JJanet

I love that place. I have such FOND memories of being in Santa Monica, and eating some In ‘N Out at the beach. Ah, to be a young’un again. Hehehehe. I had a wonderful time when my cousin visited me from Calgary! She stayed for a week, and while things didn’t all go according to plan, we had SUCH great times together. She is SUCH a little teenager. LOL. I thought it would make me feel all elderly being around her, but instead of feeling how old and creaky my joints are, I mostly just enjoyed her company. Even though there are things that were AWESOME about being 15 (I miss my lightning fast metabolism!), I would much rather be where I am right now.

 Yes, things rather SUCK right now, but I’m going to come out of this little life lesson a champion. My workouts are strong, my diet’s GREAT, and while I am a little behind schedule in my goals, I’ll get there.

I will be a little absent from the website for the next little while, but I’ll be back soon! I’ll miss you guys, and I’ll catch up on your lives as soon as I can. Until there, here is a picture of me and one of the loves in my life!

Okay! I am a few steps closer to where I want to be.

I want to be on auto-pilot awesome eating, so I am taking the next two weeks to really dedicate myself to making my eating immaculate. I will be playing ‘mother’ to my baby cousin and her best friend soon - they will be flying up from Calgary to visit, and I want them to experience my workouts, as well as a bit of what it’s like to eat clean! Of course, they need to try some of the amazing food that Texas has to offer as well. LOL. So that’ll be fun. They are 15. A small part of me is dreading this trip because I am afraid that I will be the very boring, old cousin who keeps saying shit like, "When I was your age…" and "We didn’t do it like that when I was…", and that the minute I turn around, they’ll roll their eyes and whisper how relieved they are that I’m gone. HAHAHAHAHAHA!! We’ll see how that goes.

 Workouts are strong, but I think I’ll come a few workouts shy of my projected 22 for July. I had the one oreo shake, and a bite of stuff here and there, but overall, I think eating has gone well. Yay!

I am stressed right now. I want to eat emotionally to comfort myself tonight. Is there a way to eat emotionally in a healthy way? Or is it always unhealthy to emotionally eat?

I don’t want to blog about the particular reasons I am stressed. They won’t make sense here and will require more explanation than I am willing to give. But. I’m stressed. I know this moment will pass, and I’ll be over this issue in the future, but it just really sucks right now.

I forgot to include this one in my Playacar pictures.

Hehehee. The monkey is my favorite animal. When I saw this one wandering around the resort, hitting up stupid tourists and getting them to pay exoribitant amounts to take a picture with it, I JUMPED at the chance. Sucker.

I’m doing terrific on my post-vacation plans! I can almost feel myself entering the easy part of all this. I mean, it’s never REALLY easy (for me!) to workout and eat squeaky clean, but there is a period after the initial 2 week period where it becomes much easier to turn down the good eats, and keep up with the workouts. I am probably about 5 days away from entering that zone. I can’t wait to be there!

I ordered some shoes from Nike online. They have a cool feature where you can design your own pair, and they take about 6 weeks to make it into your hands. Mine finally came! How adorable are these??!

Yes, I am SUCH a girl. I love all things pink, pretty, polkadotted, and er.. other p-words! It’s going to be a good week!

http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?p=184616351#post184616351

Check out this contest!! As far as I’m concerned, they’re ALL winners for making and posting a video clip of themselves like that! But I am rooting for one meanie in particular.

Yesterday as I was eating dinner (chicken breast and green beans. Mmmmmmm), I decided that today would be the day that I would stop being so bummed about my family. It has been over a week since it started, and while I was not down the entire time, I have been soooooooo blue since mid-last week that it was just ridiculous! SERIOUSLY. My only sibling and I USED to be so close, and while I told myself we were drifting apart because we lived in different countries, I knew deep down there were other issues at hand. Last week I had to acknowledge them and I won’t lie - I was crushed. But I decided to stop being so damn hurt. My brother in law is SUCH A PIG. I have a few saying about pigs (they don’t all apply here, but). Here they are:

1) For every pig, there’s a pig f*cker. (Crass, I know. LMAO!!!)

2) Never argue with a pig - it’ll only frustrate you and annoy the pig.

3) Never wrestle with a pig - you’ll get dirty and the pig likes it.

Most (all?) of us probably have to deal with ‘pigs’ in our lives. And it’s okay to be sad/angry/hurt about the presence of those pigs.

LMAO! (Not too sure what I was thinking in this picture!) But Life’s so much more enjoyable when you smile. And if you don’t feel like smiling, fake it til you make it.

I’m still ‘faking it’ this morning, but as it always happens when I put my heart on getting out of my funk, I make it before I know it. Perhaps I’m already there.

Minus 1.5 horrible days of emotional, I-could-care-less-about-what-I’m-eating, I have been right on the mark! I missed 5 scheduled workouts, but that streak ends today! Today’s going to be AMAZING. I claimed it! Hope your day’s just as terrific.

