cemichaels

[cemichaels]

Healthy Mindsets

Today I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind a lot lately: Health. In all its many facets, in all its difficulty and complexity, health has been dominating my thoughts. So, as with anything consuming my brain, I assume that means it’s time to write about it.

Let’s start with an obvious statement: health is something I struggle with, in a lot of its different forms, but mostly in terms of the physical. I feel safe in saying that I’m pretty emotionally and mentally healthy, but when it comes to a healthy diet, or healthy exercise? Yeah, not my strong suit. I mean, c'mon, it’s hard to be healthy when things like pizza exist. And can be delivered to your house.

My physical health had a pretty steady decline going for a long time for a lot of reasons beyond pizza. It was a good mix of lack of impulse control paired with needing to keep some areas of my life healthy to the exclusion of others. The real start of it came in my senior year of college. Finishing college on time while working 3 jobs left me struggling to and eventually giving up on making time to meal prep or work out, in favor of actually completing my homework, and sleeping. (I also sacrificed my social health a lot that year, too. Homework and sleep came before being able to bond with my friends to the point where most of them just stopped reaching out to me. But that’s another kind of health that I’m sure I’ll have more to say about in the future)

Looking back, I don’t know that there wasn’t a way to balance it. I’m sure there was had I just tried harder, figured out how to multitask better, etc., but in the midst of that very overwhelming time, it was easier to just make decision of what I could and couldn’t do, and my body drew the short straw. (Get the pun? Because my body is already short? Ha.)

The problem is, once you start in the direction of not making healthy choices for your body and not really regulating it, it’s easier and easier to keep going that way. Fast forward to the more near-present day, where I reached the most I’ve ever weighed, by a lot, and felt like it had snuck up on me. Like I’d looked at myself in the mirror one day and thought, “I could definitely stand to get healthier, but it’s not so bad, I’m not that unhealthy, I’m not that big,” and then looked at myself the next day and was like “Where the heck did all this come from, and since when am I winded walking up a flight of stairs?”

This led to me, finally, to my point of fighting back. Of finally working towards healthier habits, and a healthier diet, and consistent exercise. But here’s where the hardest part of health came in to play for me: making sure I’m working towards it for healthy reasons. And if I’m being honest, that day that I felt like I put my back against a wall and said, “No further, this stops here,” had nothing to do with healthy reasons and everything to do with insecurity. Everything to do with my brain looking at my body and saying, “You’re ugly. You’ll only be pretty if you get skinny again.”

I’m not saying this isn’t the kick in the pants I needed to get started. But If I wasn’t where I’m at in my life, with a somewhat decent dose of self awareness and a very good support system, that thought could’ve been incredibly dangerous. It’s been incredibly dangerous for me in my past, and I know so many people who have had that same dangerous thinking without the self awareness or control to reign it in and redirect. Wanting to be healthy is good. But that thought that raced through my brain that day and has raced through my brain so many days since is NOT healthy. Let me repeat that: It. Is. Not. Healthy. Skinny and healthy are not synonymous words. In some cases, skinny can be very unhealthy.

There are shortcuts to skinny that bypass healthy entirely, and can do it in record time. And when the line of thinking is, “I’ll feel pretty, or confident, or [insert whatever here] once I’m skinny,” it’s easy to never hit that goal, and to go down a very dark rabbit hole in the process.

Last night was another one of those days where I saw myself and thought, “If I were just skinny…” It was one of those days where I got discouraged. Because after months of cutting bad habits out, of going for a water before I go for a soda except for special treats, of meal prepping and increasing my fruits and veggies and decreasing my processed carbs and sugars and exercising, I lost a discouraging total of 7 pounds - only to gain most of it back again despite these changes.

I wanted to write about this today because I know I’m not the only one who has these struggles, or these thoughts, or these setbacks. Healthy is hard. It’s a long road that doesn’t every really have an end point where you’ve made it and can stop. Healthy takes time before the changes you want are as visible or tangible as you want them, and it’s tempting to cut corners and to not really do healthy the right way because it is faster. We are always looking for a quick fix to healthy and to skinny and to losing weight and to… whatever really. And it’s not always that easy. In fact, it’s rarely that easy. But it’s so, so, SO important. And so worth it.

Healthy thinking and healthy motivation is just as hard as the physical health is. It takes work, and practice, and repetition of catching myself when those thoughts drift through and changing them to things like, “I want to be healthy. I want to be strong. I want to be able to use this body for all the amazing things I know it’s capable of.”

I’m lucky, because I have support on the more difficult days reminding me that healthy is the goal, not any other nonsense. I have a fiance who knows that not every method we try to stay consistent is going to work best, who is patient and who helps me come up with new methods, new motivations, and new recipes to try (because I hate the idea that getting healthy means your food has to taste like cardboard).

