Thursday, July 23, 2015

Rethinking Goals

It's occurred to me that I've had some unrealistic expectations on myself. I know, this isn't shocking if you've been following my journey any length of time. 

The first area where I've been riding myself too hard is schedule. I was in such a groove a year ago, early in my pregnancy with Declan. Up/Devo/eat, workout, Lexi up and fed, go for a walk, etc. now, I'm just fighting to get up before 9 and my workout done before 11. Most days that's as productive as I  get. The productivity is improving, but I mean, I'm up for an hour in the middle of the night to pump, which basically steals an hour and a half of sleep. Add to that the fact that many nights I struggle to get in bed before 1130- a year ago I was on a solid 10-6 in bed schedule- and it's no wonder I'm having a hard time. Not to mention, life is so different. My body is still recovering from birth, I have a four month old and a three year old (tomorrow), and the first 2.5 months of my postpartum were absolute hell followed by 2 months of intense tooth pain. Things are finally starting to look up, but have a long way to go. And I'm learning to be ok with that. Scott told me last night "at any given time, you can only do the most important thing in that moment. You're doing that, and I'm proud of you." And you know what? The rest will come. It's already started to. 

Maybe, instead of trying to go whole hog and get up early, work out early, do housework, play outside, do school, etc all at once, maybe a better plan is this:

Week 1: work on going to bed on time/getting up on time and one housework catch up project a day. 

Week 2: this week start moderate housework at a maintainable level.

Week 3: this week work in school. 

Week 4: now try to keep it going. 

The other area I'm struggling with my own expectations in is my fitness journey. I'm getting stronger for sure, but not shrinking quickly (if at all) and I'm really frustrated with push ups. I'm definitely not eating too much, I'm pretty sure I'm eating enough not to send my body into  starvation, so I'm just gonna work on reducing sugar, and being intentional about where my calories come from. I've stopped buying prepackaged and processed snacks, and hopefully that'll help. The lack of external results is really messing with me though, and I really don't see an end to that, because I don't see what's gonna suddenly change and make the weight start coming off. I'm sure it will eventually, and in theory I can be patient, but it's hard to push myself like this without reward. I don't even have the reward of having more energy or feeling better yet, because my sleep is such a mess. Maybe working on that will help too. I fully believe that sticking with this will pay off-there's no way it won't. But right now, I'm feeling very impatient and burnt out. When it's time to wake up and work out, or get ready for spin class, I just want to go back to sleep! You'll probably hear more of this as I work through this funk. And that's why I write here-to help myself work through stuff and to show the journey between the progress photos. 

I've read a number of places that it takes the body a year to recover from giving birth, so why in the world did I set a goal to be back in my tiniest pants ever in less than 6 months for our vacation?

As of right now, my new goal is to be back in my size 8's by then ( 4 weeks 2 days), and then take the next 6 months to lose the other 2 sizes. I feel like that is beyond doable, and notice I said nothing about the scale. I have no idea how long it's gonna take to get back to 150, which is what I weighed the day I found out I was pregnant, but what matters more to me is fitting and feeling and looking good in my clothes. So I guess that means I'm shooting for a size 6 by Christmas and a size 4 by Declan's birthday.  I feel good about that! 

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