Just want to quickly post some birthday memories.

Vitaliy bought me a fitness bracelet– I love it 🙂

Vitaliy and I at Ocean Plaza for my birthday

Skyla made me this card: 

Skyla and Alla (friend) blew up and taped all these balloons to the ceiling of the kitchen early that morning. And they had a pile of presents waiting!

The church gave me this card: — one of the gals in the church, Vika, cross stitched the Bible section!

It was about 2 years ago now that I started actively trying to lose weight and get in shape. I started at 195 lbs, and I originally wanted to lose to 135 lbs, but with the Curves food school, and other considerations, I changed that to 145 lbs– I’m still breastfeeding, and it’s a healthy weight for me.

I want to note a few things. I’m shifting into the maintaining phase. It’s a change. But here is what I really like: with Curves stuff, the focus is on losing fat and gaining muscle. My body used to have a higher percent of fat than muscle. That has reversed now— I have a higher percentage of body muscle than fat.

So what I noticed is that I gain weight much slower now, like if I’m “holiday eating” for 5-6 weeks (during Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year), and I lose it faster once I go back to their structured diet.

I still workout at Curves 3 days a week, and I really enjoy that time.

Vitaliy bought me a cool gift for my 41st birthday, which is tomorrow. He loves technology. I am OK with technology to some extent. So this gift was a perfect combo of his tech-savvy-ness and my fitness.

It’s a fitness bracelet. …. I am surprised at myself at how much I like it!

For example, one thing I just did: I set my bracelet for 1 hour of walking (around the third floor of the mall). It timed me, constantly measured my heartrate, counted my steps, how many calories burned, and notified me each time I reached a kilometer– I walked 5 kilometers! (about 3 miles)

And since one of my main 2017 resolutions is to pray for an hour a day, and I’m still experimenting how to work that one hour into my life regularly, I prayed as I walked, and it was really a wonderful way to combine spiritual and physical fitness!

I don’t think I’ll do it everyday, but 2-3 days a week would be fantastic.

Anyway, this bracelet thing does a bunch of fitness stuff– measures my sleep hours and what level of sleep, counts my steps all day, etc. It’s pretty cool, and emotionally it helps me feel “official” as a fitness-type person. (I know, that’s corny, but it’s…. how I feel, and that can be important.)

Now, about aging.

You  know, for many years, I took the bull by the horns, researched and studied all this stuff about health and pregnancy and breastfeeding. But I’ve realized that I have a block about dealing with aging. …. I just want to ignore the symptoms and hope they’ll go away.

…. So… I’m trying to help myself deal gently with these news issues cropping up in my life. Like having to switch to non-caffeinated coffee because caffeinated started causing me blood pressure and heart rate issues. Its’ not necessarily aging, but for me it is.

And I keep putting off going to the doctor about some of my aging things. I personally have a complex relationship with the system of allopathic medicine, so I’m not exactly sure what I want from a doctor visit. I’m still in the process of clarifying that for myself. But I ought to go in the next month or two I think, to at least start talking about some of my other health things.

I’m actually looking forward to grey hair. I think it will look good on me.

Oh, I’ve started a morning routine, too, of taking care of my body. It involves body brushing, hypopressive breathing, a face mask, and a few other details. I usually do not have the patience to pay so much attention to my physical being, but surprisingly, I’m ready to do that now.

So, last week, I had a day or three of my depression cycle where I start thinking about 2 life dreams that I’m pretty emotionally invested in that … Aren’t Going To Happen (most likely). And then I start getting all poophead, wondering why I’m even alive, thinking accusatory thoughts towards Vitaliy (hello?), and being plagued by the question: What is the value of my life??

Going through this cycle is like peeling away the layers of an onion. It burns. It makes me cry. But I get closer and closer to it being gone. It’s gotten pretty small, actually. I’m surprised it even came up again. …. But it did.

And this time, just maybe?, I found the best answer. The answer that closes the issue and frees me to think new things.

What is the value of my life?

Stop asking that question.

Just stop asking it.

You are not capable of answering it.

I imagined some life where I was fulfilling these two dreams, and you know, I’d have the same question, the same struggles. WHAT I DO doesn’t answer that question.

