IBS--I Be Shreddin'

Need a break? :)

Sick of watching daytime TV as it contains nothing but political ad drivel (today being election day I am reallly looking forward to tomorrow!!!!) Since becoming a stay at home mom (and I ain't susie homemaker so I don't get a lot of "exercise" doing housework) I had given up on getting any real results doing workouts. I have nursed a baby for a full 12 months now and it seemed like everytime I would try to exercise some of my baby flab off it would just make more pounds stick on. Combine that sad fact with the IBS I suddenly developed when I was 29 one day after eating a kiwi at work and am now violently "allergic" to any raw veggies and some fruits and well, I'm pretty out of shape.

An amazing opportunity has presented itself via my online friends at Northeast Mountain Guiding to accompany them on some of their outdoor hiking/mountaineering/rock climbing trips to be their photographer. As a serious amateur photographer who loves being outside and turning over rocks to see what creepy crawlies are under them I am so wanting to do this!!!! BUT the truth is that I am not sureI will be able to keep up with them. That is going to change.

My sweet baby still nurses up to 5 times a day and sometimes as little as 1-2 times. I am going to be visiting my sister in NC next week for an entire 7 days and not bringing ANY kids with me so now is the time to cut her off. I feel HORRIBLE about it on the one hand and excited on the other. I can't believe that stage of her life is really already over. On the other hand it is a step toward getting my own identity back. This entire year and the one before (when I was preggo) I I have had these feelings about myself:

Old

Boring

Fat

Useless beyond being a mother

Frumpy

Lumpy

Unsexy (spellcheck says that's not a word but whatev)

Out of control

This is not the baby's fault of course, and I never have regretted breastfeeding her. She just feeds so MUCH!!!! For the first 8 months it was literally up to 12 times a day and for hours at a time some days. I have lived mostly in sweatpants and 1 pair of jeans. My hip bones still show a bit so I know they are still there, but my thighs seem so wide that I cannot even dream of putting on a skirt or normal jeans. Its hard to feel human when you have to dress like you are going to bed all the time. And dressing like that puts you in the mindset of laying around all day.

The extra weight I am carrying around (about 25 lb from before I was pregnant) has really put a strain on my knees. Apparently my knees are not very good??!! I never had trouble with them before this baby. Now I cannot bend down and stand up again without some pain. And because of the pain there are a lot of exercises I can't do. How can I lose weight if I can't eat healthy (i.e. VEGETABLES which are full of fiber and few calories--I can't even eat a bite of salad!) AND I can't jog, which has always been my go-to quick slimming exercise.

Luckily I think I finally hit rock bottom. This sounds bad but that is what I have to do: hit the bottom so I can start to go back up. I do this a lot in life. I'm hoping my kids are not like this because let me tell you it is not the easy way by far. This morning I got up, took a SHOWER (OMG!!!) and got dressed. Instead of laying in bed and nursing baby for 40 min I picked her up, got her dressed, and brought her straight downstairs. I gave her breakfast, some water, and got the kids ready for school and off we went. Coffee with my morning buddy and then when I got home baby nursed for 5 min and went straight off to dreamland. I spent about an hour doing the mending (LOL) which involved sewing buttons back on 3 sweaters, a poncho, and fixing a hole on a cute shirt Alicia has. Why don't they put buttons on better??? Why is it that I buy a damn sweater with buttons and they pop off one at a time within hours of wearing them????

After I fixed all that crap I decided I would stop slacking and put the 30 Minute Shred in with Jillian Michaels. I used to do it every morning when my BFF Becca lived next door but when she moved 8 minutes away well, it was just too much work to get r done LOL

And so, I shredded. It really wasn't all that bad and my knees didn't hurt at all. The lovely twisty part of my lower spine that has developed over the past 10 years kind of made me wince a few times but it just needs to obey. I'm hoping that I can keep it up all the rest of the week, and then when we are down south I can use the gym facilities at the hotel to at least do some cardio every day. Then I can transition into actually USING MY GYM MEMBERSHIP and get through the next few months with that, snowshoeing, X-Country skiing, and hopefully HIKING.

That reminds me...I need to do some laundry now and make my husband think that I actually have this place under control...