Gotta love there only being two rules:

1. Sum up your blogging philosophy, motivation, and experience in 5 words: I’m going to cheat and just use the blog ‘experience’, as it’s been for me aspect: helpful, encouraging, supportive, amazing and grateful.

2. Pass it on to 10 other amazing blogs:…

In no particular order….

Anonymous Fat Girl
Eating Journey
Honor My Health
Weightless
Healthy Girl
Tippy Toe Diet
Truth 2 Being Fit
Waisting Time
Big Girl Bombshell
Fit to the Finish
Living in the Real World
The Giggly Bits
Poise in Parma
The Balance Broad
Tales of a Disordered Eater
We are the Real Deal
Yum Yucky
Health for the Whole Self
A Weight Lifted
Thinspired
Ramblings of My Compulsions
Fitness, A Journey Not a Destination
Food, Drug of My Choice
Getting Better and Better
Weight-Off Musings
No More Diet Drama
Phoenix Revolution
Thufferin Succotash
Why the Weight
110 Pounds and Counting

Ok, I went a little overboard here. Don’t feel you have to pass it on ladies and gentleman, just letting you know that I enjoy reading your blog and I’m sure others will too. If I left anyone off, please forgive me!

Second issue – we will be going away on our annual family vacation at the Jersey shore from this weekend to next. I intend to, gulp, unplug myself during that time, so my apologies in advance for not keeping up on blogs and comments. I’ve been terrible keeping up these last few weeks already =( just because we have a lot of stuff going on. All good, just a lot. I feel badly when I don’t keep up with you guys, you are my inspiration and support, but I really think it would be good for me to take a break while we are away. Where do you go for blogworld withdrawal? Is there group therapy for that? =)

I will not be bringing my calorie book as I have done in all the years past that we’ve taken this trip. I will keep on listening to my body and take care of it. There are some really great treats at the shore and I will certainly enjoy them if I really want them, in moderation, no guilt. None of them are forbidden. They do not scare me as they have in years past. I am much more powerful than some silly treat.

Lastly, I have signed up for not one, but two sprint triathlons next month. Yes, the tri bug has truly bitten me. My husband has been incredibly supportive of this and I so appreciate it. (Once again, you are the best, baby!) I will need to train almost every day during our vacation, but I intend to get the workouts done in the mornings before we really get our day started.

I love the goal setting and the training that is required to do a triathlon. I love the cross training that training for three sports provides, how it benefits my body. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to improving my times as well. =)

Hope you all have an amazing next week! Once I get back, tackle the Mt. Everest of laundry from our vacay, and get my kids off to the first day of school, I will check back in with everyone. Until then – cheers!!!

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

So here they are…

This first pix is probably me at close to my heaviest. Notice the big sweater which I thought hid everything…

And here is me when I lost about 10 lbs since the first photo…

(my gawd, I had no idea those popular cable sweaters were so see-through! how embarrassing!)

The sad faces are there because I was unhappy with myself. I was bingeing like crazy, and did not love myself or nurture myself. I turned to food with complete abandon when I was happy, sad, bored, fill in the emotion. For me, eating enormous amounts of food was the answer to everything. I felt badly about myself, but felt helpless to do anything about it.

With many diets, yo-yo’s up and down on the scale, then two pregnancies …I’m more than 60 pounds less than the first photo and have been holding at that weight for just under two years.

Here I am on the beach the afternoon of my triathlon. My husband and I were goofing around with the body marking that the triathlon people put on everyone’s arms for identification.

Jody encouraged me to post this pic on my blog, though I told her it made me feel a little uncomfortable. She said “If I were you, I would post that pic! This is just showing people how far you have come & it is possible to overcome & then look great with muscles too… strong & fit!”

Thanks for encouraging me, Jody! I still feel a little funny, but the message is – If I can do this, anyone can. It took me until almost age 40 to realize that my obsession with food/eating was in fact an eating disorder. Through therapy, OA, reading some great books and of course the awesome blog world, I am now pretty much recovered.

