Journal of Magic & Happiness

[roundcoconut]

I wanted to mention that when I talk about building my foundation on things that I CAN control — that our society has laid about eighty booby traps out for us. Society really has a lot of unhappiness traps for us to fall into, and we want to be far more savvy than to fall into those booby traps!

It is a trap, for example, to get freaked out about our employment status. Where we work, or how many hours we are working, or how high- or low-status our work is, really isn’t a terribly accurate reflection of who we are. And it’s horribly inefficient to start believing that our identity has to include a certain amount of paid work, at a certain work-status. Like, if anyone here has been exposed to super snobby people (parents, friends, television), you know that there are people who go “ew” about being out of the work force, or being at the low-status end of the pay scale.

Well, work is just a way of getting money. It’s not who we are. It’s not how good we are. The work force is a fairly fickle system, and it can treat people poorly in a lot of ways. For example, i think the hiring portion of the work world, only really seems to reward people that are above average at first impressions, and above average at putting strangers at ease, and stuff along those lines. So, people fall through the cracks left and right, in the hiring process.

So, in my personal life, I am reconfiguring how I see work. Like, in the past, I have tended to measure myself in terms of whether I can sock some money away with what I am making. If I can, then “yay!”; if I can’t, then “worry!” With money, more is not necessarily better. You just need to make enough to get by on, and if you’re lucky, put something in the bank when there is excess.

So, I’m working to smooth out the rough edges in that regard!

[roundcoconut]

One more thought for the day:

I kind of think of well-being, the way I think of fitness. Like, if I go out for a jog today, I shouldn’t be terribly surprised if I’m walk-jogging at 11:30 pace. Because that’s as much fitness as I’ve been able to squirrel away, up till now. If I had started earlier, I would’ve amassed way more fitness than that, but I didn’t. So, if you’re at the early stages of fitness, just keep putting those fitness minutes in the bank, and you’ll be richly rewarded after 8 months of consistency. (Or SUPER-richly rewarded after 8 years of consistency.)

And with well-being, I feel as though I shouldn’t be terribly surprised if a crisis hits, and I find my emotional resources to be fairly low. If you build up your emotional resources (the things that you can turn to, or rely upon, to feel good about no matter what), then you ride it out much more smoothly when the sh*t hits the fan.

People who focus far more on how they treat people, as a source of their well-being, probably fare better in a crisis, than the people who monitor whether other people like and approve of THEM. If you just spent January, February and March monitoring how other people seem to like you or approve of you, then your well-being is going to feel pretty shaky as soon as someone important shows dislike.

So, it’s pretty important, going forward, to think about learning to evaluate what **I** choose to do in relating to others. Just find opportunities to make people laugh and opportunities to help people out, and let that be the basis for feeling good.

Side note, but I don’t feel I need to go out of my way for everyone on the planet — I honestly don’t click with everyone on the planet, and I don’t even want to — but I just feel that I want to be able to identify opportunities to bond with people in fun little ways, and then, if someone somewhere decides that they don’t like or approve of me for some reason (whether that’s a landlord, or a boss, or a customer, or someone I go on one date with) — then I can just be like, “Yeah, OK, they’re entitled to their opinion, no biggie!”

OK, that’s enough for today!

[bunsofaluminum]

Nice! the economics of emotional stability You are really good at applying lessons from one area into others. I like it!

[roundcoconut]

Yeah, it actually sounds fun to set down a path of better emotional stability! Keep in mind, buns, that it’s just an intention and a direction, and not something I’ve accomplished just yet!

Can you believe, I went to get a haircut yesterday, and I always really enjoy talking with my hairdresser as a person, but by the time I got up from the chair — WOW my hair is far shorter and more mushroomy than I had intended. And, in the complete OPPOSITE of emotional stability, I just came straight home and hid under the couch. HA!

Yeah, I didn’t LITERALLY hide under the couch, but figuratively. I use that metaphor because I have always thought it was funny that some dogs will feel ugly after getting their hair cut. Like, my grandmother’s dog did that — went immediately and hid under the couch after his summer haircut. Also, I remember a co-worker saying that her mom would coach the whole family, “Tell Smokey he looks pretty!” (after the family dog came back from the groomer’s) but to no avail.

So I honestly gave myself a free pass yesterday, to come straight home and not go into public with my mushroom haircut!

And today again, I go back to building a sense of identity on stuff that I can DO, rather than outcomes that the universe gives to me.

