Manning Up

Could you imagine being 5 years old and running barefoot for an hour to get to school - eyes wide and elated to be learning in a language you didn't understand? Or being given the all-clear after your chemo to have a future with your children? Really - could you? Then why not stop blaming everyone else for your being overweight? Have some discipline, get to a class and make the right choices. Yours are easy ones. Man up.

I saw this on Facebook published as a status from an instructor overseas. While I don't agree with her manner of delivery, and her presumption that being overweight is simply a 'lack of discipline' (in some cases that may be true, though I also know several thin people who are equally lacking discipline in maintaining a healthy lifestyle), she is right in that being overweight is a smaller problem to be overweight than it is to go through chemo, than to live in poverty, so forth.

However. Numerous surveys have shown that children would rather lose a parent, live through nuclear war, get cancer, go blind, than be fat. A brief look on the internet exposes you to pro-ana sites that proudly state that they would rather die of anorexic behaviour to be thin than live a life being fat.

When I was a kid I know I several times contemplated picking up a knife and slicing off a chunk of my stomach. Heck, even into my late teens and early 20s I would grab hold of my stomach and say "I wish I could just slice this off...". I don't know how many people thought this way, and I certainly am not speaking for everyone. I know though that I thought for a large portion of my life seriously did think that being fat was the worst thing that could happen to me. If I had cancer, or if I was blind, or whatever else, at least people would have sympathy for me.

For why I was fat as a kid, yes, I can probably point the finger of blame at my mother. She was the one responsible for making sure I was exposed to good nutrition - which, in hindsight, I wasn't. Now I am, though even though I am doing everything right, I am still fat. Telling me now to have some discipline, get to a class and make the right choices... yeah probably not the most helpful thing you can say.

Do not worry, I happen to not give a damn. I happen to now think that I'd rather be fat than lose a parent. I happen to now think that I'd rather be fat than to lose my sight. I happen to now think I'd rather be fat than to get cancer, or live through a nuclear war.

I also would much rather be fat than have a lack of perception and assume that overweight = sedentary.

If you are sedentary, that could be due to a lack of discipline. Overweight? That is a bit more complicated.

You don't know the story of every overweight person out there, so don't go around pretending you know what will 'fix' them. If you're not in their shoes, you have no idea what choices they are making and you have no idea of the life that they are living. Man up, and shut up.

Imma ask y'all a question...

...seeing as I'm having a bit of an insecure moment here.

The outfit. Yay or Nay?

OOPS! How did this get in my mouth?

All right everyone, hands up if you've been here.

Why I Choose Not To Diet

I choose not to diet because I don't need to look a certain way to enjoy what life has to offer.

I choose not to diet because I believe that monitoring your nutrition is more important than following some fad.

I choose not to diet because nutrition is more than weight loss.  It is energy levels, blood sugar, blood pressure, blood sugar, hydration, digestion, and so on.

I choose not to diet because food is not my enemy, it is just food.  It is both necessity and luxury.  It doesn't have an agenda, it is not out to get me, it does not have a personality.  It is there to nourish me, give me enjoyment and fuel me.

I choose not to diet because there is enough to stress out about in life without being consumed by the restraints of a diet.  More important things that require my attention are how I'm going to pay my bills, how I am going to support a friend who has lost a family member, how I'm going to go the extra mile in my job, how am I going to travel to new cities, new countries, meet new people, do new things.

I choose not to diet because I don't require adherence to a set of rules to establish my character. Nutrition, fitness and morals are not intertwined.   If I eat a carrot it does not make me a good person.  If I eat a carrot cake, it does not make me a bad person.  It just means I'm a person.  The food I eat does not define my personality.

I choose not to diet because there are many other benefits to exercise.  Benefits like stress relief, strength, cardiovascular endurance, improved energy, improved sleep, improved flexibility, and so on.  Whether weight loss comes with it or not, there are many other reasons to continue to exercise and these carry far more importance to me.

I choose not to diet because the process drives me to obsession.  I store my head and heart full of dieting information and there is no room for anything else.  No room to be sympathetic for a friend who is going through a hard time - for their hard time means nothing if all I am focused on is my diet.  No room to experience enjoyment in the way of a new activity, or new venture, or new journey - for the only priority that matters is the diet that I am following.

I choose not to diet because it restrains me socially.  It throttles my personality and places a wall around me.  All I can talk about is dieting, how many grams of carbs is in a food item, how many grams of fat is in a food item, how many grams of protein, how many milligrams of sodium.  If there is even a remote possibility of a place or event not having a food item where I did not know of its composition, I would hide from it, and from the people eating it.

