Osiyo. Dohiju? ᎣᏏᏲ. ᏙᎯᏧ? Hey, welcome back.
I have managed to ignore all of my advice again. April 1, 2012 is when I posted my first entry about working out… it wasn’t the first day I worked out as my days started with 1Jan12. However, I look down through my entries and I see progress and disappointment; the yo-yo effect that also includes losing weight, hitting a wall, and gaining weight. The lowest I’ve weighed in the last 13+ years was 260. In 2018, I lost 60 pounds going from 331 to 271 then going back to 280 where I stayed for a while. In the last 10 years, I’ve been 280 or more. I know a lot of that is because when I get stressed I eat. When I would get depressed… I’d eat. Emotional stuff at home… I eat. I haven’t had any of those things in 2-3 years, but I still binge eat or don’t eat. I don’t have a healthy management of… me.
Not long ago, I was called lazy for not putting workouts first as that’s a form of self-care. It is a form of self-care; it is not lazy. I work a lot. I work my regular job, side jobs, and hobbies. I work a lot. So it’s not lazy. It’s a matter of prioritizing myself over other items in my life. When deadlines come around it’s easy to say “oh I’ll just not do that today” I don’t think of that as lazy. Lazy would be saying “I’m not going to do that today, but I am going to watch 6 hours of television.” Lazy is not “I am not going to do that today because I’ve got to drive the kids around to all of their events, join a work call, pick up my mother to go to the doctor, etc”
How can I prioritize the work on myself when I get so involved with the work I do? I get engrossed and my brain literally doesn’t think of anything else. This isn’t the first time I’ve asked these questions. This time, however, I have to have an answer… and make it my permanent routine. This isn’t about knowing what to do. My past posts show that I’ve thought that through WRT diet and exercise. What I haven’t ever done is work out how to make that a priority for my own self-care.
Getting back to the question at hand. Anxiety. How do I overcome the anxiety of working out while waiting for a fire call? Or the anxiety of missing a deadline? Presentation with facts like working out reduces anxiety – well, that’s not helpful. If you’ve never been stuck in an anxious loop then you don’t understand that the answer doesn’t help you. For me, it’s not about diet, it’s about making time away from my computer. Rather, feeling like being away from my computer is ok. That probably stems from not wanting to be in trouble at work when someone tries to get ahold of me. The next portion of this is the fact that I have an all-or-nothing kind of thing going. Once I start working out it will be consuming me. Once my brain is done with this project and I move to the next one that will be consuming me. I’ve never found the balance between the two. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to accomplish that.
Until next time. Dodadagohvi. ᏙᏓᏓᎪᎲᎢ.
IN MY MIND BY WINK DOUBLEGUNS 