Here’s a draft from almost two months back from my Fitfy theme of posts.  Look at the second bullet and you’ll see how a little encouragement is definitely not what my innate procrastination skills need.

– I finally started my sugar detox.

– The hall pass from the Fox.

– Watching Working Girl…Melanie Griffith is only 10 years older than me and looks like hell.  Sigourney Weaver is almost two decades older than me and is an untouched, statuesque beauty.  

– What’s that teach me?

I’ve been aware of my lack of follow through on this weekly theme.  It’s a combination of reasons, really:

– I wasn’t feeling 100% physically after my first three months back into a gym routine and needed to let my Needle Man do his thing without interfering in that healing.

– Mentally, right around the end of June/beginning of July was challenging for me because it was right when the work conflict with Capt Can’t began.

– As I was feeling physically better and wanting to jump start myself out of my emotional funk, The Fox went down so my gym buddy was out of commission.

But while in my notes I had made a point of using Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver as a cautionary tale regarding aging and how shortcuts in the moment can cost a lot superficially in the future – something I knew from my past use of fat burners and performance enhancers – it was that last bullet that really proved most valuable.

What’s that teach me?

When I review my posts from the first quarter of this initiative, I can see how quickly they turned into a pedantic laundry list of a workout journal and a food diary.

Neither of those are bad things, in and of themselves, but neither was anything other than a part of the whole result I was aiming for by my 50th birthday.  I wanted to come out of this year with a more whole-istic happiness with my older self, letting go of the narcissistic twenty-something shell person that I was half a life ago and valuing my being based on my internal qualities as an individual.

And I wanted a healthy shell to carry that individual around for the next few decades.

Food diaries and workout journals were really a small fraction of the task as a whole.

Frankly, it was the downward spiral that Capt Can’t initiated that pulled my nose out of the ass of those two elements.

Sidebar:  is “downward spiral” redundant?  I never hear anyone refer to an upward spiral.

So, there I was…all butt-hurt because a co-worker bullied me.

And got away with it.

It took a while to realize – or remember, at any rate – that I have no control over another person’s actions or behavior.  I was stuck emotionally reliving each of the other significant bullying moments from my past – and there have been too many – every day at work and self medicating with comfort food and too much of Oregon’s craft beer and wine every night.  Seriously, in a four week period I drank every night but one.

It was quite a cycle.

So, I focused on letting go of that cycle and embracing a different one.

My bicycle.

Since then, I’ve been wanting to write a Fitfy post about cycling but have also been wary of just falling into that same pattern from earlier in the year.  I will post again in Fitfy, but I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to get back to the right balance before I do.

Y’know, the balance between a person who is emotionally at 100% and physically determined to go from being 110% of a person to just 100% of a person – zing! – without cutting into that initial sense of emotional well-being in the process.

Yeah, that sounds easy.

But standby, maybe your patience will be rewarded…