This is part two of my crazy month of April where I was accosted by some insane folks with some insane questions.

I want you to know how this really happens because when you read these it can almost sound like I’m trying to say that I’m well known or something.  Umm…that is SO far from the case.  BUT, I am well known in my very small circle of influence (that’d be 8 people, 2 dogs, 2 cats and some bunnies in my yard) by what I presently do and what I used to do.  Now those folks never ask me any questions—they know better.  After I’ve told you something 5 times, I begin to put your business out there when you ask me something you know already.  This is a great deterrent for repetitive questions from family.  It looks like this:

Repeat offender: “Jodi?”

Me: “Yayesss?”  If you have ever had me say yes to you this way, you know what this sounds like.

RO: “Do I have to measure my food?”

Me: “Nope.”

RO: “Really?  You told me before that I should?”

Me: “I did?”  Knowing full well that I did and said with a massively incredulous tone.  “Well then why are you asking me again?”  Said with full sincerity.

RO: “Because I was hoping you would say no.  And you did, but I know you’re lying.”

Me: “I’m not lying.  You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.  Like progress (pronounced proe-gress).  Why do what you need to do to progress?  What you’re doing so far is working great for you.  Just keep doing more of that.”  At this point they’re done with me because they realized they’re not going to get anywhere (both in their dieting and the conversation with me) but I swear to you I am neither mean nor snide.  Those days are behind me (kinda;).

So if it’s not all my family and friends asking me these questions and I’m as famous as a homeless guy (although the dude in Boston who walks along Mass Ave, Roxbury, and washes your windows is pretty well known), who is asking me these questions?  Their friends!  Holy suffering survey, Batman!  My family’s friends and my friends’ friends can keep me busy for a long time.  Since I’ve never met most of them before, I do not mind.  It is funny to watch someone who knows me run and hide, though, when they ask me a question they know is a no-no.  But they don’t realize that I just do that to them.  Sillies.

Here’s Part 2.

Do I have to measure my food?

Yes.  Think about it this way.  You’re on a side street doing a good clip.  Not sure how much but a bit on the fast side.  A cop standing on the side of the road for a detail pulls you over.  He didn’t clock you.  He saw you.  He’s been on the force for 25 years, though.  He “knows” speeding when he sees it.  He gives you a ticket and tells you to slow down.  Is he right?  Yes.  But the ticket he gives you is dependent on *exactly* how fast you were going.  He claims 43mph.  Your speedometer said 40.  Three extra mph adds $30 to the ticket in Ma.  When you contest this by going to the judge and say, “I can’t accept this. He didn’t measure this accurately. I should not be stuck with this fine.”  The judge is going to say, “You’re right.”  Think of this when you step on the scale.  You’re using an accurate measuring tool to measure an inaccurate way of dieting.  Must be frustrating to accept those extra 3 pounds.

When can I stop measuring my food?

First time dieting:  after 5 weeks.  Veteran:  after 3 weeks and you are on a roll.

Do I have to have a cheat meal?  I’ve been doing great without one.

Yes.  Because you haven’t gone anywhere yet that has your favorite food.  You’re locked up in a cell known as your house.  As soon as you leave the compound, though, and go to a real function with real food laid out in front you, I have ten dollars that says you’ll forsake utensils and you will defy gravity with some of the eating techniques you will use when you get around that PB/chocolate/ice cream/starchy food/dessert that you’ve been missing.  No snortling please.

Sometimes the things that I get are not actually questions, but declarations.  It’s as if they want me to say to them, “You are so amazing and so on track!  What you’re doing is fabulous.  You’ll be Heidi Klum in no time.”   However, it’s usually something that will send me into a two hour rant.  See below:

• “I don’t eat salt.” Who is scarred from the salt rant?  Don’t make me go here again.  I can only say “huge” so many times.

• “I don’t eat fruit.” Now that’s just sad.  Fruit is nature’s candy and definitely not the reason you haven’t reached goal.

