OnePhatMan

Yesterday morning, I started lifting weights again, the second time since my shoulder surgery back in August. The first time, maybe a month ago, was still a little too soon and caused me quite a bit of pain in my right shoulder, so I quit after two workouts.

My workout yesterday was for my chest and my back; I’m planning no shoulder-specific lifting until probably sometime next year. Because it’s been so long since I lifted, I worked out with (depending on the exercise) anywhere from 25% to 75% of what I once did. Generally, the chest exercises (because they use your shoulders the most) fell in the low end of that percentage range and the back exercises fell in the high end.

I sure felt like a big wimp.

I’m not too sore today, muscle-wise. There’s a little bit of soreness in both my chest and back, but not a whole lot. My shoulder hurts, too, but it doesn’t hurt any more than it did before I tried the weight workout, so I think I’m good to keep going. Tomorrow will be biceps and triceps, and then on Friday I’ll hit my legs.

It feels good to be lifting again.

I expect Friday’s weigh-in to reflect the fact that I’m lifting again. Not because I’m instantly gaining muscle (that doesn’t happen, no matter how much we want it to), but because my body will likely grab onto a pound or two of extra water to store more glycogen and to aid in the repair of the muscle fibers I damage while I’m lifting. Knowing things like this just reinforce the idea that the scale is simply not a good judge of anything with regards to your health or body’s composition.

My spider picture from last time didn’t scare anyone away from potentially going hiking, did it?

I used to be almost phobic about the spiders until I became a hiker, particularly when I started hiking regularly during the warm months. You walk through webs all the time, and occasionally actually get big meaty ones like in the picture on you, running up your shirt toward your head.

But you know what? They’re far more scared of you than you are of them. All they want is to be off you. A gentle flick of the finger and they’re gone. For me, the realizations that they’re not trying to “get” me, that they’re not going to bite me, that they don’t want anything more than to be away from me, helped me immensely in getting over my fear. Well, those realizations and the immersion therapy of getting spiders on me almost every single time I go out there.

The mind is a wonderfully adaptive thing, I’ve found.

Via email:

I’ve been working on getting fit and healthy again. I’m doing the Weight Watchers program currently and although I’ve lost a little weight in the last four weeks, I haven’t been working the program. My biggest obstacle is the battle against myself. Without (hopefully) sounding too crazy, I constantly have a battle within myself :

Why are you eating that?
I can do what I want.

Think about it, this is totally against what you’re trying to accomplish!
So? big deal.

You aren’t hungry and this is going to put you back. Don’t eat it, for the love of God…NOOOOO!
You can’t tell me what to do. *Scarf*

What the hell?!? Why am I having these arguments with MYSELF? Have you
had to deal with this kind of inner sabotage? Any helpful solutions
(barring a frontal lobotomy to get rid of the voices in my head?)

When I was about thirteen, my parents divorced and my dad moved out. As part of his restructuring of his life, and to help deal with an unruly teen boy who didn’t handle the divorce so well, he started going to a therapy group that taught something called “Transactional Analysis”, or TA.

Guess who got dragged to some of these group sessions?

In a nutshell, TA teaches that each indivudual has three different internal egos, the Parent, the Adult, and the Child (every time the therapist wrote PAC on the chalk board, I thought of video games). The inner voice that’s rebelling, the “I can do what I want” voice, is your inner child (or maybe your inner brat, in this instance). Freud would have called it your id. The inner child is self-centered, and sometimes doesn’t like to be told what to do.

But the inner child doesn’t have to be the one to run the show.

The child is being manipulated by your Parent ego, who’s saying, “You can’t have this” to the child. As I’ve said so many times before, any time there’s something we think we can’t have, what happens? We just want it more! We’re setting up a war inside ourselves, a battle of biblical proportion between the controlling parent and the adaptive child. Life has enough battles everywhere else, without having one every time there’s some food put in front of you.

My first suggestion would be to pay close attention to your thoughts. Have you gotten yourself into what I call the diet mentality, where suddenly your eating is moral (”I was bad today”) and foods, rather than simply being fuel for your body, are now categorized into large groups that you “can” (the yucky, tasteless stuff) or “can’t” (the good, comforting stuff) have? Or maybe you’re just feeling the strain of leading a different kind of life, and old habits are trying to drag you back down, back to your comfort zone?

If you recognize any of these behaviors, you can change them. Self control—not will power—is like a muscle. The more you utilize it, the more powerful it becomes. One of the easiest ways to implement some self control is to modify your outlook. For example, instead of thinking you “can’t” have something, what if you simply “choose not to” have it? The simple thought restructuring takes things from deprivations to merely being choices.

And for God’s sake, if you make eating some big moral thing, where what you eat makes you good or bad, please stop. You’re just hurting yourself.

Something that’s helped me over the last couple of years with regards to foods that I want, despite knowing they’re not so healthy, has been the junk food day. I set aside a whole day to eat anything I might have wanted over the last week, no matter how unhealthy. This past Friday, I had burgers from Krystal, probably one of the most unhealthy fast food places there is. And I enjoyed them.

The chili cheese pups, not so much.

Setting aside a special time—it doesn’t have to be a whole day, it could be a few hours or even a single meal—makes it trivial to postpone that inner child. If mine ever whines for Oreos, I tell him, “that’s fine, you can have all the Oreos you want on Friday, even if it’s the whole bag.” It saves fights, because it creates a win-win situation. The child gets the Oreos, but for a limited time, and the adult gets the knowledge of being in charge without being overbearing.

If you find that you’re regularly eating things that aren’t conducive to living a healthy life, try restructuring your thinking about food. Try a junk day, or a junk afternoon, or even just a junk meal. Don’t be afraid to try new things just because they go against the inner rules you’ve created in your head. They might help you more than you think.