i can't get no...

Wanna hear something hilarious (or sad, or possibly both--I dunno, my hilarious-meter is probably broken)? I wrote my blog title and then I thought, well, of course we need to stick a picture of Jagger on top, so off to google image search I went. Typed in "Mick Jagger abs", perused the results--most of which had nothing to do with Mack Jagger's abs (you're slipping, google image search!), clicked on the best one...and it was from this blog.  Oh goodness. I know exactly which post I used it in too. I decided y'all deserved more than recycled content, so I picked the second best result above. You're welcome. Or, I'm sorry. Whatever.

Onto actual content. Here we go. Satisfaction! And lack thereof.

I told you guys I'm doing that body transformation contest, just as a way to get back on track with my fitness. In a lot of ways it's been working.  I've lifted at least 4x a week every week of the contest except one (where I missed *one* workout due to the gym being closed two days for renovations coupled with a snowstorm later in the week.)  I've been faithfully taking my lunch and snacks to work with me so I don't just buy and eat crap.  I've been getting in 3-4 servings of veggies and fruits every single day.  I've even been back to yoga a few times, though I really would like to improve on that still. I wanted to go at least once a week and that hasn't happened. But, still, on the whole I've been happy with my return to better health and fitness habits.

You know what I haven't been happy about? My results. Despite assiduously eating in a deficit, my weight hasn't budged much. It just bounces all over the place and I never know what the Random Number Generating Machine is gonna say on the days I decide to step on it.  My ability to retain water like a camel, the fact that my bathroom habits are not what one would call regular despite all the quest bars I eat, and my on and off use of creatine all conspire to make it that I never know exactly what I actually weigh, but the number hasn't been encouraging of late. Fine. So I stopped weighing myself. I took solace in that fact that my bicep vein was back, my upper pecs were getting prominent in the gym mirror again, and the fit of certain clothes as markers that I am losing fat. If I'm gonna exist on these poverty calories and pretty much give up beer for 12 weeks, I better be losing fat, okay?

Then I decided to take some midway-through-the-contest pictures, in the same bathing suit I took my horrible, bloated "before" pics in.

Let's just say I was not impressed.

Pretty sure that was exactly my expression.

Damn, I thought, I looked so much better last spring and early summer at more or less this same weight. Leaner, more muscular, tighter, more vascular. Just better. I walked around in that very same bathing suit all June and July at the outdoor pool at the Fancy-Pants Y, totally un-self-conscious, and indeed, pleased when I caught a glimpse in the locker room mirror.

Then I re-thought.  Yes, I undoubtedly gained fat and lost muscle in the 6 months that I was working two jobs and was not eating, exercising, or resting properly.  That is true.  But did I truly look THAT much better last year when I was feeling all smug and happy about my physique?  Or is it that I looked a tiny bit better but was also not swanning around taking underwear/bathing suit selfies and examining them for flaws?

Also pretty sure I know the answer to that, kids.

I had put a moratorium on "progress pics" until this contest made me take them.  I'm committed to final pictures but then the moratorium is back on.  Yeah, I'll still snap a gym or bathroom selfie when a rogue muscle or vein makes an unexpected appearance and I'm like, WHOA. But I'm not gonna set up the camera self timer and examine my flaws from every angle. No good comes from that, at least for me.

xoxo

me, pinterest, and some consumer complaints

I don't really "get" some social media and I resist a lot of the rest of it, but I did recently get sucked into Pinterest (three or four years after the rest of the world, right?).  I have no idea how to punctuate the previous sentence, btw.  It may or may not be a surprise to you all, but I like to shop.  Unfortunately, I don't have much money and I refuse to run up enormous amounts of credit card debt, so a lot of the time I am reduced to window shopping or, more specifically, online window shopping. Because you can do that at midnight in your pjs. C'mon now.

Pinterest is genius for this I am finding. I specifically made a board called "things i want, january 2014" and filled it with things that I, y'know, wanted after seeing them online but did not feel it was wise to immediately waste my cash on. Then I was able to go back to these things one or two or three weeks later with the idea that I could reevaluate whether I really wanted them...and 90% of them were sold out. That's a huge money-saver right there, I tell you what.

Like, look at these $50 pj pants from Anthropologie (LOL) that Pinterest saved me from:

 

They're adorable. And now I can just look at them forever without actually wasting fifty fucking dollars on them.

Or this pink sweater:

I don't actually wear pink, I just get seduced by it every winter around this time when I'm so sick of all my drab winter clothing I could spit.

