to say more than write so I hope you meet me there.  In the mean time, get off your back and cut yourself some slack.  Cool?  Woop woop!

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If you hang out with me for a week you are in for an adventure simply because my life is crazy and honestly, I love every minute of it. I have a good amount of people that I see during the week as well as those that I get to love all over through our online services and our bootcamp class. But having that eclectic of a week somehow puts me in the wildest situations that either provide a really good laugh or give me some material for the “odd fodder” of the week. This past week was no different although what I am about to mention happened to me and not to one of y’alls.

So glad this happened to me and not to you! 

Looks Like I Picked A Bad Week
…to step on the scale at my doctor’s office. Yes, you heard me. What’s with the doctor scales of the world? By habit alone I weigh myself every day. Unlike some of you crazy ladies, it doesn’t bother me what it says so I can get on it every day and read the number as if I was checking the weather. It fluctuates just the same as it does for you (please read that again—I feel as if that was a word to deliver some of you out of scale bondage every day so for me it’s just a matter of Que sera, sera. So I have a doctor’s appointment yesterday and the lovely nurse walked me down the Hall of Judgment to step on the scale. Automatically my mind begins to think about the setup. First, I am at a “woman’s” appointment. Need I say more? So that means the only clients that these folks have are women…why is the scale in the hallway? Again, this isn’t for me. My mind starts to think of all of you that I speak with every week. This is NOT a good setup. A man set this office up and then left it for women to run and they, feeling boxed in like a velvet rope, stuck with it because I can’t think of one of my clients who would want to step on a scale in a busy hallway that has a digital readout large enough for Stevie Wonder to see. Anybody hearing me on this one?

As nice as she was, the clipboard gave her true intentions away.

She motions for me to get on the scale and I realize that she has the same outfit on as the grim reaper. What is that about? Regardless, I hop on. Ladies, it read ten pounds more than it did 3 hours ago in my bathroom.

Yes. Ten. Pounds. More.

I didn’t say a word. I smiled at the nurse, checked the brand of the scale and made a mental note about it and then I looked up in time to catch the look of judgment from Ginny Reaper the nurse. Now was she really judging me? No. But that scale read ten pounds more than what I am and at THAT moment SOMETHING was judging me!

All I could think about is what that phone call would like…

“Hey girl, what’s up? How are you this week?”
No hi, no lead in, can hear heavy breathing on the phone.
“Jodi. The scale read ten pounds more at my doctor’s office than what I am at my house scale.” Voice is at an alarming pitch that within the pitch seems to scream, ‘You better pull the best trainer rhetoric you have stored in that creative mind of yours or I’m about to lose it in 3 languages.’
I try to interject, although at this time I am beginning to panic and I don’t even know why.
“Girl, what did I tell you about the scales in doctor’s offices? They always read at least 5 pounds mo—“
I get cut off by a shrill tone that now has escalated to a fever pitch which sounds like, ‘I’ve been waiting all week to sink my teeth into you , don’t tell me anything you told me before. I am no longer rational.’
“Yes, but Jodi”, oh I’m in trouble now, “it read ten pounds more. Not 5—10. How can that be?” You and I know that last question was not one that was to be answered because I would most likely try to open my mouth to speak and she’d just cut me off right then and continue on…
“Does that mean 5 of that is mine? Am I really up 5 pounds? That can’t be water. I don’t understand. Which one is right? How can 2 scales differ that much? Isn’t it a professional scale seeing as it’s in my doctor’s office? Isn’t that the most accurate? Have I weighed that much all along? I can’t go on vacation now/I can’t get married/I can’t go to work…now.” These statements are coming faster than the 5 pounds she gained from the home scale to the doctor’s scale. At this point I choose the easy way out and I gnaw off of a limb with a wild animal I found in my backyard, claimed medical emergency and told her I’d call her back after the limb was re-attached.

Out of my imagination and back to my doctor’s office…

Second, Ginny now leads me to the patient room where I am to now wait for the doctor to come.

By myself. After I have just been judged.

I suddenly realized that there were no sharp objects in the room anywhere. I don’t think that’s by accident. I half expect that they have a room somewhere in the office that when you open the door it goes to nowhere. It’s a cliff and every woman they just put on the scale of judgment heads over there some time during their appointment and hops off. I bet if I went into the basement of doom there would be a pile of women on top of each other, writhing in agony while screaming loud screams of torment about “10 pounds” and “how could it be?”

“Beautiful scene.  And below you will find a heap of women who jumped off after getting on the scale at their doctor’s office.  Don’t get too close to the edge.  Let’s move on folks, we have a tight schedule.”

I truly sat there thinking two things: 1) I have to write about this and I pray they see the humor in this and our behavior as women and 2) that’s not cool of my doctor’s office to be that out of whack for a scale measurement. Heck yeah I am sticking with their scale being wrong! Now granted, I was dressed when they weighed me and I had already eaten but I would have had to have been wearing a bear rug with the bear still in it for crying out loud to make the scale go up by 10 pounds! I am going to be so transparent right now and tell you that that did not bother me because of my weight, that bothered me because of the phone call I would have had to have because of that erroneous piece of metal on the floor! Seriously self centered on this one. But this really drives the point home that it’s just a number and we really cannot live our lives bound up by it.

 Don’t be fooled by this innocent face.  I have gotten some of my best ‘why does the scale read’ training from this fierce woman. 

