Here are a few pictures, courtesy of CrossFit Central’s Relentless Bootcamp, of me at yesterday’s workout:

I’m still one of the slowest ones, believe me . . . but as long as I keep showing up, I feel pretty good about myself!

Sometimes (okay, 99% of the time) I feel like a fat kid at boot camp. I’m one of the Slow Ones, you know? My strength is just way behind that of most of the participants. Still, I walk out of each hour-long session with a strong sense of being a survivor . . . hey, at least I lived, right?

Boot camp reminds me how far I still have to go. I’m not discouraged; I’m just recognizing that having heart is what this process is all about. The losses on the scale occur more slowly as I move closer toward my goal, even though it’s still 40 lbs away. Persistence is key.

If I didn’t want to change something about who I am as a person, I wouldn’t do boot camp. I wouldn’t work on my nutrition. I would just stick to the elliptical or treadmill, continue eating diet junk food, and cut back my calories some. Eventually I probably would reach my goal weight. But I would still be the same, on the inside.

By doing some hard things (for me, at least), I’m hoping for a little bit more than that. Not just a number on the scale. Not just passing for thin again. I want to grow in courage and strength and health even as my measurements shrink. For my entire adult life, I have been unhappy with who and how I am. Some things need to change; others may simply need my acceptance.

It’s difficult to say exactly how eggs with spinach and chicken for breakfast and evenings spent running up and down stairwells and heaving medicine balls around may work together to make me better and happier. Maybe, in the end, they won’t. But after many years of wrong decisions, I can still recognize when there’s something right.

Luckily, I impulsively popped in on a co-worker who is doing the official Relentless Boot Camp Adventure Challenge, and she calmly talked me out of that idea.

“I need a soda,” I said.

“No you don’t,” she said, smiling serenely.

Pause. Resentful resignation.

“Ohhhkay.” I plonked my butt down in a chair in her office and chatted for a few minutes, and before I knew it, the impulse to self-sabotage had passed.

Boot camp was tough for me last night. There were lots of push-ups. I do modified push-ups, but even those I do poorly. I was way behind most of the group as a result. It was kind of demoralizing. But I can’t give up, you know? My co-workers started boot camp several months ago in no better shape than I am in, and now they can crank those modified push-ups out and I bet one of these days they’ll be doing full push-ups! As for me, although my legs are pretty strong, my core is weak. Coach suggested doing planks on my non-boot-camp days to work on those muscles.

I’m doing multiple things that make me uncomfortable at this point in my journey; in some ways, it’s a lot like the very beginning. I’m pretty stressed out, anxious, and self-doubting at times as I take on a new exercise regimen (with other people, no less), give up an old crutch (diet soda), and look ahead to making even more nutritional changes. I just have to remember that this tangle of emotions is part of making changes, and that things have a way of becoming “comfortable” again if you just stick with the changes for long enough.

Ready for a bike ride (Feb. 2010, 166 lbs)

I found an older photo of me with my bike from fall 2008, when I was near my highest weight. It’s a helpful reference point for me and a reminder that while my body fat may still be too high, I’ve made some great progress in the past few months.

Me on my bike (Fall 2008, near 200 lbs)

For those of you who had questions about my DEXA scan (body comp analysis) from yesterday, I just wanted to add that I will definitely be going into more detail about that in the next few days.

There MUST be a way out.

*claw, claw*

No one will care if I come back with a post tomorrow about what a demented idea it was.

*scratch, scratch*

You are going to lose your mind if you haven’t already. Seriously. Go home to M and the Bean. Continue with the old way of doing things, and accept the likelihood of mediocre progress. It is your birthright!

*yowl*

At this point I had reached boot camp and it was really too late to turn around. Sometimes this will happen.

Throughout boot camp, I was in considerable gastrointestinal distress. I swear it was the Lean Pocket I ate for lunch. (When I mentioned this to M, he wasn’t surprised. “No one really knows what’s in those things.” It is true that the “chicken” in the pocket resembles meat plywood more than anything else.)

The upshot is that I had a bad stomach cramp and felt like puking off and on throughout the workout—especially after the sprints! Still, I did my best to keep up with the exercises and avoid Coach’s evil eye.

As I limply dragged myself back to my car afterward, I reflected that boot camp must have something in common with childbirth. They say that the only reason women have more than one child is because they are blessed with forgetting the excruciating pain of labor, remembering only the joy of holding their new infant. Driving home, I knew I’d be heading back to boot camp for my Thursday night session, despite the fact that I had spent much of the last hour on the verge of vomiting over the edge of a parking garage. It’s all very strange.