Or these Frye boots:

I couldn't even start to convince myself I could afford them.  But those are some cool boots, yo.

Or this Athleta vest that sold out almost immediately:

But I really really really still did want one of those super thin, lightweight down/down-alternative vests that are out now, because you can comfortably wear them indoors in your cold house or office. Which leads us to the next portion of this blog post.

A couple weeks ago I went to the mall on my day off to see if I could buy a vest similar to the sold-out one above. I went to The North Face store.  The nice young man working there asked if I had any questions.  I refrained from asking my actual question which was, "Why is nothing ever fucking on sale in this store?" Because if that crappy massage job I just suffered through 6 months of*** reminded me of anything, it's that it's NOT NICE to be sarcastic to the underpaid.  No, I just took my leave of his store sans sarcasm and empty handed. Because I was not going to pay $149 for the vest I wanted. So sorry, so poor cheap.

Nevertheless when I returned to the mall later in the week (I had to go to the Container Store and buy a lunch box system because I'm still being good about taking lunch and snacks to work and I was getting liberal hippie guilt from all the plastic ziplock bags I was using), I returned to North Face. And my unspoken sarcasm was dis-proven****. They were finally having their winter sale.  So I bought this:

Which still was not inexpensive, but which I've been wearing almost every day and which frankly looks cuter on me than on that model. Or so I delude myself.  I don't wear mine over an ugly purple turtleneck, so there is that. And M2 told me it brings out the color of my eyes. So.

Pinterest is also good for some fitness stuff.  I found this board which I thought was full of really cool ideas for conditioning/bodyweight workouts, if you're into that sorta thing.  I wanted to try this one:

But I kinda think it requires an interval timer to be done correctly. Which would mean another trip to the mall.*****  I could end up at North Face.

xoxo

***Did I mention in here that my Christmas present to myself was quitting that miserable massage job?  Down to one job. So much happier.

****Spellchecker insists disproven has a hyphen. Really?

*****I wanted to buy one on Amazon but it's really hard to tell in the product descriptions which ones are user friendly and which ones suck. I think I'd wanna see in person before I plunked down my $20-40.

fitting a nap into your workout

Does that sound as appealing to you as it does to me? If so, you are just gonna love my experience with yoga nidra, kids.

A couple Saturdays ago a yoga teacher whose restorative/deep stretch class I really enjoy was holding a workshop on yin, restorative, and yoga nidra. I've done and enjoyed the first two. The third I was all WTF? about, but intrigued, especially when I saw it was described as sleep yoga. Just the concept of that was fascinating enough for me to arrange for a co-worker to cover a few hours of my shift Saturday so I could leave work early to attend. When I googled yoga nidra and read that it was supposed to put you into a lucid dreaming-like state, well, then I was really reeled in.  The whole concept of being awake and asleep at the same time fascinates me.  Plus, for someone who lives in their own head as much as I do, the promise of it being actually productive/healthy/not just daydreaming is like a siren's call.  NO, I am NOT lying down in a dark, warm room covered with a blankie and letting my mind wander, I am MEDITATING, muthafuckah.

Except, yeah, I ended up lying down in a dark, warm room, covered with a blankie, letting my mind wander. It was cool.

We did the yin and restorative parts of the class first and there were a lot of hip and low back openers that we held for long periods of time--which was awesome for me, as those are just what I need, but it was fairly demanding. My groin/adductors were screaming from keeping my legs spread. (Shut up.)  So when the teacher started transitioning us in the yoga nidra, I was certainly ready to lie down comfortably, pull my blanket over me and listen.  She said that in the training/workshop she'd taken some people had actually fallen asleep and snored loudly, which was somewhat disruptive to the other students, so if any of us started sawing wood so to speak, she was going to just come and gently place a hand on us to wake us.  Otherwise we were just going to lie there, listen to her, and let our minds go through the three layers of...something. I forget. But there were definitely three layers involved.

I do not think, boys and girls, that I actually fell asleep. I didn't need to be prodded at any rate, and when she told us during the meditation that we were going to start transitioning out of it, I heard her perfectly. I didn't startle the way you usually do when you doze and wake.  But before she told us we were going to "come back", I was definitely somewhere else.  I was trying to explain it to my friend M2, and all I could liken it to was the breathwork class our mutual friend S and I attended once while we were in massage school, a class which was sorta like yoga if all the yoga was pranayama. I remember getting whacked out on endorphins in that breathwork class and leaving there feeling better than I had in months. The effect of the yoga nidra wasn't as strong, but it was also much shorter, just perhaps the last 20 minutes of the yin/restorative/nidra class.

