my best shot

You know, I plan to start things all the time.

Start an exercise program, start a study program, start a new eating plan, start….

And I procrastinate, I procrastinate until I am practically crapping myself because I am right on the cusp of having to make it happen and I have yet to frikken start.

I am so full of pent up anxiety and then I just go for the gold.

And three days in I am thinking, why the fuck didn’t I go for this sooner?

I could have achieved so much more if only I had gone for it sooner!

But then, you see, some people are born planners. Some people are born ready.

I am not one of them.

I wish I could plan shit, but I don’t. I would be so much better organized if I could just plan something, but I work best under pressure. Pressure I put on myself, of course, not anyone else to blame but me, but I assure you, that without that pressure, I would not produce.

I went back to university in my 30’s and I can assure you that I was on the Dean’s list throughout my time there. I managed to get into one of the top universities in Japan, I graduated with a GPA of 3.9 and the only class I would have made a B on was for something like Ancient Japanese Architecture coz the teacher was a complete idiot and I absolutely detested going to class!

I didn’t get good grades because I was a swot, I got good grades because when push came to shove, when I had to be prepared for something, I was able to prepare for it to the final minute detail, with only a day to spare.

I could sit on a paper and sit on it some more, and then three days before it was due, I would practically be shitting myself about how I would ever manage to get it done with my brain as scattered as it was…but I would do it and I would hand in something I was proud of.

I used to always put myself down when I was younger. This mostly because I believed my mother when she said, “You have so much potential, but you waste it.”

Waste it.

I believed her.

I know my mother was only saying what any tiger mom would say in the hope of motivating a stubborn, foot dragging kid, but back then I didn’t see it that way. I simply believed her that I wouldn’t amount to much. I believed her that I was smart, no doubt, but I also believed her that I would waste my potential, and that belief became the cornerstone of the first three decades of my life.

Even if I succeeded, even if I knew I did so by hard work and grit, I never believed it was my doing, I always believed there was some sort of “luck” involved. Like somehow I had managed to cheat fate and I lucked out with a good job, lucked out with becoming a manager at 23, lucked out with becoming a teacher, lucked out with becoming broker support…just…lucked out.

Lucked out with learning to motocross, lucked out with learning to wakeboard, lucked out with learning to snowboard…

All these things, every task, even the things I did in my free time, I never credited myself as being particularly skilled.

I learned to revel in the joy of doing rather than the joy of achieving.

Does that make sense?

Its why I speak of finding my “Zen” on the slopes last winter.

I found this little ball of energy, all Goku like, in my gut, deep in my chest like it was hiding behind my heart…and it was a feeling of exhilaration so pure that I had to take a moment and just breathe deep. This is what it felt like to be in control. Of course, it was just a discovery of being in control of my board, after 7 years of snowboarding, I discovered what that really felt like, to not feel fear, to just be in the flow, to feel like it was me and I knew exactly where I was going and how to get there.

I had achieved skill.

I had achieved confidence in my ability, in my body, in my mind over my body…and I had done that myself, me, I did that. No one did it for me.

This is the thing I have come to realize about so many things in my life.

My children, every morning, the two little ones, they come climbing into bed when they wake around 6am, they crawl and climb and overlap and overwhelm me like nothing on this earth and I love every minute of it…I live for the morning moments, even if I am absolutely beat. I live for the nose rubs, our eskimo kisses, I live for the requests for fluttering eyelash butterfly kisses that tickle…I live for these kids. And they always get around to taking turns to rub at my belly and say, “Mama has a wobberley belly!”

Yep, I used to be quite sensitive about it before. When you are a mere five foot one and you have managed to birth three kids, your belly has been out there and back and out there and back and out there and back….and no matter how hard you hit the gym and how hard to try to eat right and no matter what frikken diet you try this week or the next, that belly that got all stretched out three times over while you carried life into the world, well, its just fucked, thank you very much!