I choose not to diet because with dieting in my life, I was not alive.  To diet, for me, was to die.  The moment I chose not to diet was the same moment I started to live.

And I bloody well love it.

Yes Yes, I know...

I managed to drop off the face of the earth again.

So what have I been doing?

As far as my running has gone... yeah that kinda dropped off the radar.  I enjoy it when I do do it, but fitting it in has been challenging.  I told myself to not run during my lunch break, though that might have to be something worth considering.

As far as my weight lifting has gone... yeah that hasn't gone so well either!  Bahhhhh...

One thing I will say is that my core needs a lot of help.  I've grown up with bad posture which has improved over the last few years, but a couple of car accidents and lower back injuries which continue to flare up whenever I lift doesn't help.  Les Mills have brought out a new program in the last couple of years called CXWORX which is available to me - half an hour in format, and it's probably going to help me in general sort out my core, and make doing weights/running/everything else easier.

There has been one thing worth mentioning that have happened recently.

The first being, one day, I put on a dress which I bought off Modcloth (thanks to Kathryn mentioning it!  I love the blogosphere) and all day I had a bit of a spring in my step.  I couldn't put my finger on it, but I actually felt GOOD.

It was such an unusual feeling that I thought it warranted a Facebook status.

The response, was actually quite overwhelming.

Firstly, on the Facebook status itself:

Then, just for the hell of it, even with my hair all dishevelled and whatever, I felt like putting a photo up.

The comments on THAT photo were even more overwhelming:

Then, came the comment that actually reduced me to tears.

It might sound stupid, but even to this day I am told that I have no right to feel good about how I look, or even just feel good about anything.  Heck, I have a well respected fitness professional on my Facebook who posted a status which said "Which would you rather be, unhappy and lean or happy and fat?"   The majority of people who replied said that anyone who is happy and fat didn't deserve to be.  I was tempted to reply, but I knew that that was a battle I could not win.

Since then, there have been days where I've been surrounded by weight talk - my Mum's jibes aren't new, but they still irritate, and to add to her attitude, my brother and Dad now both have started dieting too.  My brother is taking 'fat burning pills' which a mate has bought him - he has no idea what brand they are and no idea of what is in them, but he takes them anyway.  The fact that my Mum and Dad support this really upset me, but what can I do, he's a grown man, he can make his own decisions.

When I started teaching group fitness, I was worried that members would be prejudicial over my size.  They haven't been.  The only reason why people have not liked my classes is because I've been too tough!  My fellow instructors however... *that* is where the prejudice lies.  They forget our goals are the same and that I can tap into a different target market than people who are leaner can. I had a member recently tell me that she was so happy to come to my class since she saw me working hard and knew that she could too.  She saw other instructors and assumed she had to be thin first.

I don't like hearing the weight comments from my family, and I don't like hearing the weight comments from my peers.  But I'm trying to change the way I handle it.

Recently, I went out for dinner with my family, and all they could talk about was weight loss.  They even had the nerve to tell me that I shouldn't have a birthday cake since I needed to 'catch up to their weight loss.'

Normally this would have gutted me, and yeah, it did hurt.  But, I decided this time, I wouldn't let it bring me down.

It worked!  I've in the past dismissed positive statements like this because I've thought '... well, how much good could it really do?'

A few days later, I had to whip out a similar mindset.

Same thing, it worked!  A statement which would have in the past dragged me down for months, now only dragged me for a few minutes.

I've still got things to work on, of course.  I think I'm making progress though.

Hope to check in again soon, and fingers crossed it's not 2 months between posts!

Linkage: A Merry Life

One thing that is pretty empowering as an instructor is when you have a new person come into your class and really enjoy the workout, then seeing them back in the classes to come.

It's one of the most rewarding things about teaching, starting someone up, and seeing them continue to come back. What's also rewarding is when you take over a class and the regulars follow you, connect with you outside of class, request songs, etc. There's so many things I can go on with about how much I find instructing rewarding.

But... it can also be pretty intimidating. Especially as it is an industry where quality of instruction varies quite a lot - especially when you have gyms which have classes from different group fitness organisations (as each one has their own certification/quality control process).

When it comes to delivering a class, there are a few things that make me nervous. The first is when I have someone I know come and do my class. To watch all of my stuff ups, and just a natural desire to impress those that know me.

Another thing that makes me nervous is knowing that there are people who have had a bad experience with group fitness who are giving it another go, and coming into MY class to do it.