Anyway.  It was cool.  Would do again. And since Mr Google helpfully provided me with the location of an ongoing yoga nidra class in the Boston area, probably *will* do again.

xoxo

usual baseless excuses and apologies

Very busy, problems with the laptop, can't write on the tablet, blah blah, freakin' blah.

Laptop is fixed and new content will be up shortly.  Thank you for your patience.

xoxo

i take issue

I came across this article today, which claims that, according to a survey, the average woman goes on twice as many diets in her life as she has lovers.  I'm sure it says something (unflattering) about me, but my immediate reaction was, "Huh. Only twice as many?"  I think for me it's more like 4x as many.  I could list for you every guy I've ever boinked, but not every attempt at dieting.  This probably means I should be sluttier. Or less eating-disordered. Or possibly both.  DON'T JUDGE ME.

Besides, both my occupations are heavily female-dominated.  This means I've worked with a lot of women over the years, and let me tell you.  A significant fraction of them started a new diet just about every other Monday and were throwing in the towel by Thursday.  Since most of them were in relationships and not out at the club every weekend fucking random people, the two-to-one statistic still seems bogus to me, even if we're assuming I am less promiscuous and more crazy about my food and body than the average chick. (For the record, I'm not sure I am. On either count.)

So, the question becomes, why do women diet so much?  They're not ALL trying to win supplement company transformation contests.  Maybe it has something to do with advertisements like this.

Or this.

Or this.

How much of this has to seep into your subconscious at a young age before you just "know" that, as a woman, you're supposed to always be making the number on the scale go down? How much has to seep into your subconscious before you think eating disgusting 90 calorie snacks of "diet food" is perfectly normal and acceptable?  How much before you start feeling guilty or full of self-loathing when you do eat the real piece of cheesecake or the actual sugar cookie?

For the record, even though I myself am dieting at the moment and was so hungry after the gym today I could have chewed off my own arm, I would no sooner eat a Fiber One brownie than I would eat dirt. What I did eat while waiting for a decent enough interval to pass that I could make and eat dinner was raw baby carrots*** and ginger tea. When I posted that online, one of my friends who's also doing the challenge said that she'd staved off pre-dinner hunger with ginger tea, raw carrots, and raw broccoli.  (I am *so* gonna win this thing.  Her broccoli probably added an extra 5 calories, ahahaha.)  But seriously. I know it probably sounds elitist or even ridiculous from someone who admits to thinking pb&j quest bars are delicious, but I cannot conceive of eating a vaguely brownie-like substance just because it's only 90 calories. For 90 calories you could have an actual cookie. That tastes good.

This whole 90-calorie food business pisses me off almost as much as the time several years ago that I read an article where some self-satisfied little snot of a nutritionist sniffed that *half* a baked potato is a serving. I'm sure I was just overly sensitive because ever since I was a young child, I've been eating a whole damn potato by myself. God. What a gluttonous pig.  I've mercifully blocked out whatever else was in that article, but I'm pretty sure it was one of those that told women they should be eating 1500 calories a day. When not, y'know, dieting.

Gah.

So, anyway, yeah. Back to my thesis.  I don't believe that the average woman has only been on 16 diets in her lifetime. Unless she's under the age of 25.  It's just too pervasive in our culture.

xoxo

***two things about baby carrots, if you'll indulge me.  Firstly, I was deeply disappointed (and I am not even kidding you) when I learned that baby carrots are not actually baby carrots, they're just regular carrots cut into smaller pieces. Next you'll be telling me those baby corns you get in Chinese food aren't really babies. Or corn.  Or something.  Secondly, my friend and I, through rigorous scientific experiments conducted at Cranes Beach, Ipswich MA for the past six summers, have ascertained that the only food seagulls will not eat (and therefore will not steal from out of your beach bag when you leave it unattended to go in the ocean) are baby carrots.  To control for the fact that perhaps they are averse to the color orange, we tested them with Doritos.  No.  Seagulls are down with Doritos.

suck it, Trebek

I know, bad blogger, bad bad blogger.  (Please do not hit me with a rolled up newspaper.)  While I was neglecting my blog, however, I did do a guest post over at Cranky Fitness.  You can go read it if you missed it or, y'know, just go read Ms Crabby's blog in general because she is awesome.

Today, however, we are going to have blog potpourri.  Hence the title.  My titles always make sense. Eventually. If you're me.

