Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Lean November Weigh In

Every year my company do a healthy month program called Lean November, no prizes for guessing when it's on! It's a group effort to get fit and lose weight before the gluttony of December sets in. The canteen serves leaner options, and pedometers and walking maps are provided for interested participants, and there is a general united effort towards making healthier choices. These are all rather enjoyable and innocuous aspects of the program, the scary part is the weigh in... There are 3 teams that weigh in at the start of the month and then again at the end of the month and the team with the most weight loss wins some lovely bottles of wine. I enjoyed participating in this last year, even though my team was not victorious, it was still fun. I lost about 3lbs and promptly put it on (and more besides!) over the month of December!
This year, however, you would have to drag me kicking and screaming onto that scales! It's hard enough for me to handle my weight gain without having to actually see the figures and then have to reveal the number to a colleague, regardless of her vow of secrecy. I do need to lose weight though, it's getting beyond ridiculous, even my 'fat' clothes are starting to feel snug! It's such a vicious circle - I feel fat so I don't feel comfortable doing Taekwon-Do and I have to work twice as hard just to motivate myself to train! I feel fat and it makes me want to eat!! And it doesn't help that my back still twinges regularly enough to cause me to hold back when training. I wish I was 100%, I want to really be able to throw myself into my training and feel that overwhelming exhaustion from really giving it my all. I need to ignore the fat feelings for now. I need to take care of my back. And I need to find a way to break through this invisible barrier and out of this vicious circle. I can do this.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could you do walking or running and strength training until you feel comfortable doing TKD again?

Siobhán said...

I'm nervous about running on the road since that's what aggravated all this pain in the first place. (Plus it's really dark in the mornings now and probably not a good idea!) But maybe treadmill running would be ok... And I'm sure there's no reason I can't do strength training other than simply being nervous about hurting myself further. I always seem to do All or Nothing, I'm not great at rehabilitative exercise. Thanks for the tips though, I think I might hit the gym tomorrow morning and see how it goes. :o)

Charlotte said...

Wow - that sounds like a seriously scary program and not really all that helpful. I'm NOT about the public weighing. Good luck with your training!