So what did I do sitting in the office? Text the one person who could seriously feel the drama of the situation…Kas. Tuesday girl. Kas sent me back the best detached lawyer response ever, “Ok well, that’s a bit disconcerting. That really is enough to make you scream.” At first glance you may be thinking that that is a rational, calm response. I have known Kas long enough to know that the following thoughts were flowing through her mind (in no particular order):

What the…
Better you than me…
Right now I am up to my whazoo in tax crap, don’t put that stress on me…
Could that happen?…
Wait, she didn’t tell me which one was the right one…
I’d need some drugs to make it through that appointment…
I’d cry…
If she’s texting me, she must be upset…if Jodi’s upset I’d kill myself…wait, I can’t think about this now, I’m up to my whazoo in tax crap…but was she upset?…

Hahahahaha!! I love Kas. And I honestly do not know if she was really thinking this or not, but I know I’m close!

Ladies, get off the scale. Know it’s just a number. Enjoy your life. It’s too short to be bossed around by a box on the floor. I love you way too much to let that happen.  The email series starts today. You know where to find me. Peace.

I am often asked, “Does it matter what order I put my foods in?”  And my answer to that is like my answer to so many other questions asked of me, “Honestly officer, I didn’t see the stop sign.”  Oops…wrong situation.  No, my answer is normally, “Depends, what’s your goal?” 

Asking a blanket question like that without a qualifier is like asking, “Do you think I can wear this tonight?” and you haven’t told the person where you are going!  How are they supposed to answer that?  Yes, the prom dress at your first PTA meeting is appropriate! Make sure you wear a tiara and sparkly shoes, too! [giggling and rolling my eyes]

So we are about to delve into the world of ‘ordering our foods’ for different situations and we are going to tackle “life” first.  This is the same as offseason or maintenance and is characterized by a period of time where you are just either trying to get a rhythm or you are getting ready to go into a season of dieting (and for the record, dieting in this instance means manipulating your food for a specific outcome.  Could be weight loss, building or what have you.) 

Maintenance is a funny word because it is tossed around all the time (“can you tell me how to go into maintenance when I’m done”) as if it is an actual place you go to when you are done dieting: 

“Yo, where you at?”

“I’m in maintenance.”

“Maintenance?  How long are you going to be there?”

“I’ll be out in a week or two.  Just want to hang out here for a while before I start dieting again.” 

“Oh, alright. Well have fun.  Call me.”

What truly makes this funny is if you ask anyone in maintenance mode what they are doing or how they are eating, they will say to you:

“Are you still in maintenance?  How’s that going?”

“Yeah, I’m just eating whatever.  I’m all over the place.  I half diet one day, stuff my face the next.  I’ll get it together soon.”

Ummm…no you won’t.  The problem is not with maintenance.  The problem is not with the diet.  The problem is with YOU. 

YOU don’t know whether you are coming or going.  YOU don’t have a goal.  YOU don’t have a clear cut beginning or end to your maintenance phase so what ensues after this is just mass chaos.  You try to stay in diet mode yet eat like a person not on a diet on some days or if you are prepping for a sport but the training season hasn’t begun yet, you try to keep up with the pace of the sport but eat as if you are sitting on the couch. 

I don’t have many fears—I do have some and we’ve discussed a couple, but man do I fear a client going into maintenance mode.  The only thing worse is a client doing a “building” phase.  Now there’s one that can make me sit in a corner and rock back and forth in fetal position while sucking my thumb!  Very little good comes out of a building season for women (not so much men, they’ve got that covered) and I very rarely see it go all the way to the end, as well.  Just say no to building.

But maintenance does not need to be this hard.  It does not need to be this time of willy nilly behavior with half hearted intentions.  If you truly want to do maintenance, life, offseason (or whatever you want to call it) right, then let’s establish some order in the court!

Here are the rules:

1)       Define how long your maintenance phase is.  Even if you do not know, set a date to revisit your maintenance status in no more than 12 weeks.  So the longest you can stay in that mode before assessing your status is 12 weeks.

2)       TAKE FULL STOCK IN WHAT YOU HAVE!  Oh hear me when I speak!  Much of the dilemma with this time is that you do not appreciate all that you have.  You feel fat, no lumpy, no dimply…or you have performance goals and you want to do them all at once so you are going to yoga, doing speed training, practicing your swing while rehabbing your shoulder, you are everywhere!  Accept where you are RIGHT NOW and that you are GOING TO STAY THERE for a while.  It will make the rest of the time much easier for you.

3)       Begin to put your meals in this order:

            MEAL 1                        PR                   ST                    F/V

            MEAL 2                        PR                   ½ GFAT            F/V

            MEAL 3                        PR                   ST                    V

            MEAL 4                        PR                   ½ GFAT            V

            MEAL 5                        PR                   ST                    V

            Go ahead…ask me why.  Ok, I’ll tell you!;)  You order them this way for 2 reasons:  1) this will make  your meals almost isocaloric—meaning you are not having major ups and downs with cals all day and 2)  it mimics life.  This is what your girlfriends are doing.  This is what your family is doing.  This is doable!  Breakfast, lunch and dinner with 2 snacks.

4)       Lastly, set a work out goal.  It can’t help you to keep your head on straight while dieting, but it will help you pass the time faster while you are in your state of ‘nebulousness’.  This goal can be either performance related or physique related.  Your choice!

Defining parameters in the dreaded maintenance season will help you stay as focused as you can be during that time and it will help you get through it.  It truly is a hard phase to be in for most people.  There is no true definition of maintenance/offseason.  To be honest, most maintenance for folks is really a state of mind brought upon by the fact that they just need a break from actual dieting (dieting in the deprivation sense).  Right then and there you know that since the entrance to the phase is coming from an exhausted, not-necessarily-healthy-place, the existence there is not going to be a walk in the park. 

Hang tight as we get ready to explore other scenarios for ‘ordering’ our foods.  In the mean time, enjoy life will ya?:o)

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