The next triathlon is in less than month =)

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

The run ended up to be my strongest portion of the triathlon. After slogging through the bay and biking hard for 12.5 miles, I was concerned my legs would not be up to the task, but I guess from running for almost 14 years, the muscle memory kicked in and I had a really great run.

In fact, I have to say, that all I’ve read over the years about how cross training improves your running, is absolutely true.

Because I felt like I was one of the last people to finish (and yes, I know, that is not a terrible thing for my first race) and I am competitive, I knew I really had to try to dig deep and run hard.

Usually my legs are pretty wobbly after biking, but I guess the running gods were with me, adrenaline overtook the wobbles, and I was able to get a good cadence down pretty quickly. Soon it became my goal to pick off the runners ahead of me. I ended up passing 23 people! It was a great motivator and added some fun to the run.

Here is a pic of me right before the finish line high five-ing my kids. (See the family resemblance? lol!!! We are all very happy the race is just about over.)

Though I finished 200th out of 259, turns out the for the run portion, if that had been a separate race on it’s own, I finished 96th out of 259. I did the two miles in 17:12 (an 8:36 pace), which is pretty darn fast for me, especially after the swim/slog and bike. So that made me feel good.

After all races, there is always refreshments. There were tons of fresh bagels. I love me a fresh, doughy bagel, but rarely have them because they are too carb-y and a lot of calories, so it is a real treat on the rare occasions when I do eat one. It is not a trigger food, just something I pass on. Well, let me tell you, I had myself a cinnamon-raisin bagel with some cream cheese and it was the best bagel I ever had! I so enjoyed it.

Overall, it was a great first experience. The swim not being a true swim was both good and bad. As a negative – it did not allow me to really see how I would do, but on the other hand, being the swim is my weakest link, it was kinda nice not to swim the whole time.

I have to admit, as I had been warned, I have been bitten by the tri bug. I am going to sign up to do another one that is in mid September. I want to really be able to do the full swim and just experience the whole event again. I love having a goal and I love the training.

Other notes:

This was the first getaway/vacation I ever went on where I did not bring my calorie book and little notebook to keep track of every morsel I ate. That was freeing and empowering!

On Sunday night, the evening of race day, I started to get cramps and woke up with them on Monday morning and found that Aunt Flow had come to visit. Bless the T.O.M. gods for waiting 24 hours to send her over! (TMI?)

Have a great weekend everybody!

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

The chip timing piece that all participants wear around their ankles are pretty amazing. Not only does it give you a readout (later when you look on the tri’s website) of how long it took to do each portion of the race, it tells you what place you were in for that portion, among other things. So I was the 217th person of 259 after the swim. It surprised me that I actually was faster than 42 people!

So after slogging through the water, which was tough on my legs, I was pretty concerned that I would be in big trouble for the biking and running portions.

My bike is, there is no way to say this nicely, is a piece of crap. My husband teased me weeks before the race that my bike was going to look like a Fisher Price bike compared to all the other competitors’. It’s from Target and I bought it a few years ago so I could ride bikes with my kids. Certainly didn’t need anything fancy for that. But for riding in a triathlon, um, not the best piece of equipment.

I felt like I rode hard. My quads were burning, but I said to myself – go big or go home, so I really tried to keep up a brisk, steady pace. But the bike is heavy and the handlebars are not conducive to bending over to make yourself aerodynamic, so I’m sure putting in the same effort on a decent road bike would have made a difference,but that’s neither here nor there at this point.

The ride was an out and back. On my way back, I could see there weren’t many people behind me, which was a little deflating, but I was determined to keep pedaling hard. True enough, as I learned later based upon my chip time, I was 228th of 259. Lovely.

Here is a pic of me coming back into the transition area with my Fisher Price bike. I then had to put my bike in my designated spot on the rack, take off my helmet and start the last portion of the race – the run. I was determined to run hard and finish the best that I could.

I will finish up with the run and my overall thoughts tomorrow or Saturday. Thanks for hanging in there with me!

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

Anywho…. As you probably know, we built a long weekend around the race, at the Jersey shore. On Saturday we drove by the race sight on the way to the hotel when we first arrived in the area. My husband wanted to check out the parking situation and to give me an idea of where I would be swimming and just in general get the lay of the land. This is one of the many reasons I married this man!

