exercise
Things have been puttering right along here at the casa de Shrinking Kelly. I finally got a new job at the end of March and I’m really enjoying it for the most part.
I’m just an admin assistant, but they met the salary that I was at on my last job so that was unexpected and nice. It’s mostly stress free and I really enjoy the people that I work with.
I’m not sure I ever touched on how stressful my last job was. My office manager back then was a total headcase. Like, no joke, she needed to be on medication for her mental illnesses. She would scream and yell and throw things on the daily and you never knew what you were in for when you showed up at work.
It really ignited my PTSD from my childhood in the worst way possible and for about the last year or two it REALLY messed with my mental well-being.
Having said that, this job has NONE of that and it is so freeing. To come home from work and not bring major emotional damage with me is just so amazing I can’t even put it into words.
It did however, take me a little bit to get back into the swing of things as far as actually putting on clothes and leaving my house. 🤣🤣
The first two weeks I was completely exhausted and could barely function when not at work, but that eventually sorted itself out and I seem to have found my groove.
I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to maintain my level of exercise once I started working again. In fact, I told myself that I would keep at it for a week or two and then move it down to a more “reasonable” level.
Since I lost my job at the end of November, I’ve been managing to get in at least an hour of cardio most every day. Let’s face it, I had nothing better to do at the time and it was really helping with the mental stress I had at being stuck at home 24/7 for four months.
It was that very reason that I wanted to continue it for at least the first week or two of the new job. I knew that I would be nervous and that working out in that capacity would leave me clear headed and less anxious about the new position.
I’ve never been a morning person. Like, ever. It has always been a major struggle for me to get up and get going in the morning, be it school or work. If given my druthers I would sleep until early afternoon and then stay up all night. Lather, rinse, repeat.
That just simply isn’t an option in the real world, so I would settle for sleeping until the last possible second before getting up and doing the bare minimum (shower, brush my teeth and get dressed) before getting in the car and heading to work. No make up, no time to gather my thoughts and certainly no exercise.
With the new job, I just didn’t give myself any other alternative. It helped that I don’t have to be to the new job until nine whereas my old job I had to be there at 7:30, but I just didn’t let myself slide at all. I woke up every morning at 5:30 and was working out by six. No excuses.
After a couple of weeks, I realized that I hadn’t died from lack of sleep and actually enjoyed going to bed early for the most part. Once I reached that understanding with myself, it was fairly easy to just keep going and now it is just habit.
I even incorporate it on weekends too if I have to be somewhere, I just do the backwards math of when I would have to get up in order to be able to get my workout in and then set my alarm. There is no question (a couple of minor exceptions being 5:00 AM departures for whatever reason – mostly travel related) in my mind and therefore I just do it.
There is no way that I would be able to have done any of this if it weren’t for losing my job, so when they say that everything happens for a reason, there is a certain amount of truth to that.
With this level of exercise, I’ve been able to take off and keep off almost 45 pounds since my old job closed its doors without killing myself with super restricted calories. That’s a total of almost 70 pounds since starting this weight loss reboot back in January of 2021 (with 5 months off in the middle there somewhere).
Don’t get me wrong, I do keep myself in a calorie deficit for the most part, but nowhere near as restrictive as I used to be in the past. I don’t really feel deprived at all and I enjoy eating my maintenance calories on the weekends to allow for the big calorie items I might be craving. It’s a formula that *knocks wood* is working so far and I’m thrilled.
It no longer feels like a diet and it finally feels like a lifestyle.
Welp, it’s been a minute since I wrote in here.
Things have been going along swimmingly. If you follow my youtube channel, you will know that the last two weeks I had fairly large losses for me, and that made me happy.
I have been exercising regularly and that has made a huge difference. I started with Walk Away the Pounds DVD’s but in the last week and a half, switched to the treadmill – which we just got back up and running.
I’ve been doing really well on it. The last couple of days of last week and this past Monday, I managed to do 2 miles a day. Pretty cool.
Cut to Tuesday morning. All is well, I shower and drive to work. I get to work and sit down at my desk and something … doesn’t feel right. I have felt this sensation before, many years ago. It kind of feels like my thigh bone has somehow disconnected a bit from my hip bone.
