batty.us

So I have not blathered on at length about fitness and/or nutrition on this hear blawrg for quite some time. If I recall, it’s been way over a year.

There’s a reason for that. I f@#%@)^ed up, big time.

If YOU recall, and God bless you if you do because you’ve been THAT interested in my life as to keep track of such things – that flatters me. Anyway, the last thing I admitted to publicly doing was Paleo. Primal. Whatever. About 2 years ago. (Holy shit, 2 stinkin’ years?) And, shortly discovering the message of P/P, I ended up looking like this:

Not too bad, eh? Well. Then Stuff happened. My BGOD wasn’t looking as enticing anymore. I got tired. I got tired a lot. Many things required effort. I could not hear a lot of what was going on around me over the sound of my own self righteousness.

A mere 3 months (no, NOT an exaggeration in the slightest) after the above photo was taken, the below photo happened.

Whoa there, homeslyce. WTF happened? Truth be told….*I* happened.

In 2006, I went on a quest to just change myself, my life, and my body. What happened up there in 2010 actually put me back at square one, body wise. 2011 was an incredibly shitty year for me. Crippling depression. No love of life. I didn’t get out on my bike a lot. Strained relationship with D. Strained relationship with *everything*. Beating myself up over what I let happen to me. I cannot tell you guys enough just how amazingly shitty 2011 was for me.

I spent most of 2011 desperately trying to get back to “where I was,” and failing miserably. Trying so hard to get back into the gym. Starving myself until I couldn’t take it anymore and then going on eating benders of epic proportions all under the guise of a “refeed”. Of course, none of it worked. Can I say again just how miserable I was?

Out of all the websites and newsfeeds I devour daily, there’s one that has been consistently on my reading list since about 2008. That would be the fine folks at Precision Nutrition. PN offers up a Lean Eating program, which lasts a year, and they basically teach you the habits of healthy living and exercise. It’s a rather popular program, and it’s only open for enrollment every 6 months.

I signed up in July last year. When I signed up, I was desperate. I had completely given up, did not trust a lick of what I knew, because what I knew wasn’t working for me anymore. I DID know I needed help and there was no way in hell I was spending another year in this misery.

I didn’t know what to expect, really. I just thought they’d give me a list of shit to do and tell me to have at it. I thought that the program was just another Fitness and Nutrition program. Holy hell, was I wrong. That fitness and nutrition portion? That’s really minuscule. LE is certainly a exercise and nutrition program, but what I have realized that true transformations rarely have anything to do with those two things and have everything to do with your head.

I’ve spent the last year under their guidance. Why I feel the way I do about…everything, really – from food, to working out, to my relationships. One day at a time, one checkmark at a time. Suddenly, life is feeling better. I’ve made peace with myself. I am once again going down to the BGOD and not doing so grudgingly – I WANT to be down there. OK, that’s a big lie. Sometimes I didn’t want to be down there, but I did go anyway, because I knew that what was best for me in the long run.

I QUIT SMOKING. I have not had one cigarette since December, and, quite frankly, don’t want to touch another one for as long as I live.

Things changed, a lot. My brain was continuously blown with all the realizations I made about myself and the world around me. You might have witnessed this slow transformation on facebook where I went from a deluge of dark, sarcastic comments about life to being thankful to be alive and spending every moment in appreciation and gratitude. Yeah, that was LE.

As I worked on the insides, the outsides followed, brain being blown the entire time. Now, almost a whole year later, this is me:

and this is me:

And THIS. IS. ME. I am ever so grateful. A lot of people have bombarded me with questions about what I did – how I ate, how I worked out. To be honest, I cannot tell anyone what to do – there is no one magic formula like all the “experts” insist there is. I will tell you this, though: there is *no* body transformation protocol that you will nail successfully and stay there for life if you do not have your head in check. I now know this, because I’ve been there. Many times, for 6 years.

I am sure this is the part where I go on about how much paleo sucks and that it should be avoided. I won’t. Because intrinsically, it doesn’t. Eat Whole Food? That’s a pretty good message. Fearing carbs? Not so much. That’s another thing that I love about myself now. I  don’t fear my food – I don’t fear carbs or fat or bad foods or good – I know now when every kind of food is appropriate. That knowledge is power. *I* am power.

Perusing the past transformations, I read about the praises of the LE program and how much in love these people are with their “new bodies”. I beg to differ with that. I don’t have a new body – I have the same body as I’ve always had since birth, and it will stick with me until the day I die. What I am in love with now is the way that I treat it. I respect it. I love it.

And I’m not done. I am, again, so grateful for LE and the knowledge it imparted on me. One would think that I can now sit back and rest on my laurels now that I am on the verge of finishing the program. But I am not done. I have a lot of living to do. And this here blog will be teeming with the sheer amount of living, eating, lifting, and loving that I’ve missed out on most of my life.

This summer is going to rock.