Lean with your head and your body will follow.

What you don’t know is that this is actually my second blog attempt for the day. The first one I wrote, read, and re-read and realized I sounded like quite the Sorry Sally so I decided to scrap it and refresh my blog with a better point of view. Straight from the source: I’ve sucked at P90x the last week…. But between my Monavie energy drink I tried today, and the 30 minute walk I went for over my lunch hour in the beautiful spring weather, I’m feeling really good right now. Amazing for a Monday! Anyway, after work and my chiro appointment tonight, I’m going to give my all to P90x. I read a post last week from the P90x FB page about missing a day and what to do and I really enjoyed Tony’s response, which was not to beat yourself up, but to move on, but don’t miss a week and wonder why you aren’t getting results. I keep wondering if I keep looking for excuses to quit. Why? I don’t know. The only thing I can chalk it up to is this aversion to failing that I have. Don’t you know its way better to just not try than to fail? That doesn’t make any sense!

A big thing that I’ve been recognizing lately in the blogs I like to follow is that people are either establishing or re-affirming WHY they want to lose weight in the first place. The generic answer for me is to of course lose weight (I imagine this to be a Sz 8)… but what else does that mean to me? Well, I guess it means that I want to be strong and healthy, and to not have a self-esteem that is in the tanker. My sister (in 11th grade) is extremely fit and I would love to be able to run road races with her someday and for me to be able to keep up with her. We did a 5k together a year and a half back – just after she was done with her cross country season – she hardly broke a sweat and I barely finished in 36 minutes. Just over a mile in, I had to tell her to go and run ahead, otherwise, she would have risked actually fallen asleep while running. Back when I was a runner, I had a 5k personal best of 21 minutes and some odd seconds.

While on my walk today, I was thinking about these goals and if you can’t achieve the short-term ones, my longer term goals will never come. And it reminded me of a piece of running advice I received while participating in one of those 10-week long boot camp style workout sessions last summer, and it was to lean forward a little bit with your head when you run, because your body will find it easier to naturally keep moving forward, rather than leaning back. Then it occurred to me – lean with the head, and the body will follow. Now in an attempt to get a little deep here, I realized it’s the same metaphor for becoming healthy. Get in the right frame of mind with deciding what foods to eat and pushing yourself to not only work out, but work a little harder while working out, and the results I want from my body, will follow. Eh? How about that! Lead with your head (mentally and physically) and your body will follow.

Things to watch for:

• I plan on updating my blog with daily, weekly, monthly and my longer term goals. (Per “Winning by Losing” by Jillian Michaels so you can see what I’m going after.
• My weight tracker. I’m not quite ready to expose my before pictures publically yet, but I am going WAY outside my comfort zone and sharing my weight, gulp, publically. Fridays will be my official weigh-in days. Hold me accountable, people!