I had reserved two rooms for the four of us at what turned out to be a glorified boarding house. Note to self – write truthful bad write-up on tripadvisor.com saying that this place sucked does not live up to it’s description. Suffice to say, though we basically just used the two small bedrooms connected by a tiny bathroom for sleeping and showering, we are hoping that we did not bring home any bedbugs. Enuf said.

I made sure I was at least horizontal by 9:00 pm the night before. We ended up deciding the best way for me to at least have a shot at sleeping was for me to sleep in the room with the queen bed, and for my over- 6′-tall husband, 10-yr old and 8-yr old sleep in the room with the two double beds. That way it would be most quiet for me and I wouldn’t wake anyone when I got up super early to make my coffee and do my final prep before the race. Thanks again, babe, for taking one for the team that night!

Sunday morning…. alarm set for 4:50 am. I didn’t sleep great, but not terrible either. I boiled water in my room’s microwave (had to unplug the air conditioner in order to do this) and had my coffee, which did not taste like it does at home, but oh well. It did help wake me up and get the job done of, ahem, cleaning out my system.

So on to the race…

I was definitely nervous. On Friday, I had worked on a tweaked swim technique of exhaling underwater out of my mouth, instead of just exhaling out of my nose as I was doing all through my training. I came to learn (thanks, Rita!) that one of the reasons I was gasping for air and having to stop during my training swims is that I wasn’t getting out all the carbon dioxide I was inhaling through my mouth. So I was excited/anxious to try this new technique, that I had only practiced once but found success with, in the race .

I was in the last wave of the swim (ladies age 40+ were last) and I was truly the last person into the bay. My plan was to let everyone go ahead so I could have some open water to swim in.

Well, turns out that it was low tide, so the bay was very shallow. So shallow that even me, at 5’3″ could WALK the entire way in waist-high water. So because a lot of people opted to do that, sort of clogging things up, it was quite hard to swim. So I only swam about 40% of the swim portion and walked about 60%. I had a dilemma – it was gross slogging through the water having no idea where I was putting each foot or knowing how far it was going to sink into the sand, and it was quite a workout on my thighs, which concerned me for the bike and run ahead; but if I swam around the pack, I would not be taking the shortest distance from point A to point B.

Here’s a pic of me coming out of the bay and miraculously, though I cropped them out, there were other participants behind me even though I was the last one in! (See how happy I look to be almost out of that bay! =) )

So I like to refer this as my first (and hopefully last) quadathlon, as it was a swim/bay walk – bike – run.

On the bright side, the distance didn’t seem quite so daunting, and my time of 8 mins, 32 seconds was much better than the 12-15 minutes I anticipated.

Part 2, the bike ride, to come on Wednesday or Thursday (I’m still playing catch-up from being away)…

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

I have followed my 12-week training plan to the letter except for one itty bitty thing – the plan recommended always doing some drills at the beginning of each swim. Being an utter novice stupid and ignorant, and not knowing what drills really were, I thought it was more important for me to do the quantity of laps of the drills, as opposed to the drills themselves.

At some point during week 9, I read something about how important drills were and that swimming lap after lap was not going to help a whole lot. CRAP!!!! So I immediately got my hands on some drill devices in hopes that – better late than never.

But um, the swim is still pretty challenging, but now it is more of a breathing issue which I was scrambling around in the last day or two in search of the ‘magic tweak’ for at the 11th hour. I think I’ve got my answer and will try it out in the pool during my last training swim tomorrow (Friday) morning . I hope it works! If not, I will be fine too, it will just be a bit more of a struggle.

Through my training I learned which socks NOT to wear for the race (the ones that slid down during a recent run leaving a big ol’ blister on the back of my ankle). I’ve worn all the garments I’m going to wear for the race and ingested all the drinks and energy gels, so nothing will be new to my body that day.

