44 days remaining

It's Day 11. Where are you with your goals?

The goals I CAN control are going beautifully. I added 2.5 extra hours of cardio this week (my goal is boot camp 5x + 1 extra hour of cardio/week) and I also added two yoga sessions this week. My food has been good, but real. Sometimes I don't feel like looking at, and certainly I don't feel like sharing what I'm eating. Perhaps it's the real days that are even more important to investigate.

Here's yesterday:

B: 2 cups lemon water (big surprise), 1 tub egg white salad (another shocker!), 1 cup cheerios, 1 cup mixed blueberries & strawberries, 1 pkg. splenda, 1/2+ cup 1% milk.

L: green salad (arugula, romaine) with 1/2 large bell pepper, and 1/2 small red onion. 1 tub egg white salad and left over tuna made with lite mayo, fuji apple, onion, celery and Bubbie's dill relish. I had this with a little light balsamic vinaigrette (about 2 T) and 3 light rye wasa crackers. I ate this on the sand at the beach with visions of mint Oreo cookies dancing right before my eyes as Lucy's kids blithely partook...and then they partook of delicious puffy, orangey, salty, not-at-all-organic Cheetos...oh, how I love Cheetos. I resisted those too. Somehow. And I went into the ocean. Which was Icelandic. So I went for a walk with Noah to the nearest pier. It was far. It took us an hour. On the walk I found two PERFECT sand dollars. Ok, one had been shot and the wound had festered, but it was intact aside from the bullet hole (in case you're wondering it was NOT a bullet hole...but it was festered and bullet-hole shaped...from a very tiny gun...anyway.) The other was slightly larger and perfect. It is exceedingly rare to find a whole sand dollar so I am taking it as a good sign. And Noah was a good walking partner. We even sprinted for a bit...it's like magic how awesome a day I had.

Dinner was 2/3rds of a Bay City Imports Godmother with the works. OMG I love Bay Cities and I go every time I need olive oil or am on the west side. It was after 4 and the line was longer than usual, then I overheard a very full-o-herself twenty-something talking about how Bay Cities had been on the Food Network and that's why it was so crowded...and I'm thinking, "it's always this crowded" and then she asks Nancy Newcomer if it was her first time and Nancy Newcomer says, "yes, I heard about this place on Food Network" and I'm like oh crap...Kristen McJudge-y was too harsh with full-o-herself twenty-something-and-loves-the-sound-of-her-own-voice. So, I was schooled.

Traffic on the 405 at 5pm was le poopoo so I ate a bit of my sammich and later when I was at my AIM group (Allied in Meditation--I made this group and this name up...let me know if you want to join, we're starting again in October or so)--we always have dinner so I had some of Carol's delicious shrimp salad and some tomato slices, a slice of the bread from Green Street (that's thick as a bike tire but WAY more delicious) and a third cup or so of raspberries.

So I'm eating what the nutritionist told me to eat and I'm enjoying eating it at various times and with friends. My other goal of meditating is happening very nicely. I haven't meditated today, but yesterday I made it to 14 minutes. The thing is I explored my three questions during meditation yesterday. The three questions are: Who am I? What do I want? and What is my purpose? I was taught to take one full breath on each question and then let it go. But yesterday I thought, man, I've been doing this for several months, how about I check in with myself and see what my answers are to these questions. Long story ... I found myself FINALLY having the courage to say, "I want to be thin." I have never allowed myself to want this. I even tried to think it twice this morning before it would come into the center of my attention and coalesce. And I think it is in part because I was raised in an environment where looks were everything--more than health, more than being a good person, more than moving responsibly into the role of adult. And there was terrible, evil, wicked, narcissistic vanity in my home. I wanted none of that. Truthfully, I wanted to be beautiful but under-tended Cinderella...a natural beauty. I guess some things, like a healthy body, are worth working toward and achieving.

So, there it is. A good day by every standard. I met my goals for the day, for the week and woo-freaking-hoo, I had a breakthrough as the result of my meditation.

How are YOU doing? Breakthroughs? Hard work happening? Discouraged? Amazed? What's stopping you? What's propelling you?

YOU deserve the best.