Coming to Terms

5:00 AM, 40 minutes, 10.5 miles

Well, at least I'm getting pretty good at hopping back on the old "wake up at 5" train. And this whole posting almost daily thing gives me some accountability which doesn't suck either.

Norma had a great post yesterday about exercise, and it's one I need to nail firmly into my brain (in fact, when I went back to grab that link I saw she's emailed me but I'm going to post this before reading the email, just for intellectual honesty's sake). She opened with an awesome quote from The Angry Trainer that I'm also going to hijack here:

"...there’s a fine line between exercising to improve your health and fitness and working out too much which then becomes detrimental. The simple truth is that exercise is a replacement for the natural activity we should be getting. But we’ve turned exercise into a way of changing how our bodies look when truthfully it should be about improving how we function." Alfonso Moretti, The Angry Trainer

Doh!! You know, I kind of knew this, but I didn't know it until I saw it put right out there put it together with what Norma was saying too.

I think I just had a "click" moment. I love those. Read her entry. Go now, do it. Then come back.

Now my big thing is I need to let go of my goal weight. For years and years, my goal weight has been 130. It's not the bottom of my healthy weight range (that's between 121 and 123, depending on the chart you read), it's not at the top (159), it's just a nice, lower-middle ground. Gives me some wiggle-room, so to speak. Plus, being able to say I've lost 70 pounds = awesome. Yes, there was definitely some ego tied up in there.

But looking at the past several months, it's just not realistic. I may see 135 again, but I don't think I'll ever see 130, and I'm... getting okay with that. I wouldn't say I'm fine with it yet, but I'm getting there. I don't need to have lost seventy pounds to have been successful at losing weight. I'm at a healthy weight and have been at one for years. I've been working to find the right place, and I think I'm there food and exercise-wise.

I like what I eat. It's easy, it's mostly healthy (you will pry my Breyers out of my cold, dead, vanilla-scented fingers), and I don't spend the day gnawing my desk in frustration and starvation. As for the exercise, I can't say I'm in love with it yet, but I'm finding more to appreciate about it. Since moving to the mornings I get it done and out of the way. I start my days with a feeling of accomplishment, rather than going home wondering just how I'm going to fit everything in. That's a good thing. Plus I also have some rather obnoxious genetic predispositions to arthritis and so forth that, with care, I can structure my workouts to somewhat mitigate the impact of heredity.

So. Right now, I hereby declare that I'm done. I'm not "dieting" in the sense that I'm restricting my calories in order to lose weight. I'm not working out to the point of injury (remember those awesome bilateral stress fractures a couple of years back? Yeah, that was fun!), I've got cardio my body can function with and even with the limitations of my Stupid Knee I've got a decent resistance program going as well.

I'm also declaring my official weight as "139-ish". And that's... okay-ish.

For now, it'll do.