But I do have one dilemma, that I hope that you, my uber-smart blogger friends, can help me with… Every morning, at home, I have one cup of caffinated coffee. I do this to help wake up and to um, shall I say get my ‘system’ moving. So of course I will have my cup of coffee on race morning as that is what my body is used to. Here is the dilemma – we will be staying in a hotel the night before the race, as the race is 90 minutes from our home and it’s already bad enough I need to be there @ 6:30 am for the 7:30 am start.

The hotel does not have a coffee maker in the room, nor do they have any in the lobby until 9:00 am (It’s a mom & pop hotel, what can I tell you!). They do, however, have a microwave in the room.. There is also, as I found out, a Wa-Wa about 2-1/2 blocks away.

So… do i bring my own coffee, etc, heat up a mug of water in the microwave (and possibly wake up my poor family who is trying to sleep) and have it? Do I get up even earlier (gag!) and walk to the Wa-Wa for coffee.

Please, dear readers, I need the awesome advice you always seem to have on how to deal with this little coffee problem! Thank you in advance!

So I will be ‘unplugged’ for a few days, starting Saturday, as we are making a long weekend out of this race as a little getaway, so I apologize in advance for not being able to read or comment on anything. However, you can be sure that I will tell you bore you with the details of the race within a day or two of getting back home.

Wish me luck!!!

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

Since the car accident, I have always had some pain/discomfort when I walk for a while or stand around too long. I was in another car accident about a year ago, this was not nearly as bad thank goodness, so of course my back pain flared up.

I know a lot of us out there have issues with pain from either a car accident, carrying extra weight around, through working out, or just good ol’ life. I found this to be a great book for dealing with the pain in a down to earth fashion.

The book wasn’t about treatments for specific ailments, but rather advice on better ways to deal with and manage the pain. For instance, some things I learned were instead of just having the person you see for the pain be the only physician in your life who knows about your pain issues, make sure all your doctors are aware so that they can work together as a team in treating you. Makes perfect sense!

One thing I learned a while ago, and was reinforced in the book, was if you have back pain issues to lift heavier objects up (if you have to lift them!) using your legs, rather than bending over at the waist to lift up an object off the ground.

Another thing that seems so silly but could be so helpful, is to brush your teeth, or for any men out there, to shave, while in the shower, instead of bending over your sink and brushing (or shaving).

For more info check out… A Boomer’s Guide To Chronic Pain.

On another note, I was lucky enough to be chosen last week to be on a list of  “50 Best Blogs for Beating Food Addiction”

It’s the first one under the heading “personal testimonials.”  I feel honored to have been chosen for this list and am in some very good blog company.  I encourage you to check it out to find some great blogs.

Here’s the link – 50 Best Blogs for Beating Food Addiction.

Disclaimer – I was not compensated for reading and telling you about Dr. Kaye’s book.

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

Focusing on Intuitive Eating

I can’t remember exactly how I heard about Intuitive Eating. More than likely it was through the blogosphere.

I read Evelyn Tribole’s book, Intuitive Eating, A Revolutionary Program The Works, and I also really got a lot out of Goodbye Ed, Hello Me by Jenni Schaeffer.

It’s amazing to me how reading certain books at certain times can be so impactful on our lives. I don’t think the books would have affected me as much if I had read them before I realized I had an eating disorder. I think everything happens, or people/things come into our lives, for a reason, and those books came to me at a time when my mind was open to accept what they were saying.

I had been toying with the idea of making the transition from daily calorie counting, weighing/measuring food portions, to intuitive eating for about a week or two in mid March. Due to a combination of therapy, blogging and reading books, I felt ready to trust myself and my body to try this totally new way of eating and thinking about food. I was trying to decide when the best day it would be to start based on some other events that were going on in my life. Do I wait until those events passed, what day would make the most sense to get started with this, how exactly do I begin?

In the middle of wavering about when and how to start, before going to bed one Friday night, I read in Jenni Schaeffer’s book about taking the leap off the mountain without a parachute. I had my answer. The next day, with little fanfare, I didn’t count my calories or weigh/measure my food portions. I took the huge leap of faith. I finally had the trust in myself that I could listen to my body and that my body would not do me wrong. I realized that food is just that, food; it is not something that has magical powers over me. I control it, it does not control me.