In short: I am still committed to my 12-Week Tiny Glow Fat Loss Challenge. In fact, I am getting my initial body comp analysis done tomorrow at 8 AM!

In the right and left pictures, I’m doing wall balls with a 6-lb medicine ball (you can’t see the “wall,” but just above me there was a concrete partition). In the center shot I’m doing a quick shuffle with my feet while pushing a PVC pipe away from my chest as fast as I can.

I look at these pictures and honestly my first thought is, “I still have a really long way to go before I’ll be where I want to be!” It is hard to overcome a naturally critical disposition; at this point, it’s still a reflex to find fault both with myself and the world at large.

I can catch myself pretty quickly sometimes these days, however, and do a little gentle correction: “Those pictures show me working hard and doing my best, which I refuse to ever be ashamed of.” Effort isn’t always pretty on the outside, but it’s good for our hearts.

(Photos courtesy of CrossFit Central’s Relentless Bootcamp.)

I really believe that I will do this. I have to do this. Being 80 lbs overweight might not put me squarely in the life-or-death category of obesity, but it makes life . . . well, uncomfortable, a lot of the time. My lower back hurts from doing the smallest amount of housework. I’ve noticed that airplane seats seem to have shrunk . . . . erm. Right? Same goes for public transportation seats. I’m sick of the focus of my life being on eating. I’m tired of hiding behind that. Maybe this really is life-or-death in a way, because my life has felt so diminished as I have sat here covered by layers of excess fat. My confidence, my energy levels, my willingness to meet new people . . . all of it diminished. I’m afraid to shoot for the stars. Instead I have another candy bar and try not to think about it.

But not anymore.

Now here I am, about four and a half months later. I’ve lost 34 lbs and experienced some significant improvements to the quality of my life: I no longer have horrible acid reflux every night; my back doesn’t ache when I take the Bean for a walk; I’m wasting a lot less money (on all that candy and delivery food I used to eat); and I’m fitting into the upper end of “normal” clothing store sizes again.

At the same time, January has been a frustrating month in some ways; most notably because I only lost 3 lbs despite the fact that I stuck to my plan and still have quite a ways to go before I hit my goal weight in the 120s. Last week I actually gained a pound and it threw me into a tailspin of self-doubt.

I can’t completely write off this past month, though. Today was the final day of the SparkPeople online boot camp—I stuck with it and did the online mini-workouts every single day. I’m getting better and better at not giving up. That’s what they call a “transferable skill”! I don’t know that I made tremendous gains in strength this month, but the SP boot camp had a ripple effect, in that it got me thinking more seriously about ways to ramp up my strength training and fitness levels.

Today I attended a free CrossFit Central Relentless Boot Camp class down by Town Lake, and I’m 99% sure I wouldn’t have been out there in the cold this morning with my two co-workers and a bunch of strangers busting their butts if it weren’t for the baby steps I took throughout January. Now that my SparkPeople challenge has wrapped up, it’s time to commit to a new routine for at least the next month; I’ve decided to give CrossFit boot camp an honest, committed effort. I’d like to attend either two or three nights per week; I’ll be checking out the boot-camp class my co-workers attend this Monday evening.

My food plan is the area where I find that I’m still mentally balking at making serious improvements. I just have to remember that although it was really tough in the beginning of this for me to rein in my calorie intake, now it’s second nature; eventually, the same will be true for eating quality, nutritious foods. I’m also hoping my future boot-camp coach can give me some guidance in this area.

Photo by Procsilas

I can’t believe I forgot to post about this.

Well, actually I can.

I have taken to embarking upon new challenges in a crablike, surreptitious fashion. Then, after they take hold, I start talking about them a little more. It’s my way of not freaking myself out.

The strength training program on SparkPeople that I’ve been following this month is one example of a relatively unassuming transition into a new phase of my weight loss. In fact, this whole weight-loss shebang has pretty much been an unobtrusive yet steady journey toward my goal.

This past week I completed Week 1 of the Couch to 5K program, which is well-known on the internet as the go-to plan for couch potatoes looking to start running. The last time I tried to start jogging (back in early October), things didn’t end well; I gave myself some kind of tibial stress syndrome and as a result had to lay off high-impact exercise for a couple of months. Now that I’m down 35 lbs, I decided it was time to give jogging another try. I didn’t want to actually commit to completing the C25K program, but it seems as though that’s just what I’m setting out to do.

