It’s been a long week at work and it’s finally coming to a close.  You’ve had a “good week” in terms of diet and exercise so you are feeling “on track” right now and you’re hoping the weekend will be the same.  The phone rings and it’s your hubby calling you with a surprise:  a weekend for two down the cape with a Saturday night boat cruise to boot.  The kids are being packed up and shipped off to Grandma’s like a bundle sitting on Amazon’s loading dock and you have no other plans to cancel so right now it looks like it’s smooth sailing to paradise.  You hang up the phone and do a happy dance in your cubicle—for 2 min.  Then the panic sets in:

Wait, I am on track this week.  I have one lift left for the week, when do I fit that in?  I’ll call ahead and see if they have a gym.  What about food?  I’ll get online and see their menu.  No need to ruin all this work this week.  I really wanted to focus on my workouts, though, I’m finally on track.  Grrrr.

Perfection says:

I cannot miss any day.  If I do, I am somehow “less than”.  I’m both not dedicated and somehow likened to “general public” or I’m just a downright fraud because my priorities are in the wrong place yucking it up like this.  If I let on day go, I’ll never get on track again and I’ll gain weight.

Excellence says:

Ok, this was not in the plan but I can handle this.  Missing one day of cardio and one lift is not going to kill me.  In fact, it will probably do me some good since I’m so stressed from work.  What I lose in workout time, I’ll gain in rest.  Maybe I can get a workout in before we leave and it would be awesome if they had a gym.  Let me see what I can do…

Then you remember the call with your hubby:  “Babe.  I got us a trip down the cape.  Just ‘me and you’ time.  We haven’t had just me and you time for a long time now.  When you get home, pack the kids clothes, drop them off at my mother’s—stop the car this time…just puttin’ that out there—and meet me at the house by 6pm.  We can be down there by 8pm while it’s still light out and eat out by the water.”

As great as that sounds, you’re annoyed.  You wanted to do cardio this afternoon and lift in the morning.  There goes your mind again:

If I leave work now, I can get in 30 min of cardio—maybe I’ll just go for a quick run—grab the kids’ stuff and boot them to Grandma’s.  I know he’ll want to snuggle in the morning but he’ll understand if I just run to the gym for a quick lift…

And until you actually do all of this, your mind will be consumed with the timing and the execution of this master plan that you have that supposedly is accommodating both his wishes and yours.

Perfection says:

I’m sure he’s going to be annoyed because I need to get my workout in, but he didn’t ask me if this was ok.  He just went ahead and planned this.  He should know how important my workouts are to me.  I just got on a roll.  How can I go through the summer looking like this?  How can I enjoy myself?  Now I need to leave work early and I’m sure that’s not going to go over well.  I can say my kids are sick…

Excellence says:

This is just one weekend out of many in my life time.  Yes, I’m on a roll and I don’t want to break it, but missing one day of cardio and one day of lifting for the sake of my marriage is worth every sweat bead that I’m not sweating today.  What good is the workout if we’re going to spend the rest of the day not talking or enjoying ourselves?  Not to mention, if I leave work early on a Friday it may not go over so well and I’m in line for a promotion.  No 30 min on a machine is worth all that.

You end up not being able to leave early, traffic was a nightmare and you’re already a half hour behind.  You are trying so hard not to be mad as hornet but you can’t help but think that this always happens:

Every time you get on a roll or feel like you’re making strides, something comes along and messes it up.  (Now your mind is racing over all the times it seemed to be so much simpler than it is now.)  When you seemed to have endless time to get things done and it took 2 min to lose 10 pounds; now it takes 10 weeks to lose 2 pounds.  You don’t want to seem like an ingrate but you’re going to have to let hubby know that he should give you advance notice of these things so you can plan accordingly.  Is that so much to ask?

Perfection says:

Me, at all costs.

Excellence realizes:

Who am I losing this weight for anyways?  If the man I married is happy to have me 1 cardio and 1 lift session short and still plans for me to be with him, and him alone, for the weekend, what the heck is my issue?  Will I really have a better time if I’m down 2 pounds but frazzled and disjointed going into the weekend or will I be happier if I am relaxed and more connected with my hubby with my weight loss goal waiting for me for the following Monday?