That was over three (update – four) months ago and though there are days here and there, especially in the beginning, when I still sometimes tally the calories in my head (long-time habits are hard to break!), I still did/do not write it down as I had done for decades.

I still feel like a work in progress. I am now pretty good at reading my hunger cues, but am still working on my satiety cues. (My cues have been thrown off after 30+ years of compulsive overeating and bingeing, so I understand it’s normal that it will take some time for my body to send me the right messages and for me to interpret them properly.) I have however, maintained my weight, so I guess I’ve been making good choices.

Right now things are a bit tricky because though I’ve always worked out 3-4 days a week, I’m training for my first triathlon, which is more intense than my normal workouts, and it has thrown off my hunger cues. My appetite, oddly enough, has been reduced greatly. I know eating less would not be good for my training or for maintaining my weight, so I have had to eat even when I’m not hungry in order to keep my body properly fueled for my training.

I feel like I’m walking a fine line between eating more because I know my body needs the fuel, and eating “just because” I can, bordering on compulsive eating. I have decided to weigh myself twice a month instead of once a month to help keep a tab on my food intake in relation to my triathlon training. As I’m dedicated to doing this first triathlon, I am equally dedicated to not blow my 2+ years of binge-free hard work and more recently, IE, but it’s difficult at times to keep my old ways from overtaking me again.

Still, letting go of the calorie counting, weighing and measuring food portions and making no foods forbidden has been freeing and empowering. When you stop framing foods as “bad” it takes away its attraction. Everything in moderation actually has meaning in my life now. So do the terms “eating to live” instead of “living to eat.”

I love and embrace the new mindset of no food is forbidden, although I do choose to still make healthy choices, for instance, not choosing a meal with a cream sauce or one that is fried. Although when it comes to dessert, the sky is the limit, just in moderation. =)

Follow up to when I wrote this about a month ago… with some daily self affirmations I was able to get my head back on straight and am back to IE. In fact, with my training intensifying as the race is getting closer, I am hungry almost all day long, so no problems following my hunger cues there!

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

If you just started reading my blog, this will fill you in on where I’m coming from. If you already know my story, just skip the post below. =)

My eating disorder story began over 30 years ago when I was about 8 or 9 years old, when I became a compulsive overeater and binger. I had a mother who hid junk food from me because she said/knew I would eat more than my share and not leave enough for the family to enjoy, and I had a father who teased me in my teen years about my rear end being big. He thought he was a riot and that I knew he was teasing, but he had no idea how that “teasing” affected me.

For many years I binged on sweets like there was no tomorrow, always hiding the wrappers, packages and bags out of shame. My weight ballooned up and would come down when I would diet, only to balloon back up again. It was an ugly cycle.

As I got older and got married, it continued. When we went to parties or events, my mind was busy centered on the food, instead of enjoying time with friends. When we hosted parties, I loved cleaning up because then I got to devour leftover desserts when everyone had gone. I lived to eat, instead of eating to live.

I thought about food all the time. I would think about what I would eat next before even finishing what I was currently eating.

My recovery first began in December of 2007, a few months before I turned 40, when one night, the words “compulsive overeater” somehow popped into my head. I got on my laptop and did some googling, and found my way to the Overeaters Anonymous website. They had a list of questions that asked something to the effect of “are you one of us?” I answered “yes” to most of them.

This was both horrific and wonderful at the same time. There was the shame of having a sickness, a disease, an eating disorder, but at the same time, being an A-type personality, I was thrilled there was a name for what I was doing and realized that I could get help.

So my passion then became getting help for myself. I went to OA meetings, I found a therapist, and I got honest with myself and my husband. I wrote him a very long, cathartic letter revealing all of my food/eating secrets. He knew I liked to eat sweets, but had no idea that I did so much eating in secret and how much I thought about food/eating.

I cried off and on for days. Decades of my secrets had finally come bubbling up to the surface.

OA helped me to realize that I was not alone. Through therapy I learned that the things I mentioned earlier in my childhood are what turned me to the comfort of food. I was not getting the nurturing and love that I needed from my family, so I found it in food. This pattern repeated itself over and over again as I got older and had become deeply ingrained even though I married an amazing man almost 13 years ago.

