This here is Tecia Torres.
She’s an MMA fighter. She’s the same height as me, 5’1, and I just watched her weigh in for her fight against Namajunas who is about 4 inches taller…and Torres weighed 1lb more than her opponent.
116lbs.
I weigh 123.2lbs this morning.
Of course, I am not an MMA fighter. I don’t spend my entire day planning meals and training like a beast, probably never will be that fitness dedicated, but I am kinda on this journey of challenging myself. Its like a race to better myself, where the goal posts keep moving and I keep discovering something new about myself, a new strength that I never knew I was capable of. Its taken more time, but its taken a realistic amount of time, and as I progress, within me and without me, I am learning patience too.
It was, initially, me saying “I wanna look like THIS” with a picture of a woman with amazing abs, and my trainer saying, “Mmmm, yeeeesssssss, well, how long do you have?”
“In FOUR months!”
“Ah, yesssss…..hmm….I don’t think thats realistic”
(hey, I prize honesty now more than ever! Lol)
“What about in EIGHT months?”
“Yes, well…you COULD get there…but you would have to seriously tackle how you eat and what you eat and when you eat it…”
“Right, I am fucking READY! Lets do this!!!”
Of course, I am not ready. You are never ready! Lol.
I always tell people, shit or get off the pot. Don’t just sit there. Do something. Be proactive, not reactive. No point just sharing one fitness video or healthy smoothie recipe after another when you do not DO it! Drink that smoothie, but fucking make it first! Get off that couch, put down the remote, put down the bar of chocolate and get skipping, doing burpees, sprint training, anything, just do it.
I saw a meme the other day that said “If you keep eating what you are eating, you will keep weighing what you are weighing.”
Its true.
You may start your 20’s with Wendy’s and Burger King and that doesn’t bother you because you dance until 5am or you don’t have money to eat most days coz you partied it away, and you sleep way more than you need to, your body is doing great! You hit 30 and suddenly you find you gotto say no to pizza night, you start drinking more diet cocktails and champagne and you try to cut back and eat less carbs and shit…and maybe you start hitting the gym because you know you are finding it harder to keep the flab off, but you are doing ok, really…
Then you start to note your body slowing down even further, you begin to see salads as a good idea, you discover broccoli has protein in it…you start to research and learn about protein, you stop eating carbs at dinner…and still you find, fuck my life, I now need to work out just to stay alive, not to keep the fat off! What the hell will happen after 40?
I’ll tell you what. Things will get slower still. You will need even less to eat, less to drink, you will need to care about sleep like you never did before but you will find you can’t sleep as long as you did when you were young and full of energy to face your day!
My goal was to get to 40 in the best shape of my life.
My goal was also to walk the Camino de Santiago before I turned 40.
A newer goal was to finish my first triathlon before I turned 40.
But now I have the possibility of knee surgery, also before I turn 40, which could still have me in better shape than I have been for the last 10 years?
I have been holding off on accepting the reality of my knee injury, one I got at 19, in Texas, for…well, 20 years!
Now, I know, for sure, BOTH my fucking knees are damaged. I can feel it. The pain.
Yesterday I managed to talk to my friend who is in prison in Tennessee, and yep, he’s not meant to have a mobile phone or internet, but I won’t tell you how that call was possible. I just spent the entire call trying to sound upbeat while also being worried that he might get shanked for using a phone somewhere in the bathroom coz he’s currently housed (if you can call prison that) in a dorm like environment.
Anyway, he said, “Man, its like as if the moment I turned 40, my body just flipped a switch and everything started to break down!”
Do I understand what he’s talking about! Wow, do I!
I think as I headed into my 40th year, suddenly everything started to break down!
Well, I think last year summer, I came back from my trip to India and I weighed 67.5kgs.
I was like, “Right, this is it. No more” and you know, if you looked at pictures of me, its not like I looked terrible or fat. I look like me, maybe a little more round in the face…and I was still rocking my two piece at the pool like a brave mom (cringe)…and I think…what the hell, right?
But 67.5kgs is 148lbs for a 5’1 frame.
That is not light.
I was *THIS* close to 70!
I am amazed I wasn’t mouth breathing.
I had been doing Bikinifit for a few months, a crossfit group class, and then I got a back injury and had to take it easy.
Summer came, summer went…I traveled to India, France, Spain…and then came home to get serious about this weight I had been carrying around since Micah was born. Micah had already turned 2, so I was kinda like, dude, no excuses.
So I set myself the goal to get back to pre pregnancy weight, which, at the time, was 57kgs. I weighed 57kgs before Sasha, and was 57kgs before I got pregnant with Micah.
I began with a two week effort at Herbalife shakes and supplements. I was tired, weak, had gut issues, was so fucking hungry all the time…and my weight came almost instantly down to about 63kgs. 2 weeks, I lost 4 kgs.
But then I was like…fuck this. I can’t starve and have the shits for the next several months while I bring my weight down, I need to start eating healthy, eat real food, and do the time, the hard work and sweat.