• “I don’t eat starch.” This is a BIG mistake.  There are a ton of Atkins/South Beach sufferers from back in the day who can tell you how much this hurts you as you get older in life.  This is cool if you never ever gain any weight back.  BUT, if you gain even just 5 pounds back, you’re done for.

• “My trainer says…” Good.  Why are you talking to me about this?  Follow what they say and stop fact checking them.  This is some sick game people like to play pitting trainer against trainer like they’ve been hanging out with Michael Vick or something.  Knock it off and go with your trainer.  You’re paying them.

You know there’s more.  I had lock jaw by the end of the month.  Hang tight.  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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We have some bad habits.  It’s true.  Beyond our bad habits, though, lie some disturbing and tortuous habits that have been born out of survival and strange Greek mythology.  I’m not sure where some of them came from, but we’re going to talk about these things because they affect us long term and erode our dieting process.   We’re also going to talk about how we eat our food, what kind of food we eat, what we put on it and how all of these things can sometimes set us up for:

The Big Binge

Although this sounds like a lot of food, for many of us it usually isn’t.  All we need is a jar of peanut butter, a few slices of toast and 2 bananas and we have ourselves a Big Binge.   This does not happen regularly and we’re not always sure of what brings it on so diving into this series may help.  One thing is for sure, though, we feel like crap right after and we throw out all peanut butter for at least 3 days.  Then we go shopping and somehow it miraculously ends up in the cart again.  Very strange.

The Endless Cheat Meal

This is the meal that starts on Saturday night and ends some time Monday morning when we feel it’s safe to start dieting again.  This isn’t an all out gorge, it’s more like an unstructured hodge podge of “little bit of this, little bit of that” because our oatmeal and egg whites are about as appealing as our mates worn underwear.   If left unchecked, it can easily become…

The Behind Closed Doors Scoffing

“Monday” has come and gone and we still do not have full focus but we’re not way off track either.  No, we have some restraint but it’s interrupted daily with some kind of cookie, chip, nibble or sneak that no one else sees (so we don’t have to acknowledge or own it).  Not only do we conveniently ‘forget’ that we had those nibbles, but we will vehemently deny them to our spouse/boyfriend/mate if they catch us behind the door in the act.  Shameful.

The Que Sera Sera Menu

My heart goes out to any woman who has this menu right now.  I have a tendency to run into people in various places and inevitably someone will attack me and say, “Could you please just make me a diet?  Just tell me what to eat.  Don’t make me have to choose.  PLEASE!”  You know my answer is always, “NO.”  But why are they there?  Because they are eating ‘whatever will be, will be’ every day of the week.  They’ve been eating the same menu since the last solar eclipse and they are ready to take an eyeball out for it.  I can’t say this enough, though…giving you a menu will not solve this so you’ll have to keep up with the series.  Sorry.

The Militant Madness

Here’s where we all want to be because we think this is nirvana.  Tupperware containers stacked in the fridge with just the right amount of food in each ready to go for the next few days.  No fuss, no muss.  However, we’re not eating it.  We’ll “forget” in the fridge and run out to work or we’ll bring it but someone will ask us to go to lunch and we ditch it.  We’re eating anything and everything other than our perfectly packed Tupperware.  What’s up with that?

As always, before l launch into this series I need to remind you real quick of how I use the term diet.  I am not referring to it as something that you go on for a particular amount of time that restricts food, life and all enjoyment of anything worthwhile.  Rather, I use it as a verb and it describes the act of you eating clean food but not necessarily in a restrictive, bland sort of tortuous sense.  At all times we are ‘dieting’ because, in essence, we are different than the general population that eats whatever they want whenever they want since we choose to eat only unprocessed foods in a ‘small meal all day long’ fashion.  This is important for you to remember because when I start harping on (because you know I’m good for a rant albeit mild compared to my old self) the types of foods we eat, you won’t be thinking silly thoughts like “I can’t have that while ‘dieting’” because I’ll come and give you a noogie through the computer.

