Yesterday was a recovery day. It’s so funny how when you are aware of your inner conversation, you are aware of where you have gone wrong in the past. Recovery is one of those things that I always seemed to get wrong. I thought that if I wasn’t doing something every day and sometimes multiple times a day, I was not caring about my goals. I would push until my body stopped me by getting sick or injured. I kept trying to push and push myself. I seemed to be able to push myself much more when I was younger. Now I’m just not able to push like I had before.

My body is getting stronger. I can do more push ups, hold my plank longer, and do more lunges.  I did notice that in addition to my legs getting stronger and being able to do more lunges, my knees began to hurt more. Oh the creaks, oh the creaks. It is not a fun place to be in when your formerly healthy non creaking knees start sounding like an old door. I started drinking collagen to help. It is supposed to be tasteless, it is not, not at all. I digress. When I saw the acupuncturist the other day, he worked on my knees. Sometimes the needles don’t hurt at all and other times, oh my word, I want to jump off the table. When the needle went into the spot that was hurting, I about jumped off the table. After my time was up with the needles, came the cupping. High profile athletes use cupping for recovery and that was exciting. I’m coming to a point where I get to have my knees cupped for recovery. The cups felt amazing on my knees. He only leaves them on for about 5 minutes but I could have left them on for 30 minutes it felt so good.

When I was done and on my way home, I had this feeling like my body telling me to rest. I sat with it for a while to see if it was a situation that I didn’t want to do anything or if it was truly wanting rest. My body was like, it is time to rest. I first got irritated and then I said no, “my body is giving me strength, it wants rest so I will give it rest. I just let myself be for the day yesterday and it was nice. I learned yesterday that recovery isn’t weakness, it’s giving your body what it needs.

I know my experiences are different and that’s okay. I’m learning to love what I see in the mirror and give myself permission to give my body what it needs. I also started fascia blasting again as part of my recovery which is also very exciting. Blasting breaks up bound fascia in your body and promotes healing and recovery. I’m excited to be blasting again. Being nicer to myself is feeling good, sometimes odd, but good. I’m also learning that although I’ve always wanted to see quick external changes, it’s the changes I’m seeing on the inside that is what matters.

*Part of the fascia blaster regimen is  bruising as it is bring healing to areas of your body. They don’t look good but they don’t hurt. So if you see me, I will be having bruising on my body and its completely normal. All is well at the casa. 🙂

I’m not gonna lie, today was tough. Like really tough. The last week honestly has been tough if you want to get down to it. Today though, I cried, a lot. Changing the conversation with myself has not been easy however each time I heard the old conversation, I immediately changed it. That is until today.

I gave myself a fitness goals at the beginning of the year that are small. When I say small I mean tiny. Why did I do this? I knew that if I told myself I would do 5 1/2 push ups, 5 lunges on each side, and a 30 second plank, I knew I could do this. I will begin walking again when it warms up as I’m a wimp when it comes to the cold. These are goals I would have never done in my past. Honestly they don’t feel like I’m doing enough. I should be doing more. The problem is by starting out the gate fast, I often never finished due to the conversation. I would get angry with myself for not reaching whatever big goal I had and self sabotage would show up like a monster at the door. This way I can do these small goals and continue working up. I honestly can not wait to see where I am at the end of the year. Each time the old conversation would come up when doing my little goals, I would simply say, “Good job on meeting your push up, plank, and lunge goal for the day.” That is, until today.

This morning after doing my exercises I hopped on FB for a bit before my acupuncture appointment. This picture showed up in my Memories feed. I absolutely love this picture. As you can see, it was taken when Jenna was just a baby. It is a treasured picture with my Mimi who passed a couple of years ago. What a fabulous picture. I looked at it with fond memories and shared it to my wall. It’s a great picture and it is also a picture where I was a size 8 and I looked good. Now at the time, I was trying to work off the rest of the baby weight from Jenna, which wasn’t a lot but I thought I was really heavy here.  I wasn’t thinking that today, just wow I really liked this picture and hey I looked good at 33. Then I got ready for the day. I put on a tank and maxi skirt because it is cold and I wanted to wear a cable knit duster because it was cold. I have this weird thing about too many layers on my arms so if I’m layering with a duster or jacket, I will wear something sleeveless. I looked in the mirror and like a loud-speaker, I heard the old conversation. “Oh my gosh your arms are disgusting.” “How can you even go out in public looking like that, how awful.”