The Couch to 5K program (often abbreviated as C25K) has ample online representation. Here are two links I can recommend, if you’re interested:

• The main site for C25K.
• A very readable chart of the workouts which prints well.

You start out doing walk/jog intervals for 20 minutes, and over the course of nine weeks gradually increase the amount of jogging until you are able to run for 30 minutes in a row, which roughly translates into a 5K for many people. In the past, I’ve run a bit slower than that, but it’s a decent approximation.

I tend to want to downplay my running efforts, and I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that I ran a marathon in 2001. This was before I became obese. Before I moved back down to Texas from New York City. Before a lot of things that went down in my mid-to-late 20s.  I went from being a girl who could run for most of the Chicago Marathon to the person who started this weight-loss effort in September, a person who got a backache just walking her dog around the block. It’s hard for me to forgive myself for that, sometimes. I guess I coped with life the best I could at the time, but it resulted in me being over 200 lbs and losing a lot of my energy and willingness to try new things.

Well, here I go again. I honestly don’t currently harbor any secret burning desires to run a full marathon again, but perhaps an official 5K or even a 10K could be fun at some point. How about you? Do you run? Or, if not, is this something you aspire to? I know it’s not for everyone, but it’s one of those activities that’s very liberating in the sense that all you need is a decent pair of shoes to get going.

But like a storm, I blew myself out eventually. After a while, we went and got vanilla cones at McDonald’s (150 calories) and came home and I sat on the couch with the Bean on my lap and ate my vanilla cone, and when I had finished I was just so tired. It was time to call it a night and hope for a better tomorrow.

Which today has been! I woke up at 8 AM, ate breakfast, did my SparkPeople 15-minute abs video, and headed to the gym to do my 30 minutes of cardio and meet up with a co-worker who taught me how to do some free weights and mat exercises. I rarely interact with the outside world on the weekend aside from necessary errands, so for me, meeting up with someone to work out is real progress.

Also progress: getting more familiar with the weights area of the gym. Having someone there with me made me feel less like an intruder, and I came home from the workout feeling great. I went to Borders with M and picked up a few magazines, and then we came home and walked the Bean at a leisurely pace in the neighborhood. The sun was out, I felt the simple blessing of life on me, and my faith in the passing nature of the bad nights on this journey was reaffirmed.

Which is not to make light of the bad nights. They are very real and very painful. But they pass and if I make it through without doing anything major to spite myself or anyone else, I am so glad.

Although I hadn’t planned to take another progress photo until I lost 7 more pounds, I was inspired today and decided to go for it a few weeks early:

Here’s my current SparkPeople online exercise video routine (which basically mimics the current bootcamp they are running over there):

Sunday: 10-minute Cardio JumpStart
Notes: Okay, this is the only video that isn’t technically a strength-training/toning workout. Watch the intensity on this one; there’s a lot of hopping and I got a little overzealous and slightly injured myself yesterday. It’s fine to keep it lower impact if that’s what you can do right now.

Monday: 8-minute Lower Body Ball Workout
Notes: This video (and most of the others) utilize a stability ball. I picked mine up at a sporting goods store for about $20.

Tuesday: 8-minute Upper Body Workout
Notes: I started off with my teeny 3 lb hand weights last week but I tried it with my 5 lb weights today and that was a better challenge for me.

Wednesday: 5-minute Core Workout with Ball
Notes: Despite the brevity of the routine, I could feel this one the next day!

Thursday: 10-minute Lower Body Workout
Notes: This is a floor workout, plenty of leg lifts and stuff like that.

Friday: 6-minute Upper Body Workout with Ball
Notes: Just in case you were getting lonely for your stability ball! I had to do one of the modified versions of at least one of the exercises, but that’s okay. I’ve got to start somewhere, right?

Saturday: 15-minute Abs Workout
Notes: This is the longest of the workouts, but it still goes by pretty quickly. It’s a floor workout, so it’s more comfortable if you have some kind of exercise or yoga mat you can lie on.

So that’s my strength routine for the month of January! I also do at least 5 days of cardio per week, 30 minutes at a stretch. Generally I just hop on an elliptical machine because it’s lower impact on my legs, but I plan to work up to jogging for 30 minutes on the treadmill eventually.