Hello my beautiful bloggies!! 🙂  I obviously haven’t been saying very much here for a while, but I am VERY VERY excited to blogging today. Why? Because I woke up physically sore today. Umm wha? Are you off your rocker, Angie, You say? Well yes no, I’m trying to tell you that I am back in action with exercise and I feel it and it feels glorious! I woke up with an extra sparkle of “me” today.  By that I mean that I feel like I’m truly clearing the dust bunnies from that part of my brain and feeling ok with dusting myself off and being a Mom AND who I “was” before the whole Mom gig.

I am embarrassed to say that I got off of the exercise wagon fairly early into my pregnancy (tsk tsk) and am just now getting back into it.  I realized that for me, I just wasn’t getting my money’s worth out of my gym membership. Yes they have daycare, yes new Moms do it all the time, but in my life and in my situation, it just wasn’t working out for me, so my husband and I decided we would take matters into our own hands and do what we could to make it work.  He was never one to ever consider joining a gym; he’s just not the gym going type, but he also wants to get himself into healthier shape and drop some pounds and do the best he can to be a good example for our little Peanut so we decided to take a leap of faith on ourselves and invest in a good quality treadmill to have in our home.  I say “leap of faith” because how many people do you know (or maybe you too) who own a treadmill and don’t use it?  That’s an awfully expensive clothing rack, especially if you invest in a gym quality one and not the one that was on sale at Canadian Tire or Sears or wherever. 

We did it and I am happy to say, while I didn’t burst out of the gates in full force (it took me a couple of weeks to really “feel” it), I’ve worked up a serious “motivated” sweat 4 days last week (as opposed to the suffering through it but don’t want to be doing it kind) and I’m already 2 for 2 for this week. I feel so accomplished and motivated…and relieved.  Relieved because it was like I wanted so desperately to feel this way for so many months now. I wanted to have my grove back, but it seems like “wanting” it isn’t enough.  I hear so many people say “you have to want it bad enough” and they believe that if you’re not doing it, you must not want it bad enough.  I have to disagree there.  I believe that there are more people out there that “want it” just as bad as those who are doing it, but struggle with themselves for all sorts of reasons to get all the ducks in a row to get there.  The mental side to changing your lifestyle is huge – the hardest part really. It’s wayyyyyyy harder than the workouts hands down.  Yes?

So what finally lit the fire under my arse? (Yes they say “arse” where I come from :-D.) You would think my that gaining a bunch of weight back would be it, but if it were, I would have already made some serious progress.  I struggled mentally every single day with the weight gain. So much so that when you couple that with all of the normal post partum challenges and sleep deprivation, I just felt too spent and too “down” to get it together. (Hence the wanting it bad enough thing I talked about.)  You know how everyone says, “Oh the weight will just melt off, especially if you’re breastfeeding.” Well, apparently not, especially if you have issues surrounding food & emotional eating and especially if you are extremely sleep deprived.  Breastfeeding is on its last leg out the door and he is 90% weaned at this point so I totally missed out in the extra calorie burn benefit. Instead I ate them.  My MO has been reaching into the fridge or cupboards trying to cope with trying to function quite honestly. 

I think the thought of taking the long and difficult journey that it was to do this the first time on top of sleep deprivation and no mental capacity to devote to meal planning etc. intimidated me more than anything up to this point and it had quite an opposite affect on me. It only reinforced me to be more irresponsible with my choices.  I needed something completely different to pull me out of this.  I am very proud and happy to say that it is my husband who has inspired me.  There was a point in my life that I never thought that would happen, he just wasn’t the “healthy living” and exercise type.  But he suggested that we make our commitment a little more interesting and challenge each other to a little friendly competition to see who can make the most progress by our little Peanut’s birthday on August 13.  There will be a cash “guilt free spending” prize for the winner of $500.  That’s FIVE months of hard work and enough time for us both to transform ourselves into one good lookin’ healthy Mom & Dad 🙂  I gotta tell ya, watching him make the trek down to the basement after supper with his water bottle in hand for a few days was enough for me to step up and not let him show me up!  (Although I secretly do want him to show me up:-D)

The bottom line bloggies is that often times I write these posts in an effort to motivate myself, but this time I’m writing it with a true renewed vigor.  I’m starting to feel happy again 🙂

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