I stopped and immediately tried to change the conversation to thanking my arms for allowing me to do a 30 second plank and 5 1/2 push ups. It wasn’t working. You see, my arms have never been this big, even when I was pregnant. My arms and legs were the two things I felt like I didn’t have to camouflage, but now. I cried today. I cried a lot today because I didn’t like what I saw staring back at me in the mirror. Those old tapes played over and over in my head. They wouldn’t stop or quiet down. I started going through how I’m not doing enough push ups and how I need to buy weights NOW instead of when I’m ready, etc. It was so hard hearing that super loud voice telling me how disgusting I am and there is no way my husband isn’t embarrassed by me. His work trip is in a month and a few days. I’m telling myself I can’t go because I’m going to embarrass him and I should be embarrassed for wanting to go. I haven’t gone to his work party because I was too embarrassed for people to see how I look now. It was very hard for me to converse with my friends today because of how I was feeling. Maybe if I still looked how I did in the picture, it would have been different? When I get back down to that size, it will be different. The funny thing is when I look at myself in the picture, I realized I was saying the exact same thing. Instead of saying, “Great job for losing a lot of the baby weight and getting back into your size 8 clothes.” or “Congratulations body for bringing this baby girl here through a very tough pregnancy.”; I said, “You are so disgusting and huge, I can’t believe how long it is taking you to lose this baby weight”. You see, I can say if I looked like I did in the picture it will be different and better, but unless I change my dialogue, it will be exactly the same.

The conversation I had with myself  today and in the past, is a conversation I would never remotely consider having with another person. It’s mean, there is no other way around it. Today I was mean to myself. Meaner than I’ve been in a few days but I couldn’t stop it. This is a dialogue that I’ve been having with myself for years now. Oh how I wish that when I decided to change the conversation, this dialogue would have just disappeared. It didn’t, it is still here and something that I will probably be battling until my new dialogue and conversations get loud enough to overtake it. So yes, today pretty much sucked. I’m sure I will have more days that will suck. The good thing is because I’ve decided to change the conversation, I’m changing my dialogue. I thanked my big arms and legs for what they are letting me do now. I thanked myself for allowing me to bring it back to a place of health. I thanked my body for telling me what foods are best for it and what foods I really need to avoid. Those conversations were quite and they were short. They were a whisper back to the loud-speaker dialogue in my conversation today. The important thing is that I did whisper back because I know that each day if I purposely change the conversation, one day it will over take the conversation and I will be in a much better place both physically and mentally.

2018 has come and so have the traditional New Year’s resolutions or goals. This year I will be 43. I made an interesting observation in a group chat today that at age 32, I was the smallest I’d ever been clocking in at a size 2 and very lean yet at age 42, I am the largest I’ve ever been clocking in at a full size 16 on the cusp of a size 18 and well lots of fluff. At 32 there were still lots of mental issues, you know, I’m disgusting I need to lose more, starving because I was eating around 300-500 calories a day, crazy exercising to the point of obsession and burning up my adrenals on a medication I’m not 100% sure I actually needed. I didn’t feel like I had worth. Now at 42, now in addition to the mental issues of oh my gosh, I’m so disgusting, starving myself out of real nutrition from foods that grow on trees and in the ground, I now tack on some physical health issues due to stress, lack of exercise, and quite frankly carrying around 60 pounds that my body would like me to release. Again, feeling as like I have no worth.

I had a successful clothing boutique that I made the decision to close at the end of 2017 because it was wearing on my family and my physical health. I sat there on New Year’s Eve for the first time, not making business, financial, and weight goals. I was trying to figure out how in the world did things come to this? I then sat for a while about my word for 2018 and what I really wanted from myself this year. What did I want from 2018? How do I want my family to look? How do I want my health to look? How do I want my days to look? That is when it hit me like a ton of bricks, I needed to change my conversation. See I’ve been on a diet since I was 12 years old. Those conversations in my early years have set me up for where I am now. My oldest is 12. I think about where she will be 30 years later. Do I want her to be overweight and tired with health problems, always looking for that next external fix to make it better? It doesn’t matter if its a weight loss regimen or business, for me its about fixing what is wrong with me and fixing it quickly.

I had a occupational therapist tell me that my 12 year old is having the same conversation that I’ve been having since I was 12. Okay what do I do with this? I change the conversation and change it now. I didn’t really think about it until over New Years. How are my conversations with myself affecting my 12 year old’s conversations with herself? Not positively, I can tell you that for sure.

So where does that leave my conversations with myself? That was the big question as I closed out 2017. I had a choice, I can do things the way I always did, hop on the diet/fitness crazy train, start a new business, or I can change the conversation, my conversation. I decided to change the conversation with myself. You see I’ve done it all. So many diets, starting at age 12, thats like 30 years of some kind of dieting to fix myself. A business, if I can have a successful business then, I will feel worthy. Not fully successful in any of it because I never changed the conversation. This year at 42 I’m changing the conversation. No longer am I going to be a total jerk to myself. No longer will I strive for perfection thinking only then can I be successful and matter. I matter because I’m me. The good Lord created me and I’m still alive, so I matter. Its time for me to stop looking outside to feel worthy of something, I can look inside and above to see why I am worthy. John 3:16 is why I’m worthy and because of that, its time for me to know that worth.

Hold on to your hats girls, 2018 is gonna be the year, mommy changes the conversation because I want to make sure yours is a conversation of worthiness because worthy is our 2018 word for the year!