Thankful Thursday # 33

Without any ados, here are is my reasons to be grateful this week:

1. My boyfriend. I share my life with a wonderful human and that's always worth mentioning.
2. Working from home. I've been feeling under the weather, so it's great to have the option of stay indoors in comfy wear.
3. Food delivery. Again, it's great that I can just order food in and not have to face the elements outside. Or have to cook when I can barely hold it together.
4. Sunny days. It's so much easier to be cooped up at home when it's sunny.
5. Having a spare bedroom. So you don't disturb your partner when you're coughing your lungs to shreds at 1am.
6. Having a sense of smell. My nose is going but I can still smell. That means that even though I feel like reheated death, the fact that my living space smells like a spa makes me feel less crappy.
7. Calm. It's easily one of my favourite apps. Especially when I am struggling to fall asleep.

Reminders on self-parenting

Early adulthood is all about finding your feet and your space. It's about learning what you can do without many constraints. It's discovering that you can have cereal for dinner without there being a parent to tell you off. You can stay up way past your bedtime with no repercussions beyond your lack of sleep the following day. Leave your room in a mess and spend all your disposable income on books instead of putting something aside in your savings. Without those pesky parents the sky is the limit.

And as your grow (not much) older, as you settle into adulthood in your own terms you realize that you still need some degree of parenting, except now it's on you to parent yourself. You need to figure out what boundaries and rules to put in place, and you need to know why you've put them there.

It has been a very hard earned lesson that sometimes there is a huge difference between what I want and what I need. And furthermore that it's on me to ensure I cater to the former before I indulge in the latter. What I want is to binge watch a show on Netflix, but what I need is to first take the time to ensure I am okay. That I am centered and that there is nothing more pressing to do before opening that promising tab on my laptop. It's on me to stop myself in between episodes and ask myself if there is anything else more productive I should be doing with my time before I hit play again. It's on me to know I probably won't stop the binge by myself and therefore I need to set a timer on my phone so I don't waste an afternoon way. I need to know this. I am my own parent now.

This isn't some inspirational post, it's just a reminder to myself. I think we all need one from time to time.

Finding your inner gym bunny

A friend of mine recently said she wished she was more like me and came to the gym regularly. She said her problem was that she didn't enjoy working out. But here is the truth of it: I don't either. I have been coming to the gym several times a week, every week for three years and I have yet to wake up once excited about the prospect of working out. It just doesn't happen. Ever.

Here is what I have learned in the last few years:

1. Motivation is a very fickle mistress. It comes and goes ever so swiftly. Most of the time all you have is yourself, your pigheadedness, your self-parenting (making you do the things you don't want to do), and the tools you develop along the way to make it all work for you. Don't get me wrong, having motivation is great! It's how you jump-start yourself into action. The thing is, once you're moving it will quickly leave you and you need to be prepared to step in once it does.

2. If you want to have the time, you have to make the time. For me this means getting up at stupid a.m. and doing my workout before work. I used to go to the gym after work, but more often than not I would skip it because something would get it in the way. I was too tired. I had to go to the post office before it closed. I was stuck in a meeting until late. I didn't feel like it. I was meeting a friend after work. The excuses were endless. So I do it before my life has a chance to get in the way and ruin it. No one emails me at stupid a.m. Everything is closed. The world is still asleep. Except for me.

3. Find ways to get in the way of your own failure. To me this means not showering the night before. I have lost track of how many times I got to the gym just because I needed to wash my hair and I ended up doing a short workout that invariably always turned into a normal workout. The same about my alarm; Yesterday Me is a bit of an over-achiever and she's the one who sets my alarm to stupid a.m. Every morning when the alarm goes off I curse her with the eloquence of a sailor on leave. I don't want to be awake that early, but since my sleep has already been disturbed, I need to do something with it. I am angry and I can't let it go to waste.

4. Parenting yourself is very much like parenting a real child. This means you'll need to find clever ways to trick yourself into doing what must be done. I frequently tell myself I just need to spend ten minutes on the treadmill, knowing full well that the moment I get started I'll find the joy and momentum to do the full thing. It also means that I have to listen to myself when the ploy doesn't work (otherwise it stops working altogether). So sometimes I do play rookie, and when I do I damn well make the most of it.

5. There's lots of good advice out there, but ultimately you need to find what works for you. One of the tips that keeps popping up is to sleep in your gym wear, so that when you wake up you are ready go. While I can see the logic behind this, this very much does not work for me. Sleep is sleep, not pre-anything. It's a time of rest that has been rightfully earned and it should be treated with the gravitas it deserves. Especially because I'm such a light sleeper, sleeping in active wear just wouldn't give me the restful sleep that I worked hard for. So find what works for you, be it waking up at stupid a.m or telling yourself it's just five minutes on the treadmill.

6. If you want to stick at it, you have to set your own metrics and celebrate your successes. How do you measure success? Is it the number on the scale coming down? Is it on your measurements? Is it on increased endurance? Maybe it's how much weight you can lift, or how big your reps are. Whatever it is, find your metric to success and be sure to celebrate even the smaller milestones on your way to your goal. I would love to measure my success on weight loss, but unfortunately my body holds on to fat like a clingy child pulling the mother of all tantrums, so weight loss happens at the end of everything else after weeks (months!) of hard work. This has taught me to be persistent with my goals and flexible on how I frame my progress. My goal is still a number on a scale, but since that is something I don't have complete control over, I make sure all my milestones are things that I can control and that I can see visible progress. I have a running log, so I can see progression on my cardio. I have a weightlifting goal, so I can work towards it. Celebrating the smaller successes help me keep motivated until the day when the scales finally start to shift. Because I won't quit until they do.

Finally, know this: in three-plus years since first being labelled a gym bunny, there still hasn't been a workout that I've regretted doing. You just have to break the first barrier and follow through.