[roundcoconut]

One of my favorite words of inspiration is to Hire Yourself. For any endeavor in your life, it can feel good to hire yourself to complete a task — to find a part of yourself that can make a plan, and then execute some mildly challenging behaviors, day after day, until the ball gets rolling in a certain area of life.

On that note, I think it may be appropriate for me to “start a new job”, focusing on my well-being as a person, in terms of my big-picture happiness and feeling any sense of beauty in my life, or meaning in my life. I dunno!

—

In terms of something I said several weeks ago (about caring less about scale weight, and being OK with a scale weight that has climbed ten pounds) — I actually made the move yesterday to pull the plug on that experiment. I honestly just feel uncomfortable at this weight. I feel like a bowl of green jello that got brought to a potluck. Like, “green jello, no thanks!”

I have gone back to doing what works for me, which is that I am always able to get my calorie intake down when I do several good fasting windows each week. I am not obsessed with being superskinny, but DO want to feel inconspicuous enough in life. Like, when I walk this earth having put on 20 pounds in the last month, then I honestly am just wearing my recent confusion for all to see, and THAT is very awkward. Not to mention, the clothing difficulties!

So I have decided to implement a couple fasting windows each week, and just inch away from the recent month’s weight gain. Yikes!

[Ruff]

Ha! Oh yeah! I have been there with the “I’m OK at this weight” experiment. In my case it was my clothes. The ‘new’ clothes I bought after my big weight loss, and that I had got used to wearing and actually liking myself in, and feeling good about my clothes.....well they were tight and frankly uncomfortable. I couldn’t fit my favourite frock, and my jeans dug into my waist.

I have dropped 13 pounds and am back to feeling happy in my clothes, and I wore my frock on my husbands birthday last week.

Ultimately it’s not the actual weight, is it? It’s how we feel about ourselves.....at least as long as we are not actually obese as I used to be......but within the very wide range of ‘normal bmi’ I think it’s all about how we feel. I feel good at bmi 21-22 (never been lower!) not so good at 24 and counting......

[roundcoconut]

Ha! Oh yeah! I have been there with the “I’m OK at this weight” experiment. In my case it was my clothes. The ‘new’ clothes I bought after my big weight loss, and that I had got used to wearing and actually liking myself in, and feeling good about my clothes.....well they were tight and frankly uncomfortable. I couldn’t fit my favourite frock, and my jeans dug into my waist.

Yeah, it’s appealing to think that if I were willing to settle for the higher end of my weight range, that I could stabilize my weight, but that really didn’t come true for me. Instead, I was noticing that some of my underpants are uncomfortably tight, and (most recently) my chubbier face cannot quite carry a shorter haircut, and it just became clear to me that it would be more work to adjust to a higher scale weight, than to do the work to get my scale weight down.

Given the choice between doing the work to adapt to a higher scale weight, and doing the work to bring my scale weight back to prior levels, it just seems like the latter is the easier path. Also, the cheaper path, because I don’t have a fairy godmother who’s going to deliver new panties and new t-shirts for free. There’s nobody gonna swoop in and deliver pretty clothes at a new size, so I might as well get some work done here!

[Ruff]

Get working! Catch me! New PB for 5km this morning. Soon I will be under 30minutes for 5km

[roundcoconut]

Get working! Catch me! New PB for 5km this morning. Soon I will be under 30minutes for 5km

YES! I’ve got my little workout clothes on, and I’m geared up to put the work in.

Of course, it’s not yet noon, so I’m still surfing the internet and listening to a podcast. I’m going for a long session today — woohoo!

[roundcoconut]

I have to mention, I am WILDLY unimpressed with the ethos of “Throw out your scale! Go by feel! Don’t be ruled by a number!”

It’s not as though we ALL need to use scale weight as one of our metrics to guide us, but each of us probably needs SOME metrics to guide us. Or else we are probably fooling ourselves!

It’s funny, because when we’ve had a lot of indiscretions, of COURSE we don’t want to step on the scale — this is human nature. We don’t particularly enjoy seeing the impact of our negative behaviors, on our body weight.

Nobody really loves facing the music after several dietary indiscretions! It’s like getting online and facing the music of what your bank balance is, if you know you’ve been impulse shopping but wishing it wouldn’t catch up with you. Of COURSE our indiscretions follow us around — both financially and nutritionally.

Of course, there ARE other metrics to use, and it is probably a mistake for most of us, to only have ONE metric. We can have multiple strategies to improve our health, and not all of them show up on the scale. If you begin to work out, that is absolutely GREAT for your heart, your legs and your lungs, but is not necessarily going to manifest as pounds lost, at least without carefully managing other factors also.