Sure, it looks awesome if you lie down, or if you are standing up and you tense your gut real hard, or if you avoid carbs so you don’t retain water, but you know as soon as you lie down in a bath, chillaxing in that magnesium bath salt laden bath, you see your wobberley belly floating away all care free at the top of the water!

You know what, I used to hate looking at it. Hated it because it was something I wanted gone, I wanted to have those flat abs and the six pack and the fitness model physique, but now I feel like, you know what? Fuck this shit. I eat right, I work out, I do everything I can to try to get this belly in check but I completely neglect to realize that this belly has been to hell and back with these babies! I’ve been cut open, I’ve been stretched all over, I have had to be on bedrest for months on end with a gut full of human!! I need to chill the fuck out and just admire my wobberley belly! (I say those words in my head with my littlest sons voice, like, every time! Lol. He’s got this indian type way of saying the “w” kinda round and super cute!)

I did this.

Me.

I birthed these boys.

I carried them in my wobberley belly.

I work out, I may not always feel the pull of the gym as strong as I would like, but I fucking go nonetheless.

I may start an eating plan to cut down and then quit 3 days later, but I always come back to the drawing board and buckle back down again.

I went for another DEXA scan, its a pretty good scan that can tell you more accurately than any other measuring device, exactly how much muscle, how much fat and how much bone you have. The last time I went for a scan was last December.

Thats 9 months ago.

In that time I damaged my meniscus, tore it in two places, I had no ACL, I had to stop training with my group at JAB because I simply couldn’t do most of the exercises we would do together. I had MRI’s for the knee, MRI’s for my liver, I was freaking out about the liver, there was summer vacation away for a month and a half, I had surgery, I was sick before and after, had almost 5 rounds of various antibiotics, and my immune system has been pretty shot to shit…

And in all that time, I have gained 1 kg.

1kg could be as simple as me going for my DEXA in the afternoon vs the morning.

And my bodyfat percentage showed I had gone up 1%.

Thats all.

Through a considerable part of inactivity, holidays away, and an immune system on the fritz…over 9 months, my total weight gain was 1kg.

I did ok by me.

I keep thinking I gain, I lose, I gain, I lose…and I gain again…and I go and lose…but the point is, I always come back to the effort of watching what I eat and I always come back to exercise because I know how it helps me with combating my feelings of being low.

The guy who did my scan was actually very impressed that I had essentially managed to maintain a pretty consistent weight for 9 months, considering I had lost almost 12 kgs, it was no small feat that I had maintained as close to the numbers of my last weigh in, muscle mass and bone density as well.

I got this scan so that I know where I can go from here. I will do another scan in 4 months, maybe 6…I just want to challenge myself as I always do, but also, I want to keep myself accountable. Without that, without the support of my friends, my husband, and even my kids…I wouldn’t be able to do any of this because I would be alone in it and I would be lacking in motivation because of it.

My current fixation is lifting heavy…and getting my immune system back on track.

I am sick of waiting for doctors to tell me what is ok and what isn’t.

My physiotherapist has really pushed me to “listen to my body” and to not think all pain is a bad thing. So I have taken his advice to heart and I have been lifting heavy while listening closely to pain the next day and the day after that.

Everything has been telling me that I am doing fine. If anything, I am not even doing the damn physio recommended exercises for hamstrings and such, I have been coming up with my own and I have been finding the heavy lifting to be very beneficial to those very muscles being activated and slowly becoming stronger. I am not doing hamstring curls because I know that shit would possibly rip my damn hamstring to shreds, I know the pains I feel and I know how that part of my leg feels, and I know, for sure, right now I am not ready. I am not ready for a full deadlift.

As for my immune system, I have turned to juicing.

I have always looked at juicing as being a poor mans cheating fasting diet…but reality is, its far from cheap! Buying that much veg and chucking it in a juicer every frikken day, its costing a bomb and I am having to go to 4 different places to actually source all the veggies I can use in the damn juices.