I began training on my own at the gym, walking outdoors, swimming, running up stairs, skipping…all while my thighs rubbed together and chaffed…my armpits would end up with friction burns coz my chunky arms would rub on the inside against my chest. I would sweat so much that I could practically taste it.
I signed up for JAB and the structural functional strength training and almost overnight, with the pre training “metabolic reset” detox plan which had me eating only greens for 14 days (of which I really only survived 10 days), I lost an additional 3 kilos.
I started the JAB program weighing about 60kgs, thereabouts.
And now, at the end of my second cycle, I weigh 56kgs, thereabouts.
I am leaner, I notice that my clothes fit me better, many of my clothes are now ill fitting because they are loose, and some of the clothes I never dreamed I could fit into, I do. But most importantly, I am amazed that I have managed to stay the course this long!
My initial foray into crossfit was with Crossfit Typhoon. It was a proper crossfit box, with prerequisite hot guys that overtrained. But for reasons that were multitude, from a break up of a friendship and me not wanting to see that person daily (some woman I was friends with who just became so hostile that it made it impossible to face that daily) to the very real problem of stress incontinence…a bladder control issue that was made more obvious when doing box jumps, skipping, squatting with super heavy weights…I had to say no to that and I got into long distance running (well, more like jogging/walking) instead.
Surprisingly, except towards the last pounding 5 kilometers of a 21K, I managed to survive the long distance running a little better than the box jumps and such, but pounding pavement also had an impact on by bladder.
I faced the reality of surgery for putting a rubber band around my urethra, and then the greater reality of how it may not fully fix my problem. I thought, seriously? I am gonna spend 90K on a surgery that may not fix the problem completely? Will I ever be able to hit up a trampoline park without a maternity pad? You may laugh, but it was no laughing matter at the time!
So I thought, come on, maybe even if I lose weight, it will be less pressure on my bladder, right?
So it was that, more than anything, that made me get serious about losing the weight. The fact that my body was slowly falling apart around me and that I was doing very little to fix it, or fix it with some real effort.
Losing weight does not come easy.
It comes with serious moments of hunger, emotional struggle against temptation and bad days, food is such a drug that many people don’t realize how much comfort they got from it until they don’t have it in their lives as much.
Yesterday my son wanted to get a frozen yogurt and I said, why the hell not, we were wandering the mall, just the two of us, and I said, sure.
Well, we got one cup each…I had two spoons of mine and then I gave him the rest of mine. I no longer enjoyed it. I remember it being so enjoyable once…
But suddenly…it just wasn’t! It was just sugar and yogurt, frozen, with creme brulee flavored syrup added (I bet) and terrible, unnatural tasting milk chocolate shavings on top.
Ugh.
He loved it, totally got brain freeze from eating his portion and mine, fast as fuck.
But yeah…weird.
Its true. You begin to eat less, you begin to eat healthier choices, and over time, your taste buds completely change. Your body, well, maybe not your body, your brain (!) begins to crave only good food. Or wait, not even crave, your brain just expects and enjoys good clean food.
You don’t want sugar, you don’t even get joy from pizza anymore…and you think, to think back then, I was like “How can you call that living???”
But I don’t feel denied, I don’t feel like I am missing out, I don’t feel like I am not living.
I am on this new program of meal replacements.
When I told my trainer I was going to start it, she looked genuinely upset about it…my boxing coach too, he looked like I was an idiot, “You know that shit is just a scam, right?”
And I said, “Well, if I never try it, I will never know if it works or not…and I am not going to quit in a week and say I tried…I am not that kind of person anymore!”
So I have done it one month so far. I started at about 58.7kgs (coz my weight had ticked up again, from taking it easy) to where I now weigh 55.9kgs.
One month, I have brought my weight down 3kgs.
Its been a slow and painful 3kgs…and the fight to the finish line gets harder with every cm off and every gram I get closer to my goal weight. My goal weight was 57kgs, initially, to come down to pre pregnancy weight, but I knew, realistically, that I was still 5kgs away from a healthy, ideal weight for my height.
So I set my goal for 52kgs…well, 50kgs, because that weight is kinda unrealistic (I weighed 50kgs before Jakob was born, so I was 20?). But I look now at Torres, the MMA fighter, and I think, she’s my height. At weigh in before a fight, she weighed 116lbs (about 52kgs) and then of course, after weigh in they eat and drink water and they weigh almost 10lbs more. So technically, if I were super fit, on a stupendously dedicated nutrition program, I could look like her.
My goal at the moment, my goal for turning 40 in the best shape of my life, is to be in the same sort of shape she is in, in the picture, and weigh what she weighs. I don’t think its an unrealistic goal. I think its very much attainable. If you asked me 10 years ago if that was attainable, the optimist in me would have said yes, but the realist in me would have said, fuck that, you will never do it!
