Dear Internet,
I'm officially back after like a 4 year hiatus. Seriously I think it's been a full 4 years if my review of previous posts is correct. A lot has changed in that time! I started dating my best friend, went off to PA school for two years, graduated with a Master's degree, got engaged, moved back here, started a new job, got married..........and in the meantime got unmotivated, addicted to food and really chubby.
So, here I am, deciding on a Saturday night to get the blog going again. Why, you might ask? Well, because I think I'm finally getting to the point where I'm sick of my bullshit, and I realized that at this point 4 years ago I was in the best shape of my life and using a blog to help me stay somewhat on track. I guess in that time vlogging has become more of a thing but I don't feel like talking to myself on a computer screen. So I'm giving this a go again. Not sure if I'm going to be able to make this a daily thing with my life being much crazier than it used to be, but I'm going to try and stay as up to date as possible.
To start things off, a little recap of how we got back here.....
Honestly, I'm not sure why I stopped blogging in the first place. It was a lot of fun and reading back through some of my previous posts tonight reminded me of all the great times I had. What probably happened is that I likely fell of the wagon again and was embarrassed to talk about it. I'm pretty sure that's what went down there.
Looks like I left off in June 2013. Pretty much don't remember much of that summer other than working a bunch and just getting to the gym as often as possible. I started dating Matt in August of that year and I remember doing another Paleo challenge that ran until my birthday. Did really great with that one, I remember losing even more weight and feeling awesome. I'm not sure if that's the one where I had to do Helen as a baseline workout or not...but I do remember shaving like 3 minutes off my time of whatever workout I did (crazy the things we remember). After that is when things started to go to shit. I remember being in the throes of PA school applications and so here comes the stress eating. And it was bad. I really don't know how I don't have heart disease or diabetes yet because I was doing some pretty shameful things with bags of chips and jars of nutella. I was also just reckless. I'd just come off a paleo challenge, thought I was some sort of badass, and went balls to the wall with all the crap food I'd been holding myself back from. I was going out to eat a lot. I was stress eating on the daily. Working out took a backseat. I thought that whenever my boyfriend and I would meal prep it would be a good idea to eat as much as he could. I lost sight of my priorities and just let myself go. And then had the nerve to be shocked when I put like 20 pounds back on within a matter of months.
But it didn't stop at 20 pounds....nope. By the time 2014 hit I was in deep. But it was ok because I got an interview to one of my top pick PA schools. And then got waitlisted......for 3 months. And then got rejected from all the rest of the schools I applied to. And it was around that point that things got really bad at my volunteer job. So, I said fuck it and rode out the rest of the winter wearing baggy hoodies and being thankful I'd had the forethought to keep one of my larger duty shirts while putting on more weight. I still worked out, but not nearly as often and not nearly as hard as I was before, so I was still putting on weight.
Fast forward a few months and I get into PA school. Thank God, right? I'm supposed to be happy, right? Sure, but was I? Nope! Now I signed myself up for a long distance relationship. But it's ok, I've got a few more months to enjoy life so let's start working out a little more and caring a little more. Which, thankfully kept me from putting on more weight during this time, but it was only a temporizing measure until PA school hit.
PA school was probably the hardest thing I've ever done and also probably the lowest point in my life. My health hit rock bottom and I'm just now starting to feel ready to fight back. I basically sat on my ass all day long, whether it was in class, studying, what have you. Physical activity was scarce. My one priority became just to survive and that's all I cared about. So how did I choose to survive? Eating. My first semester alone I packed on like 25 pounds. My metabolism is slow to begin with, and then I added inactivity and a lot of Chinese food to it and it just slowed to a crawl.
I won't bore you much more with all the details of how I wrecked my body during those 2 years, but I will tell you that in that time I lost a ton of muscle mass, packed on a lot of pounds, I was constantly in pain from my back (which granted, has always been bad but I'd compensated with working out and keeping my core strong) and I had also developed sciatica. All at 25 years old. Go me!
So I get back from PA school. Now with a wedding to plan. Nbd, that'll be great motivation to get my ass back to the gym! So I got myself back to BoomTown just a little over a year ago. And let me tell you, it's been a struggle. I still had a bad back. I was terrified of hurting myself because half of the movements I was doing hurt my back in some way and I was sore as hell, all the time. So I didn't really re-dedicate myself the way I was hoping to. In this time, Matt had also joined and I had also figured out that with my job, the only way I was guaranteed some gym time was 5AM. A time of day I make a habit of not seeing very often. And I've struggled with it ever since. Sure I was going to the gym like once or twice a week, just often enough that people didn't forget what I looked like, but not enough for my body to change. And even though my back felt a little better after working out and moving, that decrease in pain was STILL not enough to get me off my ass. So I just plugged along like that pretty much up until my wedding.
