Random Thoughts on Movement and Living Well

Wow, talk about a respite....it has been nearly a year since my last blog post.  I decided it was time because I had so many thoughts swimming around in my head surrounding National Eating Disorder Awareness Week. Recovery is such an enormous and monumental thing that one cannot help but be passionate about it. Even though I have been weight restored for about two years now, I still battle the disorder but to a much lesser extent. As usual, I like to be active during NEDA week as I do feel very strongly about awareness as education is the key to early detection and prevention.   So, here is a quick recap of where I am after starting recovery from Anorexia in February of 2019.  I just spoke about weight restoration...that took a long time, but I am at a healthy weight. I have gained over 30 pounds since 2019. I don't love the way I look but I don't hate myself (I did hate the way I looked a large part of my life). I know that my worth is not connected to the way I loo...

  I have been thinking about time and life and the amount of time that I might have left here on earth a lot lately. Bottom line, I want more! There are reasons why…maybe you have thought about it too in one of these ways? I approach the decade of undeniable senior hood this year. 60 is coming in hot. So, I am putting the breaks on the year in a big way…slow down! It is almost June which means 2024 is nearly half over!...and I get ever closer to 60. Why does 60 seem so big to me? It is plain and simple, because of 70 and 80!   I look at these upcoming decades with the backdrop of my parents; everything they went through after 80 yo, seemed awful to me…. from a physical and mental aspect. So, I think I likely have two decades of quality life at most , God-willing. More often, people around me are passing away. In a most tragic way, I just heard of a friend of a friend who is in hospice (she is not even 40 yo) due to the physical complications of Anorexia. Heartbreaking, and y...

  It is heart month, do something good for your heart.  Let it feel. I don’t know about you, but music conjures up all sorts of feelings for me and it has since I can remember.   When I was a young teen, my bf and I had a few songs that we would intentionally listen to if we needed a good cry. I don’t recall talking about our feelings, but we simply just wanted to cry…. we have to let it out at times, don’t we? My music choice usually reflects my mood. If I am all disordered and stoic, I would listen to music that got me motivated and out of a feeling place. My music choices would help me to block out the bad so to speak. I still have some songs like that, but rather than feeling like they help me to block out life, now I feel like they just remind me of a really tough time in my life and they help me to say yes, I relate to all that. The other day, I was being pushed out of my comfort zone at work and I needed some music to soothe my spirit. I was not near Alexa, s...

  T oday after reading about Billie Eilish’s award for the song, “What was I Made for?”, I decided to put my real work aside and write about my Barbie thoughts which by the way, feels very exposed and scary to me. I agreed to go see Barbie one Friday in late summer. A group of dear friends were going, and I didn’t really want to see the movie, but I went to be with my girls.   As we were partaking in some wine and appetizers before the show, one friend said that she cried a bit in the movie (she was seeing it for the second time). I said rather emphatically and loudly “I am a grown-ass woman, I am not going cry!” I am forever skeptical and rather cynical at times. My expectations for this movie were very low simply because so many people were praising it. If the world likes it, then I won’t and that is how I often think. Much to my chagrin, I had to take those words back…. I am not going to lie or cover it up; Barbie hit me hard and I loved it, and I saw it twice in the th...

  Mercy, how does this happen?   It seems like just yesterday that I started NY eve with Covid and shortly after a new hip (which is now doing great).  And, it has been so many months since I last sat down to do this. To sit and type and write is a very therapeutic action for me and yet so many times when the ideas pop in my already-fully-muddled brain, I don’t sit and type.   What have I been doing, you ask? You might think, she is compulsively or obsessively exercising, hiking, baking, reading, or working. But the answer is when I could have been writing, I was usually stress cleaning, painting walls, and organizing…….for a better part of two years off and on in some shape or way that is what has filled my downtime. I did take two wonderful trips to hike. One in the summer to Bozeman and a quick one to LeConte this fall, picture above. Case in point on the cleaning though, last night before drifting off to sleep, I was “dreaming” about another closet space I coul...

  There seems to be a constant battle between what my heart and emotions desire and what my brain and body says are needed. I see it as a disconnection or short circuit (anorexia diagnosis) in my emotional and physical connection. I constantly willfully choose to ignore what my body wants or needs. It is eating disorder 101 and because I am so advanced in it, it still lingers even this far into recovery. I suppose all of us do this to some degree with something. Yesterday, I posted a rather fun for me to write blog about my hip replacement. This one is more honest and vulnerable because there is more to the story than meets the eye and I have come to the point of wanting to share the difficult or dark-belly-of-the-fish stuff (you know the nasty part that is gross looking) for some unfathomable reason. It just might be to keep myself accountable, I am not sure.    In May 2017, after being sidelined from running for four months after major ankle surgery I went all in on...

  MOMS AND DADS, YOUR CHILDREN ARE LISTENING AND TAKING IN YOUR WORDS AND ACTIONS  I knew today was going to be a writing day but I prayed to God and said, “what shall I write about next?”   A few minutes later, I thought Fat Fanny. I have wanted to talk about Fat Fanny for a while, but I was waiting. Waiting for the right time, waiting for God to say, “it is okay now. It is time.” I hesitated to tell the story because it is about my mom and I don't want us to be misunderstood. So, I must start by emphasizing that my mom was an amazingly humble, giving, loving woman but she had a terribly negative self-image that I was very aware of from a young age. Even though I am going to write a bit about that, when it comes to my history of eating disorder, I do not blame either of my parents, anyone, or anything. There are multiple factors at play with any eating disorder development. I would not have traded my parents for anyone, I was blessed beyond measure. I just have to sa...