God is the judge of it. He assigns value. And, walking in His Spirit, I do my stuff every day, and GOD GIVES VALUE TO IT. It’s valuable because I’m doing the will of God for my life.

….

I could go on.

I will spare you.

But, I’m nixing that question from my cycle– that question IS my cycle. It’s a dead-end question for me. For me, it is, I think, a question that arises from my pride, some desire to be *important* in the way I consider importance. God gives truer thoughts and better questions in its place.

Now I’m thinking about how to make a Third Thing— a life that is not Vitaliy’s, not mine, but a Third Thing that only the two of us together could make together. I will think about this quite a lot.

I’m also thinking about how to keep rechannel my emotional investments. How to see my future without feeling the loss of these two things and seeing something bright and good, something Other.

…. It’s interesting…..

So, if you remember (those who read here regularly), I was wanting to lose a decade of gathered up baby weight before I turned 40 last December.

I started at 195 lbs (I didn’t weigh myself during my last pregnancy or for a few weeks after, so I was more than that).

For the year I was 39, I lost to about 145lbs. That’s about 50 lbs! I mostly did it on my own, eating oatmeal, fish, salad, eggs. I would do a cycle of good weight loss, then stop when I lost interest, then go back to a cycle of loss, then stop. It helped me to do it in strong spurts.

But then I turned 40, and I lost all desire to diet and exercise. I still wanted to lose all the weight, but I didin’t have enough desire to actuallly do it. So I regained to about 167.

I was kind of thinking and praying about what to do. Sometimes I would try to motivate myself. But it was short-lived. Then my mom and dad came for a visit in June of this year, and mom had been losing weight, too, and we were talking about how we wanted to keep losing. So we decided, why not start now, and we joined the Curves that’s on the third floor of our mall.

During that month, we exercised faithfully 3x/week. We both gained a little weight still, from all our eating and special times, but I lost fat. At Curves, you really focus on shifting your muscle/fat ratio, so your body becomes more and more able to burn calories (because it’s more muscle) and it becomes easier to maintain weight loss.

By the time mom was leaving, they were announcing their 8-week Food School starting early July, so I joined that. It was a weekly group/class about eating and weight loss, and overall, a healthy lifestyle. I was ready to join because I was tired of motivating myself and really wanted someone else doing that, I like getting more education, and I met ladies at various places on the same road of weight loss.

It was really, really fun! And the important thing is that I really committed myself to doing their eating plan with little to no exceptions (even when we traveled) and exercising very regularly and faithfully.

It’s now September, Food School has been over for a month, and I’m still going strong. I’m still on the weightloss part of their diet, because my body is still willing to shed weight. I’ve lost 20 lls (back around 145), my percent of body fat is 31.9% (I started at 38.1%, and the norm is 20%-30%). My muscle mass has increased from 27.1% to 30.3% (norm is 35%-38%). And I love the beautiful, muscular curves in my arms and legs.

I haven’t eaten sugar for over 3 months now. I can’t believe it. Sugar in my coffee was an absolute must–otherwise, why drink it?? But the Food School teacher said she loves lattes without sugar, so now that’s what I’m doing, too.

A few major lessons from this:

1. I’m trying to make a life-change, not just achieve a goal weight. Lord willing, I will keep up my exercise and good dietary changes for the rest of my life.
2. I’m noting times when I would, before, have eaten in order to help myself. Times of fatigue, stress, Vitaliy being gone, emotional fatiuge or frustration, boredom … and I’m finding other ways to comfort and strengthen and busy myself that don’t involve food. It’s a good thing. When I want to eat for no good reason, I remind myself that I love how my clothes fit and how my body looks, and that’s worth more to me than this temporary, often non-physical craving to eat.
3. God used this to start a wave in my life of learning self-discipline. This diet and exercise requires a lot of self-discipline. It’s stressful, even in a good way, but it breaks down, into small steps, a huge task that I can’t accomplish in one or a few bursts of energy. So I’ve started applying this to other areas of my life– currently, fundraising and home schooling. It’s helping me break down those huge jobs into small steps and tasks and do them consistently to accomplish a huge job in good time.

I should post a photo sometime soon 🙂