For some of you, this may seem extreme.  For others, your nodding your head going, “I’ve been there before.”  It’s summer time.  Enjoy those around you in a relaxed and loving atmosphere.  Disconnect from you and connect into something bigger:  relationship.  This means spending real time with mom, dad, hubby, partner, kids, relatives or friends without making them wait for you to work out first.  Stop holding everybody—including yourself—hostage while you waste your memories in the gym.  I promise to you that I will give you what matters for the gym in my third post, but until then, trust me when I say that one, even two work outs missed does not a disaster make. Perfection is unattainable and always costs something in the long run.  Excellence is not stepping over a dollar to pick up a nickel.  It makes no sense to be dogmatic about a goal because you insist that reaching it will make you happy when in the course of attaining it you made yourself miserable.  See you tomorrow. Woop woop!

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I started to open this series up with a ton of science on our brains that shows how we are hard wired to desire certain types of foods and how these foods affect our emotions so we desire them more and so on and so forth.  However, I kept coming back to the same place of debunking some kind of crazy myth that we all seem to buy into that has been perpetuated by the powers that be and has secretly tormented us over the years.  I finally came to the conclusion that I need to debunk the myths first.

It is no mystery to any of us that we care about how we look.  We also love the satisfaction of a good workout, the feeling of being fit and the distinction of being different than the rest of the population.  With that love comes the heavy burden of trying to stick to a challenging diet for a long period of time:  no processed food, limited starches, limited sweets and low fat choices with very little support from outside of the clean community.  This is not the haven we thought it would be when we first signed up for this lifestyle.  I don’t know about you, but I know I thought this would be easy because I would feel great all the time and wouldn’t want unhealthy food because I was now “so healthy”.  I had no idea what I was in for the first time I broke my diet.  All I know is I started in the morning with Dunkin’ Donuts and ended in the evening with Bertucci’s and everything in between was a blurr.  That was 9 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday, although, that could be because there was butter involved.  Shhh.

When I first started dieting, I did it for a very specific reason so the means justified the ends.  I was a fitness competitor and the protocol was that you needed to torture yourself with dieting in order to get on stage or else you were not getting on stage.  Or let me say, I wasn’t getting on stage.  I don’t know if everyone shared my same views back then.  But there was an obvious reason for my very bland, boring diet that lacked variety, starch and fat.  Fast forward to present day and my diet, although still clean, looks very different than it did back then.   Flavor, texture, fat, balance and quantity vary all the time and that is something that has mattered far more than anything when it comes to me sticking to this eating lifestyle.  The majority of us who can’t stick to it long term or find ourselves struggling all the time are over dieting for the results that we desire.  If you say to me that you do not want to get on stage and you are not eating sodium, still eating tuna from a can or packet or follow any bogus diet in a magazine, we really need to talk.

This industry (meaning clean eating) it what it is because of competitors and fitness models.  You can thank both men and women alike that don the cover of magazines and strut across stages for our initial desire to enter into this way of eating.  Even if you are a runner/athlete, you have been enticed to this way of living because that’s how your favorite athletes are maintaining their weight, as well.  However, we want their look without the stage or the lights and believe to get that we need to follow their diet, or their method of dieting, *all* the time.  Not so, says I.  Also, this industry is full of “diets” but then refer to them as a lifestyle.  You cannot have a lifestyle of dieting (in the noun sense)—that’s a nightmare waiting to happen.  At some point we need to learn how to *live* this life instead of hopping on a diet for 12 weeks, off a diet into a pit of sugar for 8 weeks, back on the diet to negate all that we did in the pit, back off of the diet again into sheer anger and frustration and so on.   Or better yet, live in maintenance hell where you are constantly wondering if you are doing enough to stay where you want to be so you do more, crash, do more, crash, etc.

There are many things we need to consider when eating like this:  flavor, texture, variety and balance are a great place to start.  We also need to think about serotonin, dopamine, estrogen and galanin when it comes to the brain stuff and lastly, sodium, sugar and fat are beyond important to our long term survival.  Magazines like to talk in terms of recipes and nutritional sound bites, your friends will talk in terms of suffering, the internet is going to show you how much you suck at doing this but I’m going to talk about this as a living, breathing thing that must be learned and nurtured to be accomplished.  Are you ready?  Woop woop!!