It was familiar and uncomfortable but not yet painful. However, as the day wore on it went downhill rapidly. By 12:30 I was unable to sit in that office chair any longer and came home to lay on ice in bed. I called my current chiropractor but she was unable to get me in until Wednesday at 11:15 AM.
I rested all evening and it just kept getting worse. The pain would travel from my hip to my outer thigh, to the back of my thigh to my inner thigh. Sitting down on the toilet was UNBEARABLE.
I managed to get some sleep and it was the same if not worse the next morning.
The one and only other time this happened to me, it happened over the course of a couple of days not suddenly like this one. And my chiro at the time (sadly, now retired) was able to give my leg a swift pull when I least expected it and the leg popped back into place. I remember it feeling better instantly.
This time, not so much. The onset of the worst of the pain happened in hours and and my new chiro didn’t quite know what to do other than make some adjustments even after I told her what happened last time.
A bit of a backstory–
–Last October my husband and I drove to Vegas for a socially distanced trip to renew our vows for our 20 year anniversary.
I wasn’t in Vegas more than fifteen minutes when I fell down an escalator. See, I’m afraid of heights and escalators are bad for me on a good day when they are going down. My husband has to stand in front of me and I have to hold onto the railings for dear life. Well, we were trying to check into the hotel and we couldn’t find an elevator to get down the one floor to the registration desk. There was however an escalator. My husband and I both had two suitcases and a backpack on, so I would have to get on the escalator while it was moving with both suitcases and not be able to hold onto the railings. I’m cringing now five months later, just typing this.
You can see where this is going right? As soon as I stepped on with the luggage I went cross eyed from panic and immediately fell onto my left hip. I’m not a small woman and when I fall, I fall hard. This was no exception.
A wonderful man saw me eat it and followed me onto the escalator to grab one of my suitcases and help me up. My husband was on the other side begging me to get up before we got to the end of the escalator as I was wearing a dress and there was no way he could lift me up before the escalator ate my clothing.
I laid there wide eyed, clutching both suitcases handles in sheer panic for what felt like fifteen minutes but it was just a matter of seconds. I finally pulled myself up and made it to the end with no further incidences.
I was not unscathed however.
Long story short, I had a GIANT hematoma on my left hip that lasted about …well, it is still there, but now it’s really tiny, but the worst of it lasted like, three months. It was the size of a grapefruit.
I was sure that I had broken something (would never admit that to the hubs and ruin the trip) so even after we got back, I refused to go to the doctor because I didn’t want to know if something was critically wrong with me (that is how my brain works). I didn’t go to the chiro even though I knew every part of my hips and spine were out of alignment, because I was scared that if I HAD broken something, her messing around might make it worse. Eventually the pain got better (months later) and I just wanted to forget about it.
Back to the present —
— My chiro told me yesterday that by her calculations, I had really thrown my body out of whack in the fall, but since I never got it checked and I wasn’t really that active, my body just adjusted and got used to the body being out of alignment. However, my recent foray into exercising and more importantly walking on the treadmill had made my body revolt and say: “ENOUGH!”
So, that is what happened to my right hip … or something like that.
As soon as she laid me down on the table she took one look at my back and said: “Oh wow.” before she even touched anything. And I have a pretty large layer of fat over my bones that isn’t easy to see through. She said my pelvis was so far pushed to the back on my right side that if she put a marble on my back it would roll immediately to the left and fall to the floor.
She adjusted me a lot and told me to give it 48 hours.
I came straight home from the appt and laid on ice.
It was even MORE painful last night but I knew that it would be as I had just been put back into place after being out for five months.
This morning it felt a bit better so I went into work, but left by 10:30 because sitting in that office chair was unbearable again. Also, I didn’t want to screw up all the work that she had done the day before.
I got up and got something to eat a few minutes ago (3:00PM) and it is feeling a LOT better. Still sore and noticeable, and sitting on the toilet still hurts a lot, but much better.