But now, I am very much living a realistic life, working towards realistic goals, doing so in very real time…I would never have thought I would be capable of creating my own training schedule. I would never have thought I could bring my weight down the way I have. I would never have thought I could stick with a meal replacement program for a month and still intend on doing so for an additional 3 months until I finish the 16 weeks of the challenge. There were so many “Never” factors in my life before and now I don’t see too many things as being impossible.
Initially I thought I owed this level of dedication or even this need to “see things through to the end” to my having been put on meds for ADD, but actually, thats not entirely true. Will power is like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. It may take you months before you notice the difference, and sometimes, others notice the difference before you do, but at some point you notice it too and then you gain confidence in your ability and your willingness to do this thing you once thought you disliked, it kinda becomes second nature.
Exercise has become a part of my life. Eating right, its become a part of my life. Little by little, drinking less often has also become a part of my life. One day, it won’t feel so abnormal to view my life without a drink. Of course, at this stage I still enjoy the occasional chance to drink a few glasses of wine…but I can see how one day I will be able to phase that out completely. Nothing happens overnight, but when I look at the person I was 10 years ago, hung over and sleeping under my work desk…I have in fact come a long way since then.
When I look at how for me wakeboarding used to be something that made my arms hurt, I realize that if I did it now, I probably wouldn’t feel any pain in my arms the next day.
When I think of how I used to view 20 mins on a crosstrainer as a workout…well, or that I hated burpees and couldn’t do 5 without needing a break…I have in fact come a long fucking way.
I am strong, not just physically, I am strong mentally. I can actually finish what I start. I can succeed at what I put my mind to. I would never have been that person that had this much faith in myself if it hadn’t been for me signing up for my first half-marathon. That was the first time I said, you know what, lets just do this, finish this, start something and finish it, and it proved to me I could. Actually, thats not true…I think it goes further back than that.
Going back to University.
I went back to University when I turned 30…I went back to finish what I started, an undergraduate degree…and when I graduated at last, at 32, I felt, wow, I am not a loser. I am not that person who leaves everything unfinished. Of course, I had always been a hard worker but I had never had that same level of confidence in my ability to see things through to the end. Somewhere in the back of my mind was always my Mothers voice, chiding me about how I was a quitter, how I never finished what I started, how I quit jobs if I disliked them, and how I was never prepared.
Well, I know now that I am not that person. I know now that all those people who thought I was, they just made me believe it too.
I work hard for everything I put my mind to, and now I know I am capable of working hard even at things I am not good at. I don’t give up, I persevere, I see it to the end, and even if I disliked it, I learn from it.
Everything…the education, the running, the crossfit, the weightloss, the whole mission to see visible abs…its all going to be seen through to the end, I don’t give a shit how long it takes! I will make these abs, like the ones Torres is rocking, and I will make them in the kitchen, because thats where they are made. If it takes me another year, so be it, but ideally, I would like to see this happen by the time I hit my 40th birthday!
Goals are set so as to have something to work towards. No point just saying you will do something and never doing it. Work towards something at all times. Keep your mind and body active. Its the best way to combat depression.
I want to work my way towards eventually being in such a good frame of mind and to harness my ability to concentrate, be it through meditation or yoga or whatever the fuck, that I no longer need to take the ADD meds (which, by the way, seem to give me adrenal fatigue and make me feel burned out by the end of most days). Its interesting because the longer I take the meds, the easier it has become for me to be able to focus and get the job done even when I am not on them! Its like its trained me to believe I can complete a task and focus, and so I just immediately do, even without them. Of course, I am not driven like a work horse the way I am when I am on them, but I still get shit done.
Lucky for me they didn’t affect my appetite or my sleep patterns. Basically, they work for me. But yeah, I don’t know or like the possibility of long term side effects that could be part and parcel of the use of such kind of prescribed pharmaceuticals, so I would say that I am going to revisit that issue after a year on them and then see how I am coping before I choose whether to go without them or to remain on them.
Like I said, I manage to avoid anxiety and depression when I am on them. But I am finding that taking adaptogens help me immensely with anxiety, and taking 5HTP and melatonin seem to help me combat depression. Still…lets see how I go.
So my goals for now? 3 more months to visible abs! 10 weeks to stay on the program, the meal replacement/intermittent fasting program and to bring my weight down to 116lbs! 52kgs.
Fighting weight.
Lean, mean, fitness machine.
Of course, we have to see what the deal is with the knee surgery and when it happens. That doesn’t seem to be avoidable.
So basically, I just checked and I have been on the program 6 weeks come Tuesday. So that would mean I have 10 weeks left. Which would mean I complete the 16th week on or about the 28th of June, which would be about the time that the kids summer holidays begin. Yeah, that’s a good time. Doesn’t mean I would “take a vacation” from the plan, but it means that its a good time frame to work towards.
End June.
Good stuff.
Goals, goal posts set, and once I get there, I can move the goal posts again 🙂 Always moving!
Me, Myself & I 