Put it this way, Celery is part of what they call “The Dirty Dozen” one of the veggies with the most pesticides, so best to buy organic, but regular celery is about HKD9 for a bunch…and the organic celery is HKD59! So you do the math. One juice for myself and the man will use about half a head of celery…and then there are all the other veggies and fruits to add in too.

I started juicing three days ago because I was at my wits end. I was suffering from a full blown flu, I had no place to turn because I didn’t want to go the path of antibiotics again, being as I believe its what put me in this position in the first place. Only a week prior I had recovered from a horrendous 4 weeks of sore throat by chomping on fermented garlic every morning and night…and my garlic supply was almost down to nothing.

So I decided to juice. Green juices. I had just watched two documentary movies by some Australian guy named Joe who was fat as fuck and then juiced his way out of auto immune disease. Of course, that guy drank only juice for 2 months straight, I am here after 3 days and already ready to fucking eat McDonalds when I think about doing this for another day!

But the reality is, my flu is gone. I can breathe again. I sleep like a log. I am not crabby or suffering from any sort of detox symptoms because the reality of it is that I don’t eat crap. We do eat a very much whole foods type diet. Our coffee and even tea is always decaf…and we don’t use sugar in anything. I don’t consume much in the way of dairy…if anything we use rice milk, oat milk, almond milk or coconut milk with our overnight soak oats, if we have any. So no detox symptoms, no hunger other than the emotional kind (you know, when all you wanna do is just fucking CHEW some real food!)

They say the first 3 days are the hardest.

Its not been that hard, but I defo feel like I could do with a nice salad with beans in it.

I have decided to sign up for this online certificate course through Cornell University. Its a course with Dr. T Colin Campbell and its all about plant based nutrition and its effect on our bodies, our ecosystem and our lives as families…I feel like I need to know more before I head down that path. I don’t care much for going the path of vegetarian coz I am not a huge fan of dairy to begin with, but also, I just feel like there is a certain degree of cognitive dissonance that needs ignoring if I continue to eat eggs that I know come from cage farmed chickens, regardless of whether they are Japanese chickens or not.

Ever since I saw this video about pigs and hog farms…I have literally been completely put off buying bacon. Do I think bacon tastes awesome? Sure! Absolutely. But I just…I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t justify buying bacon when I know how much biological waste goes into the lakes around hog farms, when I know how the families living in the vicinity are affected by the stench, and when I know how the pigs are kept. There is no such thing as humanely keeping pigs so they can be slaughtered for bacon or other shit…and people eat a tonne more bacon now than they ever did when we were kids. Heck the paleo diet is all hurrah on bacon, as is every other low carb diet.

I just can’t.

So if I can’t do bacon, then how can I do pork chops? Right? I am not a huge fan of pork chops anyway. Even my love of ribs, its all about the cooking of it, having my special way to cook it…and seeing others enjoy it…and I take great pride in cooking them…but argh, I have to be honest with you, I have slowly but surely lost my joy in eating them. I no longer see them as supremely tasty ribs, I see them as the ribs of an animal…and I come right back to the fucking bacon scenario in my head!

Where once I used to love steak, even that is kinda a means to an end now. Like, “I have to eat more protein, easy choice, steak” but then its an expensive choice, especially if organic, and really, I wouldn’t eat any other, not in this day and age…and then its something I am supposedly treating myself to if its at those prices…and then I have to think, is this really me giving myself a treat? Is this what a treat is meant to be?

Its like…somewhere in my brain is a loose wire thats just sparking constantly, I know I don’t need to overthink this shit until I am losing my mind, but I do. I think about a lot of these things. I think about Fukushima, I think about it being the worst nuclear disaster in history, I think about how I can’t trust the government to tell the truth, and I think about how in 5 years since the disaster there has been a noted increase of radiation throughout the pacific ocean and its lapping America now. And that powerstation is still churning radiation into the ocean, daily, coz they have no means to stop the problem, no means to fix it.