Think of a restaurant who has had a food critic come in, hate the food, hate the place, tell ALL their friends that they hated it, who finally comes back, even though you weren't the chef at the time and you had no idea what the hell those poor people got served and how what you've got compares.

Now combine those two.

Kepa from Fit Lively Guy and Mary from A Merry Life both came into my class last night.

A year ago, Mary wrote an honest post about how she didn't enjoy the experience during the last spin/RPM class she did. What she wrote in the post itself was very honest and diplomatic, but for me, the rawness of her responses in the comments actually demonstrated how badly she'd been short changed.

I was surprised the instructor didn’t talk to us. It was a really small class and we were obviously there for the first time – everyone else looked like they knew what they were doing. I wish she had talked to us first so we knew what to do! Maybe it would have been better with another instructor.

...

She didn’t acknowledge us at all. We were on the back bikes in the class but she could clearly see us – there were only 9 people total.

Instructors have a big part of it. True. I’ve been lucky to always have awesome Zumba instructors which is partly why I love it so much

It wasn't so much the program that had let Mary down here, it was the instructor.

Now I don't know if Kepa and Mary realised it at the time, but I was incredibly nervous in the lead up to teaching to them. I normally set my playlist a week beforehand, and on Monday I teach two classes at two different gyms - I teach the same playlist at both gyms so that it's a less of a choreography overload. This time I was so nervous that my playlist changed about several times, as I was quite stricken as to

1. Would they like that song?
2. Is that song too difficult in intensity?
3. Is that choreography too all over the place to coach without getting them confused?

Even on the drive from the office to the gym I was listening to my playlist and contemplating changing the playlist.

Some of the words were coming out of my mouth in a jumble, and I even scared the hell out of them where I was torn between saying 'the goal is to keep pedalling for 45 minutes' and 'the goal is to keep pedalling for your first class' and then what came out was the goal is to keep pedalling for the first 45 minutes. They both stared at me, bug eyed, and said "FIRST 45 minutes!?!?!!"

You can read Mary's retelling of the experience here - I'd have to say it actually was very overwhelming, as Mary was someone who was as against RPM/Spin as you could possibly be.

One of the comments on the original post, now reading back through it, was quite telling.

Maybe someday you’ll post “My second spin class” and you’ll have better things to report.

I know I'm not the best instructor in the world, but it is a MASSIVE relief to have fallen into the category of 'better things to report'.

2012: Run For It - C25K W2R1

So I've been for a few runs since the last time I did a run report - they mainly have been runs on the treadmill, after teaching classes. I haven't gotten out on the track again because I've been doing other training in the weekends.

Today it's an absolute stunner in Auckland, absolutely beautiful - blue sky, sunshine. Which means it's absolutely cooking outside, and running outside in that heat is incredibly undesirable. I prefer to run in more overcast weather, even in the rain (only thing that gets in the way there is my glasses), so I opted for a run inside.

The last few times I've run, I used this playlist.

Today, I set a different playlist, but it didn't actually occur to me that today, the run format changed.

Week 1's runs followed this description.

Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes.

Week 2's runs then became the following.

Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 90 seconds of jogging and 2 minutes of walking for a total of 20 minutes.

I didn't realise it until the voiceover in the app said "Our first run will be 90 seconds, and we will be running 6 times." I thought "... Hang on a minute...? Isn't it 60 seconds for 8 times?"

I would actually say that I found this run easier than the first weeks ones. It felt less stop-start-ish, and mentally it felt easier because the number of runs was less, even though the distance had increased.

What I was actually worried about was "OMG do I have enough music in my playlist to cover the run time???" I hadn't had an opportunity to sit down and calculate everything to make sure that I had enough music on my playlist for it.

Thankfully, it actually worked out perfectly. The only thing I need to do for future playlists is to add two more tracks onto the end to encourage me to stretch.

Today someone who smelled really bad actually got on the treadmill next to me so with 2 minutes left of the cooldown I bolted off the treadmill and went into the womens area in my gym to do some stretching. My quads in particular really need to be stretched out after each run - they're getting really tight, to the point where when I teach the final stretch track RPM, it takes me a couple of attempts to bring my heel up to my glute to stretch it out.

I can honestly say that I really enjoyed today's run. I taught a class in the morning, so it would have been easy to chill out at home for the rest of the day, writing, planning etc. I'm not sure at this stage whether I'll run again tomorrow or Tuesday morning. Either way, I know I'm already enjoying the extra running distance.