Meet me here over the next few days while I talk about the crazy neurotransmitters that make us do what we do as well as our own destructive behavior that only exacerbates the issue.  We’re not talking about any of the above scenarios for the next few days; those are just manifestations of the real problem.  We’re going to focus on taste, texture, smell and so on because they’re the real culprits.  Hang tight. Woop woop!:o)

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Women are natural sadists—well, while dieting at least, because I swear we diet just to beat the living tar out of ourselves.  Although, most of us will tell you we diet for a specific reason:  vacation, wedding, event and so on.  Our girl is no different.  She was going on vacation.

It looked so peaceful.  Too bad it had 14 pounds lurking in the tide.

After 12 weeks of dieting, endless hours of cardio and more poundage moved in the gym than on a shipping dock, our girl is looking darn good (if I don’t say so myself) and traveling through the airport with confidence and ease.  She made goal and she is pretty darn pleased with her results.  She couldn’t wait for this day and has been having dreams of drinks on the beach with all inclusive meals and treats while lying pool side in Aruba.  This has been what all the suffering was about and she cannot wait until she is on the beach in her new bathing suit feeling comfortable in it for the first time ever.

I don’t know if any fitness professional has ever told you this so I am going on record saying it now:  do not ever diet into a vacation.  Do not do a 12 week countdown into drinking, merriment and revelry.  The only thing worse than dieting into vacation is going into an all you can eat buffet with someone getting off a 40 day fast.  Don’t do it. Not to mention metabolism-wise, it is the biggest mistake ever.  Lots of damage done with this one.

The resort is gorgeous and the weather is surreal.  She thinks this is going to be the most amazing week she’s had in a long time.  Her journal entries are as follows:

Day 1: I am exhausted.  Had to beat the front desk down because they messed up my room but when they saw the look on my face that said, “I’m about to blow a gasket.”  They suddenly found a solution.  I need a drink but I want to be good.  I told myself that I was only going to have a treat a few times this week and I really want to save it more for the end of the week.  I want chocolate bad but I am waiting for the midnight chocolate buffet on Wednesday night before having any.   Time to check the menu for healthy options.

As newbies we all start out with good intentions.  But then it soon goes to hell in a hand basket.

Here is where we begin to fail: unrealistic expectations of ourselves.  First, vacation is meant to have fun–not spend a week dieting in a different country.  This isn’t her lifestyle, yet.  She is working on making it so, but it’s still so fresh in her system that to expect her to go into an eating and drinking smorgasbord and not lose her mind borders on being irresponsible.  Second, she forgot to factor in the fact that she will have no will after the first drink.  At that point, all bets are off.

Day 2: Who knew that I was gonna be that much of a lightweight now?  Hope no one got a picture of me dancing topless on the fondue bar.  I am so bloated and feel like crap.  I swear I just killed all the work I did to get here in one night.  I could not stop eating the bread they brought to the table.  Ugh!

At some point in our dieting we all end up being humbled by the Carb Demon.  This guy is no joke when he shows up.  Whatever control you may have thought you had, goes right out the window whenever he makes an appearance.  Some of us have been known to defy physics with some of the things we can eat on a “bender”, our girl was lucky enough to stop at 2 bread baskets and 3 martinis.

Nothing on here said anything about it causing grown women to eat entire back rooms of restaurants.  They should have warning labels.

Day 6: Obviously I blew this week on Sunday so the rest of the week has been a wash.  I’m glad I was smart enough to pack another bathing suit just in case.  The only thing I can fit in right now is a moo-moo.  I don’t know why I can’t stop eating like this.  I will never get my act together.  I knew it was too good to be true.  I’m meant to be heavy for the rest of my life.  Those chics in the magazine are just gifted.  Why bother.

I get it when we feel like this because at the time we are so low emotionally that it is sad to even think about sometimes.  But this has to be the ultimate in inaccurate statements.  The girls are not gifted and you can stop eating like that.  What we didn’t know before we began to diet was what our bodies were going to go through at the pinnacle of our dieting:  low estrogen levels, high cortisol levels and a mind ready for a fresh game of “highs and lows”.  Alcohol after dieting is a no-no.  Carbs after dieting without being interrupted by fat first is a no-no, as well.