As I move forward with the whole blogging thing, working on my creative health as a habit and a regular practice as well, I’m sure that this topic will come up more. It’s a scary one for me to share, but my own accountability is important and writing about it sure does help with that. And it’s good to put the reminder down on paper that there are more important things than pretty and skinny. There are things I love that are such a struggle for me to do right now. Things like hiking. Things like rock climbing. Things like running. I want to be healthy for those things. I want to be able to enjoy my life fully and not be slowed down by anything, let alone myself. I want to love my body, and care for my body, and acknowledge what amazing things it’s capable of even as is, and push myself to healthy so that it’s capable of even more.

So for anyone reading this today who is going on the same journey with any kind of similar struggles, or who may want to but is terrified to try, I hope that this reminder helps you too. I hope that you have people who you can reach out to for support, people who will hold you accountable in reaching your goals, who won’t let you make excuses, but who will also hold you accountable in loving yourself and being good to yourself mentally in the process. If you don’t, reach out here. Our brains can be brutal to us, and positive support is so important. Plus, I love being able to share healthy recipes that don’t taste like carboard, so we can do that, too!

[cemichaels]

New Beginnings

My niece is 10 years old. She is out here visiting in Colorado and it’s wonderful, and today I got to go with her to the pool.

She loves playing games and rough housing when she is at the pool, and we did a fair amount of that… until there was an downpour of rain that pushed us to the indoor kids area where there isn’t much room for dunking, tag, or Marco Polo. There she was in a play area with slides and buckets and all kinds of crazy fun things, yet all she wanted was to play tag in a pool we couldn’t go in.

This was when my mom made the suggestion that she play an imagination game instead and volunteered me as a good play partner, since that’s all I ever did as a kid and even a teenager at the pool. I was totally stoked, figured this was my time to shine. I’ve never been very athletic, I’m not a strong swimmer, and I struggle keeping up with her levels of energy. But imagination, that I can do.

Growing up, it wasn’t a game if there wasn’t some make-believe involved. Even for something as simple as going outside to ride our bikes, we would have our mom make us pretend drivers licenses. We would come up with driving tests to pass before we could get them. Imagination was in every single aspect of my childhood. And nowhere was I more imaginative than when I was in or around water.

For some reason, this type of game had never crossed my niece’s mind, but upon the suggestion she was totally stoked. She is a VERY imaginative kid as well, always writing stories or plays, so off we went. We imagined ourselves as water princesses who had to protect our castle (the jungle-gym-like water feature) from oncoming (invisible) enemies, and we had a great time. But there were a few moments where she stopped to say how weird it felt, or to wonder if people were looking at us funny for playing a game, just the two of us.

This left me reflecting. Because I, as a grown woman, had no issues with the other parents or lifeguards watching me kick at an imaginary enemy or pretend to water bend (because yes, I’m just that cool). But she did have that hesitation, that self-consciousness. And that was odd to me. She is a kid. Kids play and imagine. I’m sure tons of people around us were doing the same.

But I had to take a step back. As the youngest of 4, I had my older siblings to make playing that way feel normal and second-nature. We did it all the time both inside and outside the home. So of course it was natural for me to fall back into that with no hint of insecurity or discomfort. She, on the other hand, doesn’t have older siblings, and it likely doesn’t come as naturally due to lack of participating in games like that, with other people, consistently.

I have my areas like that, too. There are other types of creativity and imagination that I don’t have as much familiarity to come back to, that I have never had that inherent comfort in. I think this is probably true for everyone, and the only thing that changes your comfort level is repetition. For my niece, it was playing at a pool with tons of people nearby. For me, it’s my writing.

I love to write. I love to imagine people and places and to bring their stories to life on paper, but I haven’t done so with any type of consistency or dedication in 2 years now.

I want to write and make a living off of it someday. I love the power that writing has, that words have when shared. Yet I am more nervous and afraid when I share my writing than when I do almost anything else.

More than anything, I love to write fantasy, to be able to build a world with new rules from the ground up, and yet this is the writing I get most nervous about. This is the writing I am least likely to share. When I take the plunge and do send something out to be read, it’s never one of these stories, but rather, something tamer. Safer.

Like my niece today, I get preoccupied with who is looking at me, what they think, if they are judging, and I forget to do it for me. Because it makes me happy. Or simply because its FUN, and why shouldn’t I?

I have been toying with starting up a blog again for a while now. I am missing writing desperately, but also having such a hard time diving back in. Everything feels harder now than it did prior to my 2 year hiatus, and I thought this would be a good way to ease in. But even with this, I’ve dragged my heels.

I wasted time trying to decide what kind of blog this would need to be, because if it didn’t have a theme, people might think it is weird. Or lose interest.

I wasted time remembering my many (failed) attempts at consistent blogging in the past, and convincing myself people wouldn’t get invested again because I always, eventually, stop posting.

I wasted time being lazy, promising myself I’d “do it later,” or telling myself I wanted to wait because “it’s easier to write on the computer, and it isn’t available now,” or any other number of things.

And I kept going day after day without writing. Until today. Today, I had enough. Today, I want to do it even though I’m scared of it. Because it’s fun. Because it’s fulfilling. And because it doesn’t matter who is watching- I need to remind myself that I can.