physical upkeep, a year in review

I'm a little hesitant to be so personal, but I'm hoping that reflecting on my mistakes will benefit others in some way. Besides, I'm pretty sure only my grammies read this, anyway.

This past year, I destroyed my body. For the first few weeks of school, I brought a (mostly) healthy lunch with me. I was sweating in the 95 degree building and on my feet all day -- and I convinced myself that that was exercise. Then, I made friends with the lunch ladies. Soon, it was a lot easier to eat the (mostly) unhealthy school lunches than it was to pack a lunch. Once and I while, Ryan would make a big batch of tuna salad and that would hold me over for a couple of days, but it didn't make up for the fact that I was consistently missing meals or substituting in unhealthy options. Plus, once a week I would go to class and on my way to class I would purchase dinner-to-go. Add to all of that the fact that teaching would make me work up a pretty big appetite, there were often unhealthy snacks available somewhere in the building, and my colleagues and I sometimes went out for lunch just to escape the building for 20 minutes.

In other words, my intake was entirely thoughtless, reckless, damaging.

Perhaps all of that would not have been so destructive if I had spent any time maintaining my body. After my October fallout, I vowed to go to yoga once a week. And I did. However, that once a week session was all I could to just to maintain -- I did not work through any of the stress or anxiety or damage that I was inflicting on my body past the surface level. Just to demonstrate how truly bad it had gotten: I have been running about every other day or more since school got out. Today was the first day in two weeks that I was able to comfortably run two miles and to find a pace to keep going. When there is so much stress to work through, I feel like I should be working out even more than I do when my life is dandy.

Before school got out, I had images of me finally taking care of my body this summer, of dropping back down to my normal pant size, of being able to see and feel my physical health again. Two weeks out, I am beginning to worry that eight weeks will not be enough. Indeed, I don't think that twelve would be enough. More importantly, I am anxious about how I am going to continue to take care of my body when school starts again. I love how I feel after even a quick run, but some days I just can't muster the energy. At the end of this last year I mastered getting (mostly) enough sleep. For year two, it's going to need to be exercise and healthful food. I just don't know exactly how yet.