Plane ride home: I can’t let anyone see me.  I am so embarrassed.  All that hard work out the window and for what?  A bunch of drinks?  I can’t wait to get back and just clean up the diet and feel good again.  I just want to ring myself out dry and empty my stomach of everything.  Oh man I feel like death.

Little does our girl know that this is just the beginning of her drama.  Just having her girlfriend pick her up at the airport put her in a frenzy because she didn’t want to have to explain why she looks so different.  The emotion brought on from a sense of failure and the difficulty she is about to have thinking she can just “lose that weight again” may be more than she bargained for…

Tomorrow I walk you through all the ways she could have failed forward on her vacation and saved the amount of damage that was done in this one week.  Once this whole vacation week and the following week are all said and done, our girl will have gained 14 pounds in 2 weeks.   Much to talk about…

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Starting any new plan, especially when it is something you have never done before, is exciting.  Starting a new diet plan that promises transformation that you never imagined you could achieve is even more exciting because it holds such promise with it:  a new body, a new level of fitness or a new level of health.    When something like this comes along, adherence is hardly the issue.  Instead, keeping our heads wrapped on tight is normally the problem because we become obsessed psychos with a goal to accomplish therefore failure in the beginning stages is mild.  However, as time goes on, the lessons learned are deeper and harder to spot.  Track with me through this series as I build a case for failing forward from the ground up.

Weeks 1 thru 4

Man, food shopping never seemed like such fun.  Strangely, it’s okay that our dieter only has a few items to choose from because as of right now she still loves them all.  Bland food and limited choices are actually a joy right now because who wants to think about what to eat?  She’s too worried about how she’s going to fit in workouts, cardio, meal prep and still keep up with life.  By a few weeks in, though, she’s got a rhythm and she’s feeling good about life.  She barely survived the first cheat meal but now that she’s over the shock of cheese on her palette, she can get on with this dieting thing.

Good stuff: Organization.  Not sure where it comes from but we suddenly have our acts together here.

Bad stuff: Perfectionism.  This will not rear its ugly head until later.  Right now it’s in check but it was conceived during this time of dieting.

Failing Forward: The Cheat meal fiasco.  Typically we figure out what we can and cannot have as a cheat meal as soon as we find ourselves eating through one whole bag of mini Reese’s peanut butter cups by ourselves.  All of us start out thinking we’re only going to have “this” only to find out that we also want a little bit of “that” and some more of “this”…  It can get ugly.  We also find out fun things like foods that shoot through us faster than Hailey’s comet, 5 ways to bloat your belly bigger than a bull frog and the ever elusive diet secret of retaining water like a dry sponge dropped in a small lake.   But we learn this and that is a good thing.

Weeks 5 thru 8

The fun of this is not so much anymore.  Our dieter is tired.  Cardio has increased, choices are less and she’s getting pretty hungry.  A girlfriend of hers is always criticizing her for not being around like she used to be and work seems oppressive all of a sudden.   There are changes in the body but not enough for her.  She’s thinking, “I thought there would be more.  I thought by now I would look different.”   She’s packing all her meals, making all of her workouts and it’s still new enough that she’s putting up with all of these demands with a good attitude but it’s wearing thin.  What she didn’t plan on while dieting like this was the emotion that has come with the whole process.  Up one day, down another, how come everyone keeps asking annoying questions?  This needs to move along faster.

Good Stuff: Resolve.  Never really had it before but somehow we manage to gain some through this part of the diet.

Bad Stuff: Impatience.  Because we don’t see enough happening we start cutting things out on our own and not following every detail of the plan.

Failing Forward: We’re not as smart as we think we are.  By upping the ante on the plan sooner than we were supposed to, this put us in a position of burnout way earlier than we anticipated.  Even though we’re hyped, we’re ready for this to be over yesterday and we can’t help but feel like ‘just give me the body already’.  For the first time ever, though, we’re sticking with it through thick and thin and that is an accomplishment in and of itself.

