My Goals

In order to fully understand the crazy logic behind my posts, I feel like it's good to talk about what my goals are. I'm always telling people that "I want to get fit and healthy." And they look at me and nod encouragingly and say "good for you!" I think they really mean it (I have some great people in my life) but what does "fit and healthy" mean to me?

I feel like I should say that first of all, my goal is not to lose weight. Well, not in the traditional sense anyways. Throughout all of my dieting  failures experiences, I have been scale obsessed. To the point that I was weighing myself about 14- 20 times a day. Definitely not healthy. Especially because that number at any given point of the day, determined how happy I would be for the rest of the day.

So now I have banished the scale to a box, and weigh in on the same scale about once a week. This way I have a ballpark figure of what I weigh and my progress but it no longer defines me. It has actually been quite freeing. And sure, I would love that number to go down, realistically another 10 pounds, but that's not one of my goals that I am actively reaching for right now.

When my trainer first body fat tested me and told me that God-awful number, he said "we need to get this number lower more for your health reasons than for vanity." I took that to heart and am currently focusing on lowering my body fat and upping my lean body mass.

My current goals are:

• Eat a well balanced diet with limited sugar every day (usually easier said than done in my world!)
• Exercise at an intense pace at least 6 days a week
• Stay within my calorie range (currently 1500-2000) and nutrient range (40% carbs, 30% protein, 30% fat)
• Less body fat, more muscle

Why do I torture myself 6 days a week at the gym? What do I want to get out of this? I want to run a marathon. I want to be able to do pushups (on my toes) and pull ups (yes more than one). I want to lose a little bit of jiggly fat. I want to go rock climbing. I want to have kids and be an active mom. I want to wear a bikini without nitpicking my body's flaws. While all of those are worthy reasons of regular sweat fests, that's not why I do it. I drag myself to the gym 6 days a week at the ungodly hour of 5:30 a.m. because exercising helps me be more at peace with myself. It helps me like myself better. It helps me be okay with my flaws. And because its fun :O)