January 2017 Goals

Fitness and Nutrition

CrossFit Goal: 19/200 WODs. I'm off to a great start to meet this goal because I need about 17 classes per month. Our coach Alex has started to post an Abs by Coach Alex workout each day as accessory work. This has been really great because it's helped me to make friends with some members at the gym that I didn't know very well.

Not CrossFit: I went to Pure Barre Brookhaven four times. I bought an unlimited back for $75 when they first opened and I never used it. A single class is $23 so I got my money's worth. It was a pain in the ass to drive up to Brookhaven on weeknights but the studio is really pretty. You get to look out onto Dresden Drive and see what folks are up to when your thighs are shaking. Unfortunately, I never got to go to class with my friend Mara.

Macro Tracking: 3/Weekend Days. I realized that I was binge eating again when I started tracking my weekends. This realization caused me to adjust my weekday macros and I'm a lot happier.

Water: I'm drinking between 50 and 70 ounces a day, not including the water I put into my shakes, pre-workout etc. Definitely room for improvement.

Happiness

Church: I went to church twice. Last Sunday I went to lunch with three friends afterwards and it was hands down the best part of my week. I was also home to go to community dinner every week this month. I am so thankful I found this church.

Call a Friend: I had two great phone calls this month. My friend Rylan and I caught up after someone pretending to be me said she was pregnant and naming her baby after Rylan. Just as an FYI, I claimed this baby name in 2012 and I will fight you. My high school roommate Heather and I had the most fantastic call on Sunday night. We've been playing phone tag forever and she called me back just as I was getting on the treadmill to get in my 10,000 steps. I walked on an incline and we had so much fun catching each other up on our fantastic, and sometimes dramatic, lives.

I'm Losing My Gains!

So I know that I regularly claim that I'm losing my gains, usually when I'm hangry or unable to do anymore pull-ups. Except it turns out that I actually am losing my gains.

On Saturday, Body Fat Test Atlanta came to CrossFit Identity with the dunk tank. This was my fourth test. The great news - I'm at 18.6% body fat. The bad news - I lost 0.55 lbs of muscle. This is on top of the pound of muscle I lost between 2014 and 2015. I know about half of you are rolling your eyes over 1.55 lbs, and the other half of you are about to send me condolence letters. Do you know how freaking hard it is to gain a pound of muscle? Really. Freaking. Hard.

Mulligan on Weight Loss Wednesday aka Friday 1.27.17

Despite someone telling me I shouldn't be eating Triscuits last night because I was already gaining weight, I am back to 141.6 lbs this morning. Don't listen to anyone who tells you not to eat Triscuits, especially if you bought them AND you bought the good rosemary and olive oil kind.

After driving that total pompous ass* to the airport, I came home and thought I looked pretty lean as I got out of the shower. I hopped on the scale and low and behold, I'm back on track for pool season.

Pool season starts in mid-April and last through the beginning of football season. If the Dawgs aren't playing until the evening, you can totally find me in the pool until about October. I start April with my bikini ready body, and by Memorial Day it looks like I'm four months pregnant. Thanks Miller Lite.

*He's actually not that terrible. I may have asked him to provide negative reinforcement as motivation to stick my macros since I miss my ex-boyfriend telling me I eat too many carbs. However, he did try to claim he was taking an Uber until he told me to stay in bed until he was ready to leave because how else was he getting to the airport.

New Year, New Goals: 2017 Edition

Fitness and Nutrition

WOD 200 times in 2017: I need to WOD approximately 17 times a month to hit this goal. Honestly, I think meeting this goal really depends on how often I travel for work and how much I am willing to spend in drop-in fees. Discovering that CrossFit Downtown Atlanta offers 11 AM classes on Saturdays and Sundays, plus a noon Sunday class is probably going to be the only way I hit this goal. I don't know how my friends show up to the 8:15 AM CFID class after going out with me the night before. Masochists...

Follow my macros at least 6 days a week: I'm pretty dang good about about tracking my food and hitting my numbers Monday through Friday, but I stopped consistently tracking my weekends a while ago. I'm going to report the number of Saturdays and Sundays I tracked each month to hold me accountable.

Drink 96 oz (4 Tervises) of water daily: I was so good at drinking water and now I'm always drinking iced coffee and protein shakes.

Happiness

Go to church: I started going to St. Paul's Presbyterian back in August and I really began to enjoy it. I think showing up twice a month and going to community dinner on Wednesdays whenever I'm in town is a reasonable commitment.

Call a friend who lives outside of Atlanta each month: I guess I stay in reasonable touch with people via Facebook, but I haven't been great at maintaining relationships with my friends from New York, college, or high school. I know this because I text them when I see their Instagram engagement posts and see that I haven't messaged them in over a year.

Say no to shit I don't want to do: Not many people would describe me as a pushover, but man do I agree to do a ton of crap that I just don't want to do. This is exactly how I am still signed up for a GMAT exam for which I haven't studied. I don't even have plans to go to business school! I'm not planning on becoming a Negative Nancy, but it's really okay to take stock of a situation and decide it's not for me. Basically my goal is to become selfish in 2017. Woot woot.

