Today I’m starting the post off with a story about what happened in the gym that many people who have lost weight or are trying to lose weight can relate to. I hope you enjoy it and can take a little piece of it with you.
How long does it take to break the “fat girl” image from your mind? That question is asked so often by people who have lost weight. After years of the same old messages playing in your head, “you are too fat to wear that…you can’t go there because you are too fat…don’t try to keep up with them, you are too fat…stop drawing attention to yourself, people will think you are fat,” you find it difficult to see the new image in the mirror. Every glance of yourself seems to replay the ugly mantras all wrapped around one theme: YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING BECAUSE YOU ARE TOO FAT.
Now the layers peel away and you find a new body and figure staring back at you that somehow you just can’t claim as your own. Who wants to admit success in weightloss? Won’t the weight just come back? Afterall, you don’t deserve to be thin. Being thin isn’t who you are…you are a “fat girl,” at least this is what still plays in our head regardless what the world and our mirrors tell us.
As I was working out on the treadmill today, I may have broke through in a small way. Honestly, it was something so simple and trivial to the rest of the world but it meant everything to me. You see, forever I couldn’t walk fast. Four MPH seemed like a blistering pace that was unattainable. I remember when I started working out how my best friend would walk COMFORTABLY next to me on the treadmill at 4.0 MPH while I huffed and puffed jogging at 3.8 MPH on the other side. To this day I truly believed I was too fat to keep up a 4.0 MPH pace. Heck, I’ve run five half-marathons but I convinced myself that a fast walk was way out of my league.
Last night a client emails me her treadmill routine that starts with a 4.0 MPH warm-up and goes up from there including some serious hill work. Just looking at the spreadsheet brought all of the “too fat” sayings to my mind. I sat in my dark office and told myself that I couldn’t do it before even trying. What a shame…giving up without a fight. In that moment the 210 lb. eighth grader that everyone made fun of was back and too scared of making a “fat fool” of herself in the gym.
In the normal rush of the morning to get out the door, I grab my things and head to the gym. After weights, I’m claim my treadmill and start my interval training…sprinting, side-shuffling, and doing all the other wild things I do on a treadmill. The cool-down starts. Using my heart rate as a guide, I know I need to be at 55% throughout the cool down to do it right. Guess how fast your trainer had to walk on a 3% incline to stay in the right range. Four MPH!!! I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself at how far I have come and how sad it is that I need a stinking heart rate monitor and a treadmill to validate who I am today.
My point is that too often the only person standing in the way of our success is ourself. We let our minds and our personal messages speak so negatively and so loudly that we stop ourselves from ever becoming who we want to be. I hope each of you will read this and realize that we don’t have to live like this. We owe it to ourselves, our significant others, and kids to appreciate who we are and what we accomplish. Let’s just get out of our own way.