Do I still want to eat fish?

No.

Have I ever eaten a lot of fish in the past?

Not really, mainly coz I don’t like to cook fish, I like small fish, I cook it more than I would do big fish. I used to buy salmon before, but its gotten simply too expensive, plus everything I read about farmed salmon just puts me off…and reality is, sadly, wild salmon just doesn’t taste as good. Its like…gamey! And also, if you read about how wild salmon are getting cancer because they have to swim up tributaries that have salmon farms all up and down them…well, you won’t really want to eat wild salmon either.

Yes, I may be overthinking things, or maybe I am simply thinking about things.

Many people choose to ignore the cognitive dissonance, about how we can no longer trust our governments to have our best interests in mind. How we can’t trust labelling laws. How we can’t really trust what we put in our childrens belly.

I use non-fluoride, non-sls toothpaste for myself and my kids…I used to have insane gum ulcers that would flare up and stay for a month at a time, those painful sores are so fucking stubborn! And then I read about SLS, Sodium Lauryl Sulphate…a foaming agent…and how this and whitening agents in most commercial branded toothpaste can cause gum ulcers. I stopped using these toothpastes and just like that, no more gum ulcers. Before, it was almost every month or so that I was complaining about the pain. I would blame it on a lack of B vitamins or not enough water or not enough sleep or some other shit…but nope…it was the SLS.

I don’t use deoderant. Haven’t used any since my 20’s when I found out about aluminum and other cancer causing chemicals in them. Oh sure, initially I tried to use “mineral sticks” or whatever tree hugger nonsense was out there, but then I thought, what? Fuck this.

Many of these things actually cause you to have the overgrowth of odor causing bacteria. I simply don’t have that problem anymore. If summer rolls around and if I am training a lot, I shower more often and I ensure I consume parsley in my meals…done. If that isn’t tree huggery enough, I don’t know what is!

Ugh. So I have a deadline to meet, tomorrow, tax accountant shit, website shit…and its almost 9pm.

If I go to bed now, force myself to, and wake at 4:30am, like I have been seeing this one dude on Instagram do because he gets more out of his day that way…I could get that shit done, all of it!

Either that or I stay awake all night working on it.

Mmm…

I am not a night owl, I am a morning person.

4:30am is fucking early, but it is only a little before 5am, and I kinda wake every morning around 5am wondering when the kids are gonna come wake me…so I think I can hack this.

Then I can make it to the gym once they are awake and having breakfast, drop them to school after gym, then work some more, hit up the bank to pick up my internet banking security device and pin, then come home to pick them up from school….then do more work before heading to my accountants to give her all the documents she has been waiting on, banking and otherwise.

Yep, this can be done.

I have avoided taking my ADD meds for almost 4 days now, partly coz of the juicing but also coz I wasn’t feeling well and I didn’t feel I needed it, but I will take it tomorrow at 4:30am and just fucking go for the gold.

As last minute as it may seem, I am so ready for it.

I have been working steadily at it, but the truth is I haven’t had the fire under my ass…or more honestly, I haven’t had the dedicated time to do it.

Kids are a full time job.

Before when someone asked me, “So what do you do?” I used to say, “Nothing!”

Now…now I just avoid meeting anyone new so I don’t have to hear that dumbass question and I don’t have to explain myself for the millionth time.

I am a mom. I wish I had an office to go to so I could actually get work done. I wish I had a desk to call my own where I wouldn’t feel guilty for being there and loving it. I wish I didn’t have to put all my shit in a safe just so I wouldn’t have tiny hands all over my stock and supplies…but this here is my life. I made this. I am proud of it. I own it.

My little monsters…I made them too…I am so proud of my accomplishments.

I am a mom, and I am gonna own that shit, wobberley belly and all, procrastination and all, juicing and drooling over McDonalds and all.

All of it.

Own it. 🙂