Hey, if you’re going to give up smoking, cut down on drinking, chuck out 70% of your worldly possessions, get married, go from platinum to brunette, make radical diet changes and gleefully flag down the menopause yelling “over here! over here!”, you might as well lob an extra challenge on top, right?
Hm. Not sure it’s what The Experts would advise, but my tendency has always been more all or nothing than sensible, incremental change. I’m not very good at parceling out challenges one by one, taking time to get used to one dramatic change before starting another. I tend to boot my life off a cliff periodically (usually around every 5 to 7 years) and start everything again all at once.
Changing things, even if they’re ultimately positive changes, is discombobulating and discombobulation is stressful. I do not do well with extended periods of internal or external low-level turmoil, I’d rather bulldoze my way through a few months of absolute chaos and know that once it’s done, it’s done.
Anyway, the challenge: Last year, I spent a lot of time and mental space dieting, trying to get slimmer, more toned and so on, with the aim of looking good on our wedding day. Given that I only had 8 months between getting engaged and the big day, I knew I had to either commit like fuck, or accept the fact that I would probably not look like my ideal version of me-as-a-45-year-old-bride. So I settled somewhere in the middle. I did eat better, I did do more exercise and I did cut down on drinking (for a while). I lost a bit of weight and I toned up a bit. I did not commit like fuck.
A major part of the issue for me was the motivation behind the dieting and exercise, which was, let’s face it, ‘be pretty’. And all that for one day. Having that as my motivation made me uncomfortable and as a result, I did less than I probably could have done. But, having started the process, I do want to continue. I just need better – for me – motivation.
I want all of these things – lose weight, become more toned, improve core strength, improve my mental health etc., – but I don’t want to tie a motivation to it that could undermine the hard emotional work I’ve done over several years to unpack and unpick my own relationships with food, fitness, vanity, expectations of femininity and more. I don’t want to measure my waist and note down in an app that, this week, I failed to lose as many millimeters as I ‘should have done’. I don’t want to feel guilty if I wind up in Al’s Diner on a Saturday afternoon and blow my calorie budget for the week. I don’t want to step on the scales and feel bad.
I want to measure my waist and think ‘ok, this is what my waist measures right now’. I want to go to Al’s and think ‘damn, I do love a Blues Burger’. I want to step on the scales and feel like whatever it says is useful information to have, in the wider context of my overall health and fitness.
I need a challenge to work towards, but I don’t want to tie that to external factors beyond myself, like sponsorship or group goals. Guilt about potentially letting other people down is not going to work as motivation for me in this situation.
So my challenge is deliberately arbitrary. All of those things (weight loss, toning up, core strength, improved mental health) will be side effects rather than goals in themselves. If I ‘fail’, it will not be soul destroying, because my challenge doesn’t reflect on my perception of myself or my worth in the world. It is a means to an end, a marker to focus on, a challenge to myself, just to see if I can. My challenge is deliberately daft. When someone asks me why I’m doing what I’m doing, my reply can be, simply, ‘why not?’.