  The sky is not the limit Maybe you have big life goals.  How do you push yourself to achieve or do well without losing yourself in the process of mastery? Do you need to have any big goals? How do you know when a goal is within reach? When is it important to see a goal through?  What about those things that get in the way, our own limits? How do we deal with limits and obstacles? These are just a few of the many questions that run wild in my brain and end up looking like a labyrinth going nowhere. Sometimes, writing helps. Other times, I am still in a mental tizzy. Maybe just maybe, you want to look differently. Maybe you want to lose weight. But what if you are right where you need to be?   Maybe your body was not meant to be 5’8’’, xxx pounds. This blog is not about weight but it is about goals and limitations.   I see so many people out there wanting to lose weight or look a certain way; that is not meant for them anymore than me running like Shalane Flan...

WHO ARE YOU AND HOW DO YOU DEFINE YOUR LIFE? Be you, but you may ask, “well, how do I find me?”  Some of us find out early, some of us find out later.  I also firmly believe that we have never arrived when it comes to knowing ourselves. It is an evolution, am I right?   I just recently discovered that I am a cat person. Not exactly what I am getting at but it is something that I just realized in let's just say well-past my wonder years. When I was a young kid I had a progression of career desires….not that career defines who we are but it is maybe our earliest definition of ourselves and I for one, put a lot of value in it.  I wanted to be a stewardess or waitress at first….sorry if those terms are “wrong” but they were the terms used in my childhood.  Then when I was older, I wanted to be a teacher.  A good friend of mine (we were in about the 4 th grade) and I would pretend to have classrooms. In my room, Greg was always getting in trouble, and he...

  How I have learned to live without regret, or as few as possible. We all have to find our individual inner peace and learn how we each can live unapologetically. This blog like the last, took a long time to come.   As is always the case, a situation came up that fit the theme of living life intentionally focusing on living and acting without regret, which for me results in inner peace. First: why?   For me, the answer is that my past regretful situations are hard to forget, hard to forgive yourself for, and they are painful. Nobody wants any of that for sure!   Several years ago in confession, I learned to not regret some of my poor choices from so long ago but to realize they made me who I am today and of course I received the grace I needed from that reconciliation. The main reason I could accept that advice is my past actions by and large did not effect my loved ones. I accepted that truth and advice readily.   Many years later, I had a difficult ti...

  This blog has been simmering for a while.  My twisty thoughts have been taking longer than usual to unravel.  You might guess that by that mambo-sized title….how will I ever wrap all that into one blog and make it positive? I am not sure but I do know this, I always do my best to listen to my heart and do what my gut says because I hate regret and I try to avoid it at all costs….more on that later….I hope!  So, here goes!  My last blog was pre-Boston, which is almost two months ago.  I have packed lot of life into a few weeks......two birthdays,  all of Thanksgiving and Christmas tradition. I have cared for and planned for it all and it has been wonderful.   I have either been in high gear getting things done or just the opposite, which is a completely unproductive and melted-mind state. By the way, unproductive is perfectly okay, healthy, and good to do, which is hard to see unless you have a healthy mental state. Now that my busy personal ti...

Celebrating success in a recovery process is especially important...it is a long haul and I know I always feel like I still have so far to go so it can become overwhelming and self-defeating to only look forward. I was thinking about celebrating some achievements today and then I realized doing that is a bit like gratitude practice....sometimes it is easy, sometimes it is hard, but it is always good and it is always especially needed when it is the most difficult. Just an FYI, this is one of the few times that you will see me include some numbers in eating disorder-related writing. Numbers are not helpful in the recovery scene so please forgive this one time. After thinking about what I am celebrating, I realized that it was a good weekend to do it. I had read a book on Labor Day weekend in 2019 that was pivotal in helping me to see that I had more than an energy availability problem or RED-s. So, today I looked at some of my earlier writing and I saw that September 6 was also a big da...

We can change our opinions, views, thoughts, actions, values, looks. We can even change our brains to think in a new way that we never thought possible. It takes work and extreme openness and a lot of times a professional if we are seeking serious brain change. I noticed two changes in myself this week that I am especially happy to notice and am honestly in awe of.  What made me notice my change were two different posts on  Facebook actually.  One was the meme that says something like, pray for all those fighting battles they don't talk about or we don't know about....something to that effect.  It made me think about how I used to view that post because I first saw it a few years ago.  My pendulum has definitely swung.  I used to have the attitude that...yeah, here is to all the people who inwardly struggle and aren't talking about it or whining or asking for help or wanting attention or pity.  I was the classic Viking that Brene' Brown describes and I...

I have been encouraged the last few weeks by a couple of different people to start a blog. So, here it is!! We shall see how this goes. I often have a lot of random thoughts that now I can share with readers without making Facebook posts that are too long☺❤In addition to that, I am... let us just say not a young person... and I have been working on myself hard the last couple of years.  I want people to learn about eating disorders and their prevalence and I hope to show the truth of these illnesses. In addition, I would like to create a page that is focused on overall mental wellness. As a nation, we are not doing very well at wellness. We are promoting "fit" in the name of thin and we still label healthy weight by an antiquated BMI chart. We need a big paradigm shift....from how we look to how we feel and we must learn the true measure of health. I have been in "recovery mode" from Anorexia for over two years now. I have had had this mental illness though for a mu...