Okay, I’m a big cheater. :p I don’t want to take a full progress shot! And I don’t think I want to take it in a week, either! I look pretty much like that last bikini shot I took in April. I cannot BEAR to call it ‘progress’ when it is more of a ‘regress’! LOL!!!! So I cheated. Here’s my quad.

My forearm is getting that tell-tale hollowed out look when I am leaning out. Yay? I wish it would take the fat off of my STOMACH instead of my already skinny forearms. LOL! I am only a few pounds away from when I was my leanest in early April, but it definitely looks different this time around. I thought I added some muscle to my frame so I was anticipating looking more musclar at a slightly higher weight, but for some reason, it looks like I have even LESS than I did that first time! I see this particularly in my abs. Eh. I’m not going to worry too much about it because I know I am eating right, I geared my workouts towards leaning out, and all other areas of fitness are in line with my goals, so onwards I go! No room for hesitations or second guessing now!

I did something really tough yesterday. I wrote an email to my sister and brother in law, and aired out some of my grievances with them that I had been keeping in for a few years. It was sooooo hard to press the send button. But send it, I did. And I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. That is, until I saw their reply this morning. It was something along the lines of, "We got your email. We are thinking of how to respond to you. Later."

Ugggh. That was SO not the response I was hoping for. This is my first real confrontation with my family, and I feel SO much anxiety over it, it’s not even funny!!! I am crossing my fingers that a week from now, I will look back on this and think of how awesome it was for me to do something that is so out of my comfort zone. I wish it was next week already, and I could be away from all this tension…

I have one cleeeeeeeeean week of eating behind me, complete with a solid week of brutal circuit training/lengthy cardio sessions! I am definitely on my way to leaning out, although I will not be taking any form of measurement until June 19th. To help encourage a friend who is very new to clean eating, I challenged her to a little competition to see who could lose the biggest percentage of inches off the waistline. Even though my workouts are pretty brutal and my diet couldn’t be cleaner, I am anticipating losing this round, and I think I’m okay with that. But I’m still giving her a run for her money. The loser has to send the winner a care package filled with goodies (she’s in Alberta), so we’ll see how that goes!

Thanks to those of you who resisted the urge to give me advice on how to deal with Mr. Umbrella. LOL!! I know how hard it can be to listen to someone vent without trying to ‘help’ them. I am fighting this very urge with my new gym buddy I met a few weeks ago. Since meeting her, we have been to lunch several times, and spending a decent chunk of time together. We really clicked and I think we’re going to be good friends. Here’s us at a country club luncheon last week.

She is a special person. I am drawn to her sweetness, her utter transparency, and her ability to talk frankly about subjects that most people don’t discuss with near strangers! She is … like… my opposite twin. With almost everybody, I (think I) am a bit distant, hesitent to share my true thoughts, and extremely reluctant to share matters of the heart. I am quite certain that I met her because I need to learn from her. And I think there are some things that she is currently struggling with where I may be able to help. She is a busy little butterfly when it comes to her social life, and in her own words, she is a pushover. A doormat. After listening to some stories about how some men have treated her, I couldn’t stay quiet anymore. Like many of the uninvited problem solvers in my life, I burst in with my well-intentioned advice and told her what to do. LMAO!

(I am just venting right now). She tolerates men treating her poorly. I just cannot bear to even listen to these stories, and know that the behavior is likely to continue. It kills me to hear them. I know that there are lessons we need to learn the hard way, and that no matter how adamantly someone tells you to do something, I know experience might be the only way to learn. I just … have never been in this situation before, to tell you the truth. I have never had the honor of having a friend who is able to be THIS honest with me EVER. I have so much to learn from her. And I hope that I can show her that she definitely deserves a guy who can treat her the way she should be treated.

Isn’t life a blessing? I am so thankful to have met her. I can tell great things are going to come from this friendship.

I took my first ‘booty’ shot yesterday, and posted it for a few minutes in my progress pictures, but took it down because I was too self-concious of it. But, I am too DAMN PROUD of this shot, so I am going to post it here! From a formerly booty-less gal, I looked at myself in the mirror, and realized that all of my squatting, leg pressing, lunges and hamstring curls earned me a booty. Damn right I’m proud!

I’ve been taking a lot of classes at the gym lately to help with the cardio minutes (so that I can smoke bull-dogz in our cardio contest! hehehe!), and I’ve really been enjoying the spinning classes. It’s a fun way to make 60 minutes pass by in a flash, and forces me to work in intervals instead of my usual steady state sessions. But damn, sitting on that seat makes for a sore tush. At the end of today’s class, there were a few women standing by their bikes, discussing how wearing biking shorts alleviates a bit of the discomfort, and I asked one of them where she got the bike shorts she had on…

… and it turned out that she was not wearing any bike shorts.

She was really offended at my assumption. Yes, yes, ass, u, me.

Oops.

She hissed out, "I’m NOT wearing biking shorts. This", while gesturing towards her butt, "is EXACTLY why I’m GOING to these classes!". She sent me a glare that had me wishing I could blend into the walls, and she and her friend sent me one last withering glance before they left.

LOL. I felt SUPER horrible. But LMAO!! Why do I say the dumbest things to people?