Weight Loss Wednesday 1.25.17

Well, it's official. I'm gaining weight on this so-called cut because I keep binge eating. I decided this morning, as I felt fluffy and defeated, that I am going going back to my self-determined macros ASAP. I found that 135 P 165 C and 65 F worked really well for my body. I saw upper ab definition, I was hitting PRs, and I felt satiated. Now I am all hangry, obsessed with tacos, and dreaming about Kerrygold butter. I miss my Gatorade/creatine/whey workout shake y'all!

I'm extremely competitive and I don't like to fail. I didn't want to fail at this Fat Loss Accelerator program but what the heck am I accomplishing by pretending to follow numbers that I don't want to use? I have to learn to admit that sometimes something isn't working and that's okay. I dated someone for a year because I didn't want to fail at another relationship. A whole year! I've been through enough. Give me my damn fats back.

The Fat Loss Accelerator program has an awesome Facebook group, which I'm really loving. I think I might be a little more active in it now that I'm not ashamed of bombing my numbers. I've only had a protein shake so far this morning and I'm already feeling a hell of a lot less stressed since I updated my goals in My Fitness Pal.

1/25/17 at 143.6

Weight Loss Wednesday 1.18.17

The Fat Loss Accelerator program has been a bit more challenging than I expected. Princess doesn't handle low fat very well. Katiesfitscript, one of my favorite bloggers, has written about how some of her clients do better when she increases their macros because it gets them to stop binging on the weekends. Dude, I made it until Thursday night before I was like fuck this noise, and went to Hacienda for fajitas and margaritas. That guy I've been seeing came home the next morning and I used that as an excuse to keep drinking and eating whatever I wanted... which was apparently lots of dumplings and dan dan noodles. I committed to (and paid for) this program, so I'm getting my ass back on the wagon, but I don't think these are sustainable numbers for me. I mean it's a four week program for a reason, right?

1/18/17 at 143.2

Despite my love for tequila, pinot grigio, and meat wrapped in dough, I otherwise ate pretty well (did I mention that this guy cooks a lot better than I do?) and I got a bunch of workouts in. I went to two different CrossFits on Saturday, made it to Pure Barre on Sunday, and went to CrossFit on Monday and Tuesday.

Weight Loss Wednesday 1.11.17

It's been a while since I posted for Weight Loss Wednesday. I took the new photos below last Saturday as my before photos for the Fat Loss Accelerator program I am participating in this month. The older photos (shorter hair) are from May 25, 2016.

1/7/17 at 141.4 lbs

VS.

5/25/16 at 140.2 lbs

New Toys and the Great Blizzard of 2017

Atlanta prepared for an epic snowstorm last Friday. Luckily we all survived.

The gym was open on Saturday morning but all of the scheduled classes were cancelled because some roads were icy. Fortunately the roads I need to take to the box were not icy so I cleaned off Miranda, my Nissan Rogue, and headed on over. 

No, I don't find it odd that I named my car after Miranda Oldroyd.

I did some ankle mobility with Kayte and two of the Abs by Coach Alex workouts I missed. I was really just there to socialize.

Abs by Coach Alex 1.3.17

100 straight leg sit-ups for time

EMOM 5 v-ups. Start with 5 v-ups.

This vicious thing took me 5:16. I had three sit-ups left to do when minute 5 hit and those extra v-ups burned.

Abs by Coach Alex 1.6.17

4 RFT

50 turtles

0:30 side plank, each side

10 GHD sit-ups

This thing was surprisingly much harder than it looks. I subbed straight leg sit-ups because my back can't handle GHDs right now. It took me 9:41. I did the planks unbroken. Thanks Pure Barre!

We got new tires! This one is somewhere between 150# and 200#.

Although we didn't get very much snow, we had a snow day party anyway. Definitely the most fun I've had in a while! I love my CrossFit Identity family.

Tilikum is Dead

Tilikum, SeaWorld's most notorious resident, has died and I am devastated. It might sound like I'm kidding, but man did I feel like that orca understood me. I wrote about it in this February 2013 blog post. Spoiler alert! This post is pre-CrossFit and I was a nasty bitch terrorizing men on my young professionals club volleyball team.

source

I'm actually not against SeaWorld. I read this article about SeaWorld's CEO Joel Manby in Fortune Magazine last September and I think it's a worthwhile read. We know a lot more about marine mammals in 2017 than we did when Tilikum was caught in 1983. You can't just dump a whole bunch of animals who have come to rely on human care back into the ocean. My favorite place in the whole wide world as a middle school student was the Dolphin Research Center, and I think they're doing some great work. If anyone wants to make a trip to Grassy Key with me, holler at your girl.

Anyway, there is a point to this post. I had so much anger and frustration trapped in me that I was clearly on a path to self-destruction. I was going to be dead within five years. I had no constructive way to express or release the feelings I didn't let myself have and I just became really fucking mean. I felt trapped in a city I hated, surrounded by literally millions of people to whom I had no connection, and I didn't know what to do besides work all of the time and get really drunk. I understand the frustration Tilikum must have felt living 34 of his 36 years in a fucking glass tank with a bunch of idiots screeching at him. That's how I felt about the subway.