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If you really want to get a chuckle, look at my resume from when I first started working.  I have done just about everything under the sun from delivering newspapers to designing balloon catheters and stints for angioplasty surgery.  I went to school for mechanical engineering and biology and graduated with the expectation of going into the biomechanical engineering field but that never happened.  Instead I took my first job as a chemical engineer—don’t ask how I made that leap—and had an eclectic career path in engineering that ended with me working for the state as a civil engineer (Dear God in Heaven will this madness stop?—again…don’t ask how I made that leap).  The only common thread during all of those years was I was an athletic junky.  I wasn’t a gym rat, yet, just an athletic junky and I taught group fitness classes after work every night.  I did this until 2001 when I took another leap, only this one was a leap of faith and dropped the engineering altogether to see if I could make it as a full time trainer (I did this to be a SAHM.  I still love engineering.)  Years later, here I am as a janitor of Starbucks.  Oops, that’s coming soon…not there yet.

It’s important for you to know my background because it speaks directly to how I think, train clients and determine what a failure is and what is not.  In the world of engineering, there is no such thing as a failure per se (unless a client dies as a result of your design and then that’s not just a failure, that’s a tragedy and a lawsuit.), it is more like ‘that was good information’ and now you know better.  Obviously, good engineers get closer to the mark, fail faster and fail cheaper but failure in some way, shape or form is expected (preferably in the design stage, though, so as to avoid lawsuits).  The process is best described as iteration and is what I live my life by in terms of how I do things.  I really couldn’t care less if I mess something up and many times I get excited when I do because it means I making progress.  The question is, am I going to hang out crying over my failure or am I going to say, “Crap.  Now why did that happen?” and do something with it.  At that moment, the choice is mine to do with it as I may and glean from it as many golden nuggets of info as possible.

Over the next few days I want to walk you through a diet like I did before, only this time I will walk you through with you seeing through the eyes of the dieter and the dieter going through a few 12 week cycles instead of just one.  We can all learn a lot from this, including myself, because we all have a certain amount of perfectionism that we bring to the table that inevitably holds us back from forward progress.  However, the main thing that I want to show you is that almost all of us have survived dieting by iterating to some extent and if we just fully embraced it instead of poo-pooing it, we’d fail forward faster.   The fact that we look at it as a failure as opposed to good info is a primary reason as to why so many of us become discouraged and head into the land of moping.  I also want us to see how we regroup while dieting.  Some of us have become very adept at looking at our pasts and seeing where we made mistakes, but in the land of engineering that takes way too long and wastes way too much time and money.  We need to be more efficient in our failing.  We need real time data and real time “fixing”.

Meet me here tomorrow, dressed for the gym with your cooler packed as we start our 12 week diet.  I look forward to losing a few pounds with friends.   Hit me up below if you want me to mention anything in particular.   Woop woop!

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We post about time management with a fair degree of frequency.  I think it serves two purposes: 1. We speak to our audience.  I don’t know many healthy lifestyle oriented folks who also work FT who don’t struggle with this; 2. It reinforces the fact that the Jodiojo.com Team has the same issues as everyone else.  So, even as coaches, it’s not like we don’t get it.

Case in point: Last Monday.  Mondays I work from home.  Not for the company for which I’m contracted to do a wellness and fitness program onsite—they get me Tuesday through Friday.  Mondays are for other stuff—Jodiojo.com, Therapeutic Bodyworx (that’s me!), and overall move-yourself-forward type stuff that just doesn’t get done once Tuesday at 4:15a hits and I’m on like Donkey Kong for my client.  The peril of the open-endedness of Mondays is that it also ends up being the day I can most easily plug in the extras, such as doctor appointments, housework that didn’t get done on Saturday or Sunday, meetups with friends, etc.  That actually is just not cool as it creates an inherent lack of structure and unpredictability on that day, no matter how mapped out it is beforehand.

While many abhor Mondays, if there were any way for me to buy an entire calendar just of these, I’d do it!

For example, the mapped out version:

-Up early (5:30a latest), write and post blogpost for following Monday

-Catch up on emails and what not

-Workout

-Walk dogs

-Start laundry

-Start cooking (having picked up groceries over the weekend)

-While laundry and food are going, do some work-work

The actual version:

-Slept in until 6:45a due to very sick husband coughing all night

-No blogpost written, had to meet with builder of new house at 8:00

-Meet with girlfriend in crisis, 9:00-10:45a and head home

-Wait, no—didn’t get the groceries over the weekend, stop on way home and hit up the store

-Get home, walk dogs (check!), get ready to start some food cooking only to get call from very-sick hubs who went to work part of the day anyhow: “I need to go to the minute clinic, I’m dying.  But first can we take my car to get serviced then you take me to the clinic?”