Fun fact: about ten years ago when they had auditions in Boston for (the real) Jeopardy, I passed the written test to be on it, but apparently failed the actual audition/simulated game part because I kept buzzing in too soon.   Despite my later being regularly schooled in bar trivia league, I remain convinced that had they let me on there, I'd have won hundreds of thousands of dollars. That was before perimenopause/old age destroyed my memory. God.

Three paragraphs and a video in and we haven't actually even started the real post yet, boys and girls. This might actually be a new record.  Or low.  Depending on how you look at it. Perspective is everything.

Ok!  Random fitness-related crap!  Starting...now.

1.) I entered a $100,000 body transformation contest.  Poof!  Now I'm a bat!  No, no, no, we aren't attempting to transform into small flying mammals or anything actually interesting. We're attempting to transform our bodies into something more aesthetically pleasing to the judges so that we can then later be used in supplement company advertising.  Now I know I have no chance of winning. First of all, it's a 12 week contest, so by my reckoning the winners are going to be people who have approximately 20-25 pounds to lose, which is the most weight you can reasonably expect to lose in 12 weeks unless you're really overweight. I mean, if you're 80 lbs overweight and you lose 50 lbs, that's impressive, but you're still 30 lbs overweight (and thus not supplement company marketable) at the end.  If, like me, you can reasonably only lose 5 or 6 lbs, well, that's not going to make a very dramatic transformation (and isn't marketable.)  Plus, I'm 51 years old. I doubt I am the demographic the company is trying to reach. So very not-marketable.

Nevertheless I entered in an attempt to get my fitness routine back on track.  So far, so good.  Last week during week one, I lifted 4 days and went to yoga once, took healthy food to work with me every day I worked so that I would not go to Au Bon Pain and eat mac n' cheese and brownies instead, had 3-4 servings of veggies and fruit a day, and flushed out a lot of bloat on what I lovingly (ok, not so much) call poverty calories.  The summer of 2012 when I was preparing for my upcoming surgery I was lifting heavy, doing my conditioning, and going to yoga regularly.  I was lean, I was muscular, and I was all-around really fit, because I wanted to go into the first (and hopefully only) major surgery of my life as strong and healthy as I could possibly be.  I want to get back there.  I'm motivated.

2.) Do you tell people at the gym that they're badass?  Every once in awhile, I see someone doing something really impressive and I want to tell them how impressed I am, but I am usually too shy.  Even though I KNOW I myself am ecstatic when I get a gym compliment.  I know, I know, it makes no sense.  Today's example was one of the gym regulars, a dude who has lost a good deal of weight (probably over 100 lbs) in the three years I've seen him around, who was doing waiters carries with the 35lb kettlebells. Since I do those exact same waiters carries, only with 20 lb kettlebells, I was like, holy crap.  Bittybro, I said to myself, someday *you* will walk the entire perimeter of this gym with 70 lbs over your head. Then I laughed and laughed. But seriously, I wanted to tell this guy how badass those carries were, but I didn't. How to overcome this reserve, readers?

3.) In a fit of insanity, I bought these.  They're pretty much a $50 version of my $10 grippy yoga socks, sigh, but since they're officially shoes, I thought I might be able to get away with wearing them in the gym.  I am so sick of being scolded by the Shoe Nazi lady and her minions, I have yet to dare try them however.

4.) Speaking of things at my gym I don't approve of, they shoehorned this giant TRX apparatus into the stretching area which involved moving other equipment around in that already over-crowded gym.  I was facetiously told the other day that the reason I am such a klutz and always have bruises all over me is that I only train for strength, not agility, but I swear to god, if you saw the amount of bobbing and weaving I have to do just to farmers walk around that gym and not break an ankle, you wouldn't say that.  I have nothing against TRX, but if they were going to put something that takes up that much space, they could have given us another damn power rack.  I guarantee you, it would get used more than that TRX. After all, people gotta curl somewhere. (Insert winky face here.)

Alright, that's enough randomosity for now.

Weightlifting baby memes crack me up almost as much as SNL Sean Connery.

xoxo

Addendum: my feet in stretchy shoes

twenty from the back...

Wow. Two blog titles involving ellipses out of the last three.  That's some damn lazy writing right there.

Blog readers, this is one of those posts I owe you from like six weeks ago that I'm just getting around to now.  Any day now we'll be all caught up. Maybe. I'm just saying, if I wrote and published this six weeks ago when it first started germinating in my brain, the too many ellipses in too few days problem would have been null, okay?

