Relax Babe

Last night I spent 3 and a half hours in a gym with 5 people practicing for an Olympic weight lifting competition in 8 days. It was challenging because I knew that I needed to learn, but I needed to be humble enough to accept that I had enough knowledge to be dangerous. I started weight lifting in the gym to get healthy, to look like Ronda Rousey, to finally feel good in my own body. I never felt good in my own body, since I can remember realizing I was overweight. This happened at a very young age and was only perpetuated by my parents and family. Interestingly enough, I never felt social pressure to conform to a specific body type. Some I think was cultural, in the South it is more important to eat and be a family at dinner time. Some might have been because I got good grades, I did not need to excel in a sport. I know a lot of my personal block was that I was still loved, and I was accepted regardless of how much I weighed. For a while, I was very scared of whether or no...

What if I decided to stop thinking and just do? I use this like a journal and put my innermost thoughts and it destroys the process of doing and I am simply at a loss. I have everything I need. I just need to do.

Today was a really stressful day on all accounts, mostly because I hate speed limits and if I don't see children my poor little squirrel brain turns a corner and forgets there's a school on every block in the urban city I live in. Regardless, don't speed or pay the price. I'll pay the price. I had a great lift day, axillary work around deads. Cardio is the biggest fight ever, but I think that with my DXA/REE test in February, I'll continue a mini-cut/carb cycling and jump into whatever they suggest when it shows my true resting metabolism. I couldn't even guess right now. I've had anything from 2400-1400. Obviously I want more. Obviously I still eat more. Anyways. I got rejected by a PhD program again (actually one of those, blessing in disguise I didn't want the decision anyway), and gained a valuable friend whom I hope actually does edit my entry essay. It's probably shit. I hope she takes me seriously afterwards. Then I ran to school and p...

Is something I just learned, and will probably struggle with my entire life. I need to get my PhD. I have dreamed of Harvard since I heard its name. And so help me, it will be mine. I compete with myself for myself by myself.

Tonight I gave in to the desire for food. It wasn't filling and it wasn't what I wanted. I often think of why I use my body as a empty dumpster for feelings I can express or have no one to express to. It's an interesting concept, making myself bigger to fill nothing. Anyways. I gave in tonight under false premise that I haven't been sleeping due to calorie restriction, and my throat hurts, and I'll work it off tomorrow. Excuses I wouldn't take from someone else but have been fed to me my entire life. It's interesting how your brain will trick you. Perhaps a less reactive imagination would be better. I see pictures of myself this time last year and even with the insane gains I've made on my squat, I can only think about how you can't really tell because the amount of body fat is either the same or possibly larger than when I was 128 pounds. It makes me really sad. More sad that I can't control myself around food, the atmosphere, or t...

My entire life has been cursed with the impatience of a 20-something-year-old with a lot on her mind and too little experience to make something of herself. That's what I thought at least, going down the hallways of high school impatiently waiting for the "permission" to go to college. Or when I would sit and sigh in non-nursing pre-req classes waiting for "permission" to start nursing school. Even still, waiting for permission to start PhD-inspired research or waiting for my inconsistent diet to finally materialize into the perfect body (I assume everyone knows that such an amazing personality as mine deserves a rockin' body to match). But the more I listen to others who have paved their own path, the more I realize that I flat out, down right, sickeningly, do not need to wait for permission. Yes, I do need to have aggressive patience as Andy Frisella calls in on his podcast, the MFCEO Project, but there are so many things that I have not been doing...

At first, I did not know what I wanted to say, then I thought about it for 3 days before I realized that I just need to talk. This afternoon I had a flash thought of how thankful I am that I was raised to work hard. But don't get me wrong, I'm not sure what exactly my parents had in mind when they raised me. I think a lot of it has to be my controlling personality and my inability to sit still (cough ADHD cough) that I forced myself to find ways to occupy myself. When I didn't want to nap, I taught myself multiplication in the dark (it was the only game I could reach from my mat). When I was finished with the lesson, I would reach for whatever book I was reading. When I had a silly class that was "unimportant" I would finish my math homework so I could take extra hours at Cinemark. I worked tirelessly because I like to work. I finally found a group of people that, if I were able to sit down and have a conversation with instead of a one-way podcast, probabl...

If this doesn't scare you, you're not thinking big enough.

There are so many ways to start this blog post, and I apologize for posting twice in one day, but just as I respond to the American Nurses Association's legislature emails, I feel that I must pay respects when due. Ronda Rousey was my original inspiration to the creation of the New Me. Even my trainer jokes, to this day, 2 years later, of when we first met. He asked me what my fitness goals were, and I told him, "make me look like Ronda Rousey". Now, I cannot lie to you. I have evolved and her fighter body is no longer the look I want to achieve. But in the beginning, whenever I thought about quitting, I remembered the videos of Ronda training and her dedication to her sport, which was always apparent, and it gave me strength to tell my mind to tell my body to shut up. If I wanted to look like a bada** mofo, I was going to have to put in the work and if I complained, kept it out of the gym. I still remember about 9 months in, someone told me I looked like Ronda,...

Relax Babe, You've Got This. Not a very powerful statement by itself, potentially even disrupting to a feminist who views "babe" in a negative connotation that perhaps 80% of the general public understand it to mean, but it is my mantra. Yes, I have a mantra. Yes, I mean it when I say it. And actually yes, yoga was the avenue for its development. And yes, actually, I went to yoga in the shallow attempt to deepen my squat. Did it work? Yes. Did it help me achieve more than I imagined? Yes. Here's why. I didn't have a mantra before yoga. It's silly, 5 (technically 6) words that I say while practicing mediation through breathing. "Relax babe" during inhalation, "you've got this" through exhalation. With slight pauses in between to feel the air in my lungs. To connect my mind with my body. To accept absolute control of everything that I was, am, and will be. It is so empowering. It's so empowering I still go to yoga just f...