-Don’t start food, can’t leave it on burner/in oven.  Take hubs’ car to get serviced, then take him to clinic, head to Costco to buy giant tub of cookie dough to make cookies for home building crew (sucking up—need that house up a couple of weeks early if possible), wait and wait and wait at clinic (he must really be sick), get hubs who has walking pneumonia and go back to Costco for air purifier I saw there to park next to him in the house.

-Back home.  For 2 minutes.  Get call that husband’s car is ready.  Back out to pick up his car and return home in rush hour traffic.

At this point I was close to imploding.  It was closing in on 6:00p, and my Monday had gotten overtaken big time.  Worse—I try to get to bed early on Mondays because I get up very early on Tuesdays.  Where was the workout, cooking, blogpost, other-work going to fit in before then?  I was one hot second from having a counterproductive meltdown about that, which intellectually I knew would serve me in no way, shape, or form.  The only thing I could think to do was take inventory of what DID get done that day, in hopes it would change my ‘tude.  So…

-Didn’t get up super early due to lack of sleep during the night.  Good for me making that decision!

-Met with builder.  Yes!  We feel much better now about how he’s going to re-grade the overly steep slope in the backyard.

-Spend some quality time with a very dear friend who lives hours away and will be in town.  Good stuff!

-Grocery shopping done on way home.  I’m so efficient!

-Walked dogs.  They love me.

-Got husband taken care of, husband’s car taken care of, got air purifier so husband can breathe, got cookie stuff for the crew working hard on my new home.

The “What got done?” List helped me improve this dramatically.

Implosion averted.  I cooked enough food to get us through Tuesday.  And last night (Tuesday), I cooked up a storm, including the “thank you cookies”, which I’ll deliver today, making some folks very happy, I hope.  My husband is feeling a lot better and he loves that air purifier.  I noticed him carrying it downstairs this morning to have next to him in the living room while he attempted a workout.  Cute.  I missed my Monday workout, but I killed it Tuesday so I’m okay with it. And now I can check “blogpost” off my list, and it’s only Wednesday.  Even better, I can check off “prevent mental –emotional disaster”.   You see, while it seems as though I went on a needless sharing (rant) of a day gone awry, what I’m REALLY sharing with you is the fact that I KNOW some of you gitterdun gals like a neat and tidy itinerary of things happening when and as they should in your day.  So many of us are perfectionists, whether we like it or not.  I find this quality to be very prevalent in nearly all folks I know who budget time for meal-planning and training around an already-packed day of work, errands, sleep, and life-having.  Time management is essential, we pride ourselves in getting more stuff done than the Average Josephine does, and we are intolerant of other people or events taking control of our days.  I also know this personality type is prone to pulling a nutty when the day’s plan gets discombobulated (one of my fave words).  What I know more is how my own default trip straight to Anxietyville does nothing to fix the situation.  And, honestly, I’m still working on not defaulting there.  Fortunately, I U-turn back to Sanity Town much more quickly these days.  Age really does = wisdom.

Since we’re a tracking and journaling crowd, the next time your day gets a little out your control, or “off plan”, as we say, stop for just a minute and quickly list what DID get done that day.  It doesn’t have to be anything that was in the original plan.  But I know you guys, and more than likely SOMETHING got done up to that point that you can feel good about.  And while we’re discussing tracking and journaling, consider adding a “‘Tude Tracker” section to your diet and training.  What I mean is, track your attitude, making notes of days/weeks where you either can’t buy a good mood or clear thought, or days/weeks where you just seem sharper and more “on” than usual.  Look for patterns in your menstrual cycle, nutrition, training, sleep, work, etc. that may coincide with highs and lows in your attitude.  I’m just starting to try this out.  I think it could really help if I’m losing it a little, or just can’t seem to gain clarity, if I can look back objectively and see “Oh, I just ovulated, I’ll be a constipated spazz for a day or three.  No major decisions to be made until at least Day 22.”  That sort of thing.  Hey, it’s worth a try.

Happy Monday!