I love the woman who teaches the yoga class on Monday nights. As I mentioned before, she taught spinning at my old gym and is one of the sweetest, most welcoming, most nurturing instructors I've ever encountered.

All gyms should have this sort of woman in them. She's lovely. More people would stick with their fitness routines.

But I have to tell you: asking me what the tattoo on my lower back means while I'm struggling in a Salamba Sarvangasana is not the best idea. Still, I had to laugh. I take everything so god-awful seriously. My instructor? Not so much. It's probably a good lesson to learn.

I'm achy today, from all of that yoga. I wish I could figure out a way to incorporate another class into my week but at this point I think it's just asking a lot of myself. I'm running three times a week, in addition to one class each of spinning, weight lifting, yoga and cardio kickboxing. It's all a little bit much right now, and I'm not willing to sacrifice one for the other. As helpful as yoga is, I'm big into working on my cardio right now and dropping some more weight.

God I feel as boring as dried paint over here - sorry about that. Right now it's a matter of keeping myself focused on what I've been doing these past few weeks, and not allowing myself to veer off track, while at the same time not become obsessive about the process.

Last night I ate eight Girl Scout cookies. EIGHT. And I didn't care, despite making a mental note to myself that I would track them honestly in Spark People, which I use every day during the week, knowing the results might horrify me.

(I give myself the weekend off from tracking. Not from being mindful, or eating healthfully, just from tracking.)

I wanted the cookies, so I ate them, and reminded myself that it's just food and I wasn't eating them for emotional reasons, nor to binge, but rather because I just wanted to eat them, blah blah blah.

And you know what's funny?

By the end of the night, when I sat down to enter in all of my food, I was still 50 calories under the recommended max of 1500.

That wasn't deliberate or anything. Swear to God. It's just that what I happened to eat that day was all whole and healthy and light and it turned out that while the cookies weren't the best eating decision, they still didn't put my total calories for the day into a train wreck. What if I had made myself feel guilty while eating them, attaching to them all of this fucked up shame, and still have found out that I was perfectly within my calorie range? God, what a bunch of time wasted on not only stupid cookies but the rest of the progress I've made these past few months regarding my whole attitude about food.

I'm not saying that this can be the norm for me - obviously not - but it was a nice example in how I'm learning to just trust myself and not allow every morsel of food to turn into something more than what it is, not to mention that I'm totally capable of making healthy, sound decisions for myself the majority of the time.

Lastly, it dawned on me during my long run Sunday that my 8K on the 25th may possibly be my personal slowest. And I checked out the course today and while it's daunting to see, I'd rather run slow than not at all.

I have incentive to run faster, though. I scored two reservations to a taping of a live interview with Anne Lamott at noon that day. Which means I have to be done with enough time to get me from the South Loop to the north side of Michigan Avenue. I might be a little raggedy, but I'm not missing that interview!

Posted by Erin at 02:27 PM | filed under: Random

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