So, it’s probably good to have several avenues of feedback, and not to engage in too much wishful thinking.

In my own life, I DID step on the scale today, and I am 114, which is six pounds over my preferred high weight of 108. Six pounds is not a disaster, and I feel like myself again. I’m pretty sure (based on how my thighs looked and how my clothes were fitting), that I peaked earlier in the week at 116 or 117.

This sounds like a low weight, but just for clarity, I should mention that I have a very slight frame. Like, I have never worn grown-up sized bra in my life (Training Bras for Life!). I am perfectly flat-chested and I am very slim from the waist up (no matter what my weight), and yet if I put on those ten or fifteen pounds, I wind up with heavy, heavy legs. Really unpleasant!

Back to what I was saying:
Metrics to keep ourselves honest are things like: “Are you still working out? Did you get to the gym this week? Did you break a sweat during a few of your sessions?

Another metric for me personally is, “Do you have a fasting window these days, or have you been eating from sun-up to sun-down? Are you giving your body any time dig into that stored body fat? On a scale of 1 to 10, how full are you when you start eating again, on average?”

And I DO see the magic of using scale weight as another metric. The scale doesn’t lie. Sure, the scale measures the poop in your colon that’s on it’s way out, but the scale also tells you how long you’ve been on the straight and narrow. Believe me, I KNOW that it is part of our human nature to want to go back to giving ourselves little sugary treats, even after 8 hours of making good food decisions. The scale kind of reflects that back to us, if we’ve been making good decisions for two hours, and “rewarding ourselves” several times a week for “how good we’ve been”. (Lots of sarcasm! Because believe me, I can be irrational here.)

OH WELL. That’s a wonderful ramble-fest.

[roundcoconut]

By the way, I believe that I am doing plenty of right things for my body weight and for my overall health! I would be willing to place a bet that by June, I will have better fitness metrics than I had in March. Like, if I were to time how far I can go on a treadmill in 40 minutes, I believe that my June numbers will be better than my March numbers. (I DO believe that it probably takes eight to ten weeks for the improvements in fitness to manifest in a timed test like that!)

It is crazy, but since it is a temptation of mine, to just eat from sun-up to sun-down, I am now walking around with my fasting window actually written on my left forearm. Like, my left forearm says in large letters, “6:45 PM fasting window”, because that’s when I stopped feeding last night. And I really want to keep this front of mind, so that I am not tempted to start bargaining with myself and go back to this “facedown in a bowl of fried rice” thing. Good gracious! The things I do for better health!

So anyways! I’ll continue posting my workouts here, because it’s important to me to have good fitness. (Update: Yesterday I did a long walk at strolling pace. No heart rate monitor or even watch, so I can only report that yesterday was an easy day, but not a zero.)

I’ll make a point to post my weights once in a while, and probably should get around to posting a pic at some point. (I know I posted a pic in my old journal, of me at the higher end of my range — I am wearing a green t-shirt and glasses in that pic. Should probably link to it, because that’s more or less what I look like in four or five days, as I get back to the higher end of my preferred range!).

OK, I’m still having fun with this! And that’s good.

[roundcoconut]

Today:
Stairmaster: 1hr, 32min
Av heart rate: 135; max hr 152
69% middle heart rate zone, 22% the next higher zone

That’s enough for today!

[roundcoconut]

Today’s fitness thingie:
Don’t need to go terribly long today. I’m thinking 35 or 40 minutes would be fine!

Today’s nutrition plan:
I’ve been back to relatively high vegetable consumption, because that is what kept me slim for my first five years on this way of eating. When I got too high on the starch, I went off the rails!

So eating peas and carrots and Brussel sprouts is great for me. Bell peppers, celery, lettuce — totally great for my body type.

I love me some starch, but I definitely didn’t get away with ANYTHING when I was face down in a bowl of fried rice. I just dug myself a hole, and here we are, happily digging our way out!

[roundcoconut]

Today
58 min stairmaster
Av hr 143; max hr 157
73% in medium-high zone, 21% in middle heart zone

[Ruff]

I’m a starch girl myself. Potatoes all the way! But you got to do what works for you. I watched Jeff on YouTube on calorie density, and now I often mix some veg with my mash. Broccoli or cauliflower are my favourite, along with the ever present silverbeet of course. Literally grows as a weed here!