Now, in the meantime, that's not to say I didn't try to change things up at least a little. I started seeing a chiropractor who put some major work into me. I put her through her paces every time she saw me. She found my SI joints are very unstable, my lower back, pelvic muscles and hamstrings are constantly tight and things overall were just not moving the way they should. I had like 1/4 of the range of motion I used to have. But within a few sessions my sciatica had gone away and I was already feeling better. And then a few months down the road, I started seeing Amanda, a coach at BoomTown and a massage therapist who helped even more with the muscular issues I was having. Then there's another chiropractor at the office that's been making sure I'm relearning how to do movements like deadlifts and olympic lifts safely again because my form was downright scary. So, from that front, I can honestly say I'm so thankful to be done with all that pain. My back still hurts and it gets tweaked every once in a while, but it doesn't even come close to comparing to where I was a year ago. I literally never want to be in that kind of pain again.
Here we are now, in the present. My wedding is done, we went on an incredible honeymoon and I can tentatively say that life may actually be able to settle out now. If you were looking for like this horrible life-changing event that would scare me straight, I'm unfortunately about to disappoint you because that's not how this went down.
One of the owners at BoomTown has started really focusing on the nutrition aspect of the gym. So she now runs a nutrition program that people can sign up for. There's not really a focus on Paleo anymore, it's just how can you get to be a healthier you and have better relationships with food. We'd talked about me doing it, but I had told her it needed to wait until after the wedding because I knew I wouldn't dedicate myself the way I needed to. And now that I'm post-wedding, it's time to hit that up. So last weekend both Matt and I met with her and officially started with Be Well Blueprint. And while I have to check in with her on a weekly basis and log my food on MyFitnessPal, it got me thinking of other ways that I could work on staying accountable.
While this past week has been nuts, I've been doing a lot of thinking. I guess the thing that bugs me the most is that I have no idea when I lost my ability to cope, and my ability to just keep getting back up again. I had 2013 by the horns. I had my routine figured out, I knew what I wanted in life, I was competing at CrossFit and doing well, I had just let my best friend out of the friend zone, I had my dog. For the most part, that year was really awesome. But it just seems like one day I mentally became very weak and I just stopped getting back up. I became unable to cope with stressors that came my way. Granted, these weren't your every day first world problems, but I keep wondering why I wasn't able to handle them. Either way, the past is the past, I went through hell and came out the other side, but I wonder sometimes what it's going to take for me to get my mojo back. I look back at my previous facebook statuses about the PRs I was hitting and how active I was and I'm like "what's it gonna take Ally? You did it once, you should be able to do it again." And then I read through some of the posts I made here before starting this one and it's sad to see the things that I used to be doing - working out 4-5 times a week, running on the side, working nights and making it all seem so easy.
A lot has changed in my life since then so in some ways I know I'm not 100% getting back to 2013, and that's not what I want. I just want the motivation and the drive back. It's taken a lot of trying to pinpoint what's been holding me back in the past year and it is 100% mental. I want to blame my body for it, but I can't anymore because that's fixed. It's all in my head and I don't know how to tell it to stop. I want to see the improvements I'm making and feel even more motivated by them. I want to be mentally tough again. Because the girl I am right now is not the girl that used to do 60-70 burpees in one workout and say "wow that sucked....be back tomorrow." I'm a lot more fearful now - maybe I fear the pain, maybe I fear failure, maybe I fear I will never get back to doing the things I used to do. Maybe it's just easier to be fat and not sore all the time. Who the fuck knows anymore. But I'm just praying that I'm at a point now where I'm actually ready to tackle this and at least try to be better, both physically and mentally. Because I have things that I want to do. I want to travel and be able to do active stuff without worrying about my ability to do it. Hell, I'll start small - it'd be nice to be able to sit comfortably on a plane again. I want to hit PRs again, and go Rx in workouts and actually look forward to working out. And maybe, deep down, very deep, I want to be able to run again.....that's at the bottom of the list though because running will always suck. But most of all, I want to be mentally strong again. I need to be. Because this emotional wreck I've turned into is just not fun. I get easily overwhelmed and I just shut down. I thankfully don't give up or I wouldn't be where I am today, but there have been some serious close calls. And I don't want to be that person for the rest of my life.
I don't really have a great way to round this out. I've always sucked at conclusion paragraphs. But at the end of the day, maybe getting my thoughts down will actually help me sift through them a little easier. Or at the very least will give me some interesting reading material in a few years. Or maybe I'll realize that I'm royally screwed up and should go see a real therapist. Who knows. Anything is possible I guess.
If you made it this far, you're crazy...just kidding! You're awesome for sticking it out because I tend to ramble. A lot. I don't expect to reach a huge audience with this, it's more for me than anything else. But either way, hope everyone is having a good weekend!
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