Weeks 9 through Finish

Just got the plan update and our girl can eat a leaf, a berry and a bean and not necessarily all at the same time!  She’s hit ground zero.  She hates her food choices, she’s tired, she’s in perpetual motion and she can still pinch some stuff.  What’s up with that?  So although there have been many pluses about this process, she’s not sure they outweigh the negatives, yet.  Flash forward to the end of the diet phase and it’s vacation time.  All that dieting to look good in a place 3000 miles from where she lives, go figure!  But she did it and she’s proud of it.  She’s lost 18 pounds in 12 weeks, took off countless inches and feels like a million bucks.

Good Stuff: We made goal.  The first time around seems so easy that we convince others to do it, too.

Bad Stuff: Lack of knowledge.  Dieting to go on vacation is one of the biggest no-no’s ever and she’s about to find out why.  Our next post is all about this and where we really begin to see what failing forward means.

Failing Forward: Nothing right now.  But a storm is a brewin’ and it’s not cool.

There are four major phases to dieting:  the initial success, rebound, dieting after rebound and maintenance. We just went through the easy part, we head into the jungle tomorrow when we talk about the week of vacation.  Get your bathing suits out.  We’re goin’ in!  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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I am a pen fanatic. 

Actually, I am a pen, journal, notebook, audio book, make up and fitness fanatic.  But for right now I’ll just focus on the pens.

Not only am I a pen fanatic, but I am a ‘complete set’ pen fanatic.  So if I find a pen missing from the set of 8, I give the set to my kids and move on to the next set.  Yes, disturbing I know.  Disturbing enough that you are sitting there thinking, “umm..where are you going with this?” 

Well this morning I found a highlighter on my daughter’s desk that was part of a gorgeous set I had.  She essentially mangled it.  I will eventually get over it (after years of therapy, a mini public rant followed by a book deal and a bad reality series off shoot about the incident that doesn’t go anywhere) but it got me t’thinkin’:

Don’t you just hate it when…

            You have a favorite treadmill/elliptical/gauntlet etc. and someone is on it when you get to the gym.

            There is no one else in the gym and someone has to get on the machine right next to you—then turn up the tv!

            Your favorite class instructor is out and you were really looking forward to her class.

            Your gym changes its hours—and you didn’t remember. Boy it’s cold in the morning.

            You are ready to get-it-together-and-start-again-on-Monday-type-deal and you wake up (fill in the blank here: late,     sick, cranky, with a headache, sore, tired, somewhere unknown—sorry, that’s another post).

            Starbucks/Dunks runs out of your favorite coffee flavor or someone makes your coffee all wrong.

            You get to the gym and realize you forgot your sneakers.

            Your gym stops towel service—and didn’t tell you.

            For some reason, everyone is in the shower today and you have an 8am meeting.

            You forget your shampoo—and you realize in the shower.

            You are on a pee marathon (no idea why) and you cannot get anything done in your workout.

            You suddenly hate your playlist.

All of these only occur on Mondays.  It seems as if it happens no other day.  Then you spend the rest of the week using them as the ‘omen’ for your workouts and diet progress saying to yourself…

I would have lost those 2 pounds if:

            My favorite lunch place didn’t run out of chicken at the salad bar (you hate their tuna).

            I didn’t leave my lunch on the table when I was late this morning (see above).

            I liked the substitute instructor who taught for my favorite instructor (see above).

            My Monday wasn’t a total wash (see above).

            I paid attention to the new gym changes.

I could go on for days. 

Finding a way to get past these things makes us who we are or defines us as to who we are not.  You know it’s the holidays and these pitfalls are just lurking around every corner so be aware and be diligent. Do not let them get you down or define the rest of your week.  Mondays are just that, they’re Mondays.  They have nothing to do with Tuesdays, Wednesdays and etc.  So stay focused and stay healthy.

Do you have your most dreaded “I hate it when”?  Or a good gym-story-gone-bad?  Let us know so we can all share in your pain and laughter (and learn how to get around it too). WOOP WOOP!:o)