The reason I tell y’all this story is to explain that I am fully expecting to gain on my weigh in Saturday. I haven’t been able to exercise since Monday and being stuck in the house on “bedrest” has made me want to eat the world out of boredom. I’ve been doing kind of okay keeping the eating in check, but there has been an increase in snacking … Not gonna lie. Also, I haven’t been drinking much water because sitting on the toilet hurts so bad. So I will not only be gaining weight, but also water. 😒
I guess I’m okay with the gain. It’s not like I could do anything about the fact that my body rejected my idea of getting fit (at least at this point, five months ago would be a different story).
I will not be as hesitant to go see my chiro from here on out though if something happens, because I am NOT happy about getting sidelined from exercise just as I was getting to love it again.
I can’t say I remember a time when I wasn’t on a weight loss journey of some sort.
There isn’t a lot of my childhood that I remember, but I DO remember not being happy about how I looked.
My mother often told people that when I was first born she was worried that I wouldn’t be able to open my eyes because my cheeks were so very chubby. She also expressed concern about how I could possibly be able to start to walk with those pudgy legs.
I don’t remember ever feeling “normal sized” and it certainly didn’t last for very long.
I don’t know my genetics on my fathers side beyond my grandmother and aunt and neither of them were very big. My father wasn’t either until he got married and “settled down”. He probably gained the weight as a matter of no longer being active and eating out of boredom. I remember him also quitting smoking early in my childhood and that he put on some serious pounds after that. There was always tons of candy around the house to help him quit and I delighting in that fact.
So I was a round child and it just got worse after my father left for the first time when I was ten. My mother tried to make up for the fact that he wasn’t a part of the family anymore by rewarding us with food.
He came back for a spell and then left again for the final time when I was 12. That was when junk and fast food moved from being a reward to being a necessity when my mother had to start working two jobs to support us and try and keep the house.
Late evening happy meals from McDonald’s were not unusual as it was just easier and most times cheaper for my mom to snag them on her way home from work, than to have to cook when she got home.
Our cupboards were stocked with chips, crackers, white bread and all other things starchy.
A favorite snack of mine was pretzel sticks covered in melted butter or wrapped in American cheese. Because my mom worked two jobs, there wasn’t really anyone around to police mine or my brothers eating choices. My grandparents lived right next door, so we were allowed to stay in our house by ourselves knowing that we could call one of them if we had any problems.
I remained a “big girl” throughout high school.
After being told there weren’t even enough credits to earn to graduate with my class no matter what I did, I dropped out my senior year and started night school.
Somewhere around here I got into therapy and though it took me a couple of years it started to do me a world of good.
Around this time period I decided that being fat was no longer for me. Money wasn’t quite as desperate (though it went in ebbs and flows) at the time. I got an exercise bike for a gift and bought a portable stair stepper with my own money. I even got a small resistance band weight station at a garage sale.
Yours truly began to watch every single calorie that went into my mouth, never going above 1200-1500 calories a day and everything was low fat. In addition, since I didn’t work more than 15 hours a week, I started working out at least twice a day – sometimes three times.
Looking back it was horribly obsessive compulsive behavior that was just setting myself up for an inevitable eating disorder.
But boy did it work! The weight came off and I felt fantastic! For the first time that I could remember, I was wearing the latest fashions and they looked good!
I started to get a lot more attention from the opposite sex and even got a steady boyfriend for a few months until he cheated on me and I dumped his loser ass.
After that I sort of went on a use ’em and lose ’em tour de force for awhile and had a lot of fun.
Eventually the weight started to creep back up a little bit at a time. I decided for emotional reasons that I didn’t connect at the time that as long as what I ate didn’t “stay” in my body, I couldn’t gain weight from it!
Hello bulimia!
I’m not going to sing the praises of that particular period of my life. Mostly because I don’t like the idea of speaking positively about eating disorders. I might write about this chapter in my journey in another entry because it did have a major effect on my life.
Having said that, the full on bulimia lasted at least two years and consisted of throwing up everything I ate and also taking laxatives at night to get whatever else I missed out of my body.
The binging on the other hand…
At age 25 I met my current husband and fell in love. I met him while on vacation and long story short, I ended up moving across the country to live with him. A year later, we married.
