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It is time for a ‘Glow Up’
Belly floof. Pudgy arms. Thunder thighs. Every area of your body does not look the way you want it to. You keep showing up daily, but you are disheartened. There isn’t 100% to give anymore; you feel like just being there has to count for something. Sleep wins sometimes; more often than you would like. You are mentally and emotionally (and let’s face it — physically) exhausted. The scale creeps up, a few pounds at a time. Bending over to tie your shoes gets more and more uncomfortable. When this happens to me, my brain goes right to those awful thoughts. Thoughts about my worth, or whether I deserve to…
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There are cows that can jump over the moon…
…And cows that can’t make it over a fence. For the past few months, I have been the latter cow. Stagnant. Stuck. Spinning my wheels with nothing to show for it. What is my fence? Some of this is my own fault. I’ll admit I wasn’t as focused on the habits that would get me closer to my desired results. I let the stressors of life get in the way of my routines. Life is always stressful in some way, we build our routines to work for us in times of stress so we don’t spend the mental energy thinking about it. I did an extremely poor job building those…
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Collect those raindrops
Life hits you at the strangest moments. As I was driving my daughter to school in the pouring rain, I looked up into a street light. The rain drops seemed to flow down to the earth in super slow-motion, and I could see individual drops, not merely sheets of a downpour. Seeing all of those individual droplets made me think about flooding…and I realized something. An individual droplet won’t cause a flood. It is an annoyance — but it doesn’t change its surroundings except to make them a little bit wet. Unless there are millions of droplets…the environment doesn’t change much. Millions of droplets, however, cause huge changes in their…
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If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it
We all have those days, weeks…months?…where we feel frustrated. Where we are making all the “right” moves toward our goals, but not exactly getting where we want to be. It’s complicated, and there is so much data to look at. How do you measure your progress? The Dreaded Scale Many people have a love/hate relationship with this device. It is the most common way to measure progress with health. The problem is, most people have a “weekly weigh-in” and don’t take into account the daily changes our body goes through. What you ate for dinner, how much water you are retaining, whether you have had a bowel movement…these all play…
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Keep it simple, even though it’s complicated
You know what to do. Honestly, we ALL know what to do. In an effort to keep it simple, here goes: eat right, exercise, sleep, keep stress to a minimum. It’s simple, really. Except then you start ruminating on all the different ways people determine the “right” way to eat. How often and what type of exercise? How much sleep? And what exactly is a minimum amount of stress? You get deeper into the world of fitness and you just end up with more questions than you started with. And strangely enough, the miracle cure for one person may not work for you. And what works for you may not…
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Half the battle
Day 37 of 75 Hard has come and gone. I am a little less than halfway through. I have persevered through another road trip, turned down cake at my nephew’s birthday party (even though I heard it was very good cake from my daughter, who happily ate my piece), survived a swarm of mosquitoes even though I’m still itchy from the fray, and even–gasp!–worked out all alone for two of the past 16 days. My parents’ neighbor probably thinks I’m extremely weird, as I huffed and puffed my way through a strength workout in the driveway (with said mosquitoes) at 5 am. I’m sure many people in my life find…
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36,000 Minutes
How do you measure your progress? In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee? ☕️ (Sing along now, y’all). Check Ins In Camp Gladiator we celebrate check ins. Getting up, getting out of bed, getting dressed, remembering hygiene 🤣 (deodorant is important), and making it to the workout daily makes us feel accomplished. 💪 We celebrate check in #1, #50, #100, the same way we celebrate check in #1000+. We celebrate the same way because showing up your first day is just as difficult as showing up on day 1000 (sometimes even more so). Getting started is a struggle. Staying disciplined is a struggle. It is a struggle…
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Day 21 is over and done
AKA how to do 75 Hard while moving your kid to college. (Maybe this was why I was in a funk all week!) Top Ten Takeaways from Dorm Move In Find a lot of rest stops. That gallon of water is NO JOKE. Buc-ees for the win! Make sure to pack extra snacks so you know you have something to fall back on. Dorm move in counts as a workout. Count your wins! You followed your diet, didn’t cheat, and didn’t stress eat or head to the nearest Mexican restaurant and order the “biggest beer you have” as we overheard one frazzled dad doing at lunch. 🤪 (You also didn’t…
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Never Miss a Monday
How you start your week is how you’ll finish it. Start with excuses, build on those excuses. Start with action, build on that action. i.e. NEVER MISS A MONDAY. Showing up is half the battle Picture Monday morning. Your alarm clock is blaring. Instead of jumping out of bed, you hit “snooze” and roll over for 9 more minutes of glorious sleep. (Why it is 9 minutes and not an even 10, I’ll probably never figure out). That alarm blares again in what FEELS like 2.5 seconds. On autopilot, you keep “snoozing” until you miss your opportunity to execute your perfect morning routine. You might even end up late for…
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The C-Word
Everyone knows they need it, most of the time it eludes them. Why do people let distractions detract from their goals, and how do you make sure it doesn’t happen to you? What is the word? Consistency. How do we get it? I don’t know. Before True Consistency A few years ago, I subscribed to another C-Word. That word is comfortable. With a splash of coffee (sorry–had to say it). I sat around drinking a lot of coffee. I consistently yo-yo dieted. I felt sluggish and lethargic. My clothes didn’t fit, and I consistently went up in size (but I blamed the clothing manufacturers instead of my habits). I liked sugar,…