I have been binge-free since I realized and embraced that I had an eating disorder. I lost the extra weight I had been carrying and have maintained the loss for 20 months now. I did this by counting calories, weighing and measuring food portions, and working out. I also weighed myself every day.

Oddly enough, I weighed myself and have counted calories for over 20 years actually, even when the numbers were astronomically high. I felt like food was the only thing I could control in my life.

In January 2010, I started to just get on the scale once a month. The mere thought of that gave me heart palpitations, but it turned out to be quite simple. Then in late March, a certain calm or peace came over me and I decided I was ready to delve into the world of Intuitive Eating. Six months prior, the mere thought of giving up my calorie counting, weighing/measuring my food portions would have had me laughing in your face, but at the end of March, all the therapy, eating disorder books I read and blogging gave me the awarenesses I needed to make the giant leap of faith.

Almost three months later, I can’t tell you how empowering and freeing it is to have dropped that white-knuckle grip of control I had on my food. I have come to learn that “normal” eaters overeat occasionally. The difference is that they don’t focus on it and beat themselves up about it. They just put it behind them and move on to the next meal or day.

The “voices” in my head that roared like a lion when I was in the throws of compulsive overeating and bingeing have become the whispers of a mouse.

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body

On Sunday, our family was invited to go out on a friend’s boat which gave me a wonderful opportunity to do a practice swim in the open water, a lake. Once again, a whole other animal than swimming in the pool with it’s tidy clear water, walls and lane markers.

I was scheduled to do a 5-mile run, so I did that before we left. I won’t bore you with the details but I ordered asked nicely for my husband and our friend to please do certain things to help make this swim close to the conditions I’m going to face at the actual race – like having to swim out and having to navigate around an object that will be like a buoy. Besides rounding up 400 other people to swim around with me, they did a great job.

It was actually kind of interesting to have my husband and my kids in a boat 10-20 yards ahead of me watching me in case I showed signs of drowning. My 8-yr old son asked me about three times if I was OK. I told him I was OK, but it was really hard. The fact that I could even respond was quite a feat.

Since the boat doesn’t have an odometer, we marked the distance based upon my swim time from the duathlon. Bottom line – I did it and I didn’t stop this time (like I did at the duathlon)! My husband was kind enough to jump in the lake with me with about 1/3 the distance left, and swim in my proximity to help me experience another swimmer in the water. While we were out there together, with my head above the water doing breaststroke, I asked him if the dock was getting further away or if I was somehow swimming backwards. Funny how that phenomenon happened during the duathlon too. Anyway, he assured me that was not the case.

Unbeknownst to me, he had decided to race me in to the finish. I somehow beat him! A little while later he told me that his arms were pretty sore. Um, really!?!?!?

While on the boat, both kids told me, after one of the times they were out swimming/playing around in the lake, that they could never do a triathlon, which of course led me to my – you can do anything you set your mind to speech.

On another note, I have realized that I don’t push myself enough when I’m swimming. In both training in the pool and swimming in the lake Sunday, I easily give up on freestyle and go to breaststroke to give myself a break. I’m not sure why that is. As competitive and athletic I’ve been my entire life, I guess the older I get, the less I seem to push myself.

It’s weird because I know darn well that freestyle is a lot faster than breaststroke is. It would help me finish the swim portion of the triathlon faster to get me on to bless-ed dry land. It could also keep me from getting trampled by the stronger swimmers who start in the wave after me. So I REALLY need to remind myself, both during training in the pool and when I’m out there for the race and I get that feeling of needing to take a break and go to breast, that I truly can push myself a little harder.

On an entirely different note, I just hit the 31- month binge-free mark and put another bead on my bracelet. Whoot!!

Last, but certainly not least, I am fortunate to be doing a two-part guest blog on the fabulous Healthy Girl blog today. Part 1 is running today. Check it out if you have a moment.

One Day at a Time... Nurture myself... Awareness... Letting Go... Listen to my Body