How we doin swoleites?
This last month has been a little rough for me. Travel, sickness, injury (slept on my shoulder wrong and it took it over a week to not hurt like hell), family issues. In short, one of the wheels on my fitness wagon fell off.
So I did an experiment, and let myself go a little. Drank more soda in a week than I have in the last month, ate some Fried Oreos (oh god, the stomach pains afterward), some fast food, had a nice big glass of beer, spent most of the days not working playing Dark Souls 3 like a drug addict and did no working out.
And, to no one's surprise....I felt like shit! Yeah it was nice to step away from the rigor of working out and eating right but you know what? It wasn't easier. You just immediately fill up that void in your discipline with transient shit that distracts you. It's like.....sleeping in to catch up, and waking up feeling no more rested than if you got 8 hours.
Momentum is so important to staying fit, it's crazy. Even down to how your muscles feel. After a week off, all the tension went out of my muscles. After 6 months of a weekly workout routine, it felt weird to have my muscles return to a state of normalcy. Not constantly aching, not constantly throbbing, nerves firing, blood pumping. I felt like butter this last week (shoulder aside) and while that is a great feeling.....I felt so out of my routine, it felt like I'd flushed my motivation along with all the muscle tension. I've gotten so used to my body feeling slightly strung out all the time that feeling fully rested felt wrong. I've come to rely on that feeling of "being worked" to in turn fire me up for my next workout. In some ways the absence of it almost felt like I was starting all over again, even after just a week off.
Of course that feel rapidly went away but.....I doubt I'll meet my goals by the end of March. Just too much shit going on that distracts me from both my nutrition and my workout schedule. I know some fitness coach or model would say "that's no excuse!" and they'd be right. But I don't doubt my ability to be disciplined anymore, nor do I doubt my ability to resist the things I know are bad for me. I just know that pushing myself when I'm facing other environmental stressors isn't going to give me a good workout, and if my mind isn't there, the effort probably won't be either.
S'alright though, I'm back on the horse and summer is still a long ways away. Plenty of time to drop the rest of the weight I've been looking to get rid of.