Control Freak

Let me just start with a super-quick summary of the past week. In my last blog post I went on a whole rant about numbers and how we need less of them and how I’m going to distance myself from numerical goals because of the emotional weight we ascribe to numbers when we’re talking about health and our bodies... yeah, it makes more sense when you read the whole post [I hope, anyway]. So, I’ve been trying to embrace that mentality and totally throw numbers to the wind. I haven’t been weighing myself, I haven’t been counting calories, I haven’t been obsessively stalking my steps and active minutes on my Fitbit app.

 This is the part where I feel like I should be telling you guys about the revelation this has given me. I should be saying how I feel numerically cleansed and stress-free and wow-this-whole-no-numbers-thing-changed-my-life. I should no longer believe in the scale. In fact, I should have smashed my scale and turned into a pure snow white cloud of no-numbers bliss. But none of that happened! Not doing those things was driving me crazier than doing them!

 Alright, I need to write a blog post. What kind of lesson can I pull out of this that will engage and excite and motivate the people who read this blog [also known as my friends and family]? Not having a revelation is not motivational!

 So, I didn’t get the story I was expecting from my week without numbers. But I actually do think there’s something worth being said about this experience. Plus, a bonus Deep thought about my fitness journey that I’ve gleaned from driving myself crazy not knowing my weight. All this after the break on ~the most dramatic season yet~ [sorry guys, it’s Bachelorette night]! I also just had a coffee, and that’s not helping my focus either.

 And now [drum roll please... it’s what you’ve all been waiting for... ] I will get to my point! On my way to my point, however, I’m going to tell you a little bit about myself that I think explains why this exercise was so challenging for me: I am a control freak. Maybe the world’s biggest control freak. I was that person in high school who would rather do all of the work for a group project and have it done my way than deal with other people doing work I deemed less than satisfactory. Luckily for me, we do much less group work in college. But yeah, I am that person—and I’ve come to accept that about myself. So I’m not really sure why I was surprised that wrenching myself away from my treasured numbers was getting under my skin.

 Here’s my first takeaway: not every method works for every person. Profound! Shocking! No, we already knew that. But this particular adventure really hammered that home for me. On some level, at least in the phase of life that I’m in right now, weighing myself and checking my Fitbit stats and knowing how many calories I burn every day gives me some sense of control. When I have that information, I feel better equipped to make decisions about my diet and exercise that I still do think are healthy. I had the idea that because the diet industry uses numbers in a negative, fear-tactic type of way that they couldn’t possibly be useful to me in my positive, non-fear-tactic style of being healthy. But I would like to rescind that train of thought, mostly if not entirely.

 I think there’s still something to be said about the connection between numbers, especially weighing oneself, and the emotions we feel in regard to those digits. I don’t want to feel those emotions, but now I’m thinking that doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t want to check and record those numbers. It does make me wonder, however, what exactly is at the root of my reliance on numbers. Is it my control freak tendencies? Or is it some deep set emotional connection to the numbers as an aspect of defining my worth? Or somewhere in between those extremes, perhaps?

 I tell myself that I’m recording these numbers, these data points, objectively, without emotional attachment, just as unbiased information. But if I really trusted my body to regulate itself, why would I need to collect data on it? And am I really just doing this for the sake of nonjudgmental data collection? I tell myself all the time that I don’t care about my weight, that I believe I will eat a balanced diet if I would just allow myself to break free from food rules, that I just want a “healthy” lifestyle, whatever that means. And I do want a healthy lifestyle. I think that I’m on track to getting there, too. But telling myself that I don’t care about my weight doesn’t suddenly make that true. I want so badly not to care—and that’s much easier said than done.

 Forcing myself to take a break from numbers and tracking made it abundantly clear to me that I do, in fact, still care. Above all, that’s what I’ve learned from this experiment. And let me be clear: I don’t consider this a failure. I don’t think that because I still care what I weigh and think about those numerical statistics related to my body and exercise in an emotional weight that I’m failing at fitness or being healthy. I’m just on a different stepping stone than I thought that I was. And that’s totally alright.

 In the last year, I’ve made a lot of progress in terms of my physical fitness. I started up running, I lost some weight that I wanted to lose, I increased and diversified my exercise repertoire. I feel good about my body. In that process, however, I think I’ve been on such a roll that I’ve forgotten sometimes to stop and take a look at the mental side of things. For me, I think of health as being tied to both physical and mental aspects of my life. I want to make sure that my attitudes about fitness are as healthy and beneficial to me as the actual tangible exercise that I’m doing. And again—not a failure. Just a different area to focus on. I think as long as you have the will to improve and you’re working on doing that, you’re on the right track. So I will contend that I, for the time being, am on the right track.

 Reading this back to myself sitting in the school bookstore, this doubt starts to creep in. Am I being too candid? Do these people need, let alone want, to know this stuff about me? Well, it’s my blog so I can cry if I want to [kidding, no tears involved]! But in all honesty, I’m choosing to be candid because I think that’s the best way to write in a relatable way about my fitness process. Fitness is not all energizing runs and Trader Joe’s flat lays on Instagram and mental empowerment. It’s also some unfinished workouts and occasional crying on the erg [me all of winter training] and every so often waking up so anxious that running is totally out of the question [me on Sunday morning]. To me, and I think for many people, fitness is all of those things. But it’s so hard to move on with your fitness and health journey if you think you’re the only person having some disheartening days and slow results—because nobody posts that shit all over social media!

 I guess what I’m trying to say here is that nobody’s health practices are perfect all of the time. But the way to keep your fitness journey weighted on the “good” and “happy” side of the seesaw is to admit those weaknesses, recognize the areas where you can improve, and keep on pushing through. The only fitness failure, so to speak, is dropping fitness altogether. Working on your health can be frustrating, almost certainly will be frustrating, but if you’re back at the gym after a disappointing workout the day before or you’re trying that running route again that you couldn’t finish last week or you’re taking time to meditate because you want to increase your positive energy—that’s what health looks like, getting back up and trying again.

 When swearing off numbers started making me stressed, I was initially mad at myself, wondering how I could get up on my soapbox [see above paragraph for great example of me on my blogging soapbox] and talk about fitness when I couldn’t follow through with one simple health experiment. But nobody’s fitness journey is perfect; mine certainly isn’t [and spoiler alert: probably never will be]. So, consider this post a little nudge of encouragement for those days when your goals don’t quite turn out as planned. They’re going to happen, but what’s important is that you keep at it. In the spirit, once again, of The Bachelorette, let’s make a toast: here’s to imperfection!