So.  Six or seven weeks ago, right before the birthday on which I turned 51, I was at my friend M2's house, and talk turned to aging blah blah. M2 is approximately 18 years older than I am but she is not an Old Person.  Not saying that anyone would look at M2 and say "OMG! I thought she was 40!"  I mean M2 is thin and perky, but she's also wrinkled and gray-haired.  What makes her not an Old Person is her mind and her attitude. To illustrate, the reason that we know each other is that we went to massage school together. Since we started that endeavor in 2005, if you do the math you'll see that she started massage school after the age of sixty. Anyone who goes back to school at the age of 60 to learn a whole new line of work is not someone who is, or ever will be, an Old Person.  M2 has friends of many different ages. M2 has varied interests and is in tune with the cultural zeitgeist.  M2's grandchildren are happy to hang out with her and she didn't even flip out when her eldest granddaughter went to live in India.  (I'd kinda flip out if a child or grandchild of mine went to live in India. That episode of Seinfeld is burnt into my brain, yo.)

I told M2 she is in fact one of my aging role models.  If she's almost twenty years older than I am and she's not an Old Person, then I have hope for myself. Because I don't want to be an Old Person.  I don't want to be stodgy, stuck in my ways, conservative, and disapproving. (Failing on that last one already. You should have heard the rant I went on after I was stuck on the commuter rail with a bunch of drunken 20-somethings coming back from the Kanye West show. OMG, all those girls in skirts that barely cover their asses and 5 inch heels they can't walk in.  No, honey, you do NOT look sexeh and klassy, you look like a streetwalker. Just stop.  See?  That's an Old Person rant right there.)

M2 was flattered and tickled that I consider her a role model.  And somewhere in that conversation she said something about how you just didn't want to be one of those women who look good from the back but cause you to cringe in surprise and semi-horror when they turn around. "OMG! OMG!" I said. "I have a name for that phenomenon: twenty from the back, sixty from the front!"  You see it not-totally-infrequently in the oh-so-very-klassy environs where I live.  A skinny woman in very tight jeans from the juniors department, usually sporting long bleached blond hair and accessorized with a Dunkin Donuts coffee cup and a cigarette, who looks like she just might be a hottie until she turns around and...oh. She's 30 years older than you thought she was and those thirty years have not been particularly kind.

I worry about reaching that corner. Well, without the shopping at Forever 21, the cigs, and the blond hair. I'm standing at the precipice and looking down.  I wear jeans and hoodies. My hair is below my shoulders and three weeks outta any given month, you can't see my grays.  And because I work out a lot, my body doesn't look like what most people assume a 50 year old woman's body is going to look like.  But if some 25 year old guy is checking out my butt in the Dunkin Donuts line, unless he's got a serious GILF fetish boy's gonna be pretty damn disappointed when I turn around.  I hate the thought of that happening. I mean, not that I'm interested in picking up children.  See: drunken-Kanye-fans rant.  I just hate the thought that someone would think I'm trying to look 20 and failing horribly.  I keep feeling like I need to telegraph my middle-agedness (haha) more obviously.  The last time I talked about that in here (the George Thorogood post) someone who has a stake in it told me vehemently that NO, I should not cut my hair, that it's pretty. And I'm kinda not ready to go gray until it's all gray.

So I should probably change how I dress.  Sadly, M2 cannot be my role model in this.  She dresses in a very casual, outdoorsy style, all fleeces and cargo pants or jeans with, like, Keens. Picture a perky 60-something year old in a Patagonia catalog. Totally appropriate, right? Not too stodgy, not matronly, but not too young.  But not me. At least, not me all the time, or me head-to-toe.  Sometimes I can and will do what I think of as "massage therapist drag" but sometimes I have the need to tuck my jeans into boots and wear some kind of Anthropologie boho nutjob top.  Sometimes I leave the house in yoga pants and UGGs. Sometimes I wear tight little cardigans with my jeans.  And sometimes I wear a fake leopard fuzzy coat that makes me look like someone's crazy Aunt Matilda.  M2 may have varied interests, but I have varied sartorial tastes and they're not all sane or probably, strictly speaking, appropriate.  It's times like these that I need a teenaged daughter to tell me when I really look like a douchebag.

Though I have to say, the other day a young woman in the CVS parking lot opened her car door to tell me how cute my UGG cardy boots are, so maybe a teenaged daughter would just encourage my worst instincts. I dunno.

Being the dear friend that she is, after that conversation M2 sent me a birthday card saying that I'm still twenty from the back, twenty from the front.  Your friends will lie to you, y'know?

Readers: tell me. What should a woman in her 50s be wearing if she can't carry off Full Patagonia Catalog

xoxo