Aspiration: Shredding, shedding

Most of my eating habits are pretty good. I never ate much fried food, and I gave it up completely (along with most sweetened beverages) in the last year or so, hoping that through modest diet and lifestyle changes I would shed some of my post-baby weight, which is about to become four years post-baby weight. I eat oatmeal for breakfast. I snack on carrots, cauliflower and cucumber slices. I’m usually good about drinking water. I don’t make a major effort to get the closest parking space, and I don’t eat much refined sugar (admittedly, I can get a bit weak in the face of ice cream and cinnamon rolls, though). Still, I’m the heaviest I’ve been in my life, frustrated by my body’s refusal to budge and I’ve managed to get sick three times over the winter.

I decided to have aspirations instead of resolutions this year, because I want my life changes to be slow and enduring, not rash and readily discarded. Besides reading more (which I’m doing), I’ve been trying to be more consistently physically active. Like finding space to read and write, that can be harder than it looks. I’ve been quasi-faithful to yoga practice for several years, but since I don’t do it in hot rooms or jump from posture to posture, it hasn’t been much help with weight loss.

There’s been a lot of talk on Twitter for months about Jillian Michaels‘ 30-day shred video, I think because it promises results if you let her slay your body for a highly manageable 20 minutes a day. This month, Kristen Chase of Motherhood Uncensored formed an online sisterhood of shredders to support each other. Up until this point, I’ve just been reading, not sharing, because I didn’t want to announce to the world that I was going to do this until I found out that I really could do it. And so far I am.

Today was day four for me. I was miserably sore on day two. I’ve felt better one place or another, but I’m kind of startled by how much nicer exercise pain is than the aches I get when my life gets too sedentary. That extra energy everyone promises that exercise will yield is kicking in and while I doubt the scale has budged, I feel heaps better. I don’t expect that this is going to take me exactly where I want to go, but like the decision to join NaBloPoMo for March, this feels motivating – like it’s the groundwork for a revitalized approach .

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