What I've learned - pt. 1 - food

So. I'm done. I still can't believe that I made it.

I've been struggling a bit since finishing. Day 90 dovetailed nicely with me running out of groceries and my fridge being filled with a bunch of containers each filled with a little bit of something that I had been eating in the past weeks; a little rice, a few shriveled pieces of broccoli, a couple spicy and now stinky shrimp, etc. So besides milk, mega awesome whole wheat sesame bagels, tomatoes (it's still tomato town over here) and carrots, I haven't had much pcp friendly food around. That's my own damn fault, I just need to go grocery shopping, but without the imperitive of the diet I don't feel the panicked need to do groceries. I will clean out the fridge and do groceries today, though.

So I haven't been magically transformed into someone who always has the pantry stocked and always has a meal ready and waiting. I'm still the same person struggling with keeping myself and my partner fed. But I see that with just a tiny bit of planning, I can keep food in the house, always have something to eat, and can avoid getting groceries and then coming home with a bunch of stuff and feeling like there's still nothing to eat.

I'm still wrestling with my tastes too. I haven't magically stopped liking all the things that I loved to eat before. Some of them do taste gross, but some of them still sway me with their cunning and calculated masses of butter and salt. That's ok. I'm human. Our bodies evolved to stock up on fat to ensure survival. I can't undo centuries of evolution in 90 days. What is easier to deal with is our cultural eating habit of a meal being either made of up a giant piece of meat or processed carbs and fat. That one I can look at and see how messed up it is, and feel how messed up it is when I partake of it. One of the two most important things that I learned from this whole endeavor is how much better I feel when I'm not fueling myself almost entirely on processed carbs and fat. I was a vegetarian for a long time, but didn't really eat that many vegetables, and when I started eating meat again, it wasn't that much meat. So most of my meals were things like grilled cheese, pb and j, mac and cheese, pasta with some sort of sauce and a bunch of cheese, pierogi, etc etc etc. Processed carbs and fat. No wonder I was chubby and sleepy all the time. I've been eating a lot of what were previously normal meals lately and I can feel the difference. I've been tired and sluggish and it's been hard to get out of bed. And hungry! I've been so hungry. The fiber is an amazing wonder.

The way things taste is really interesting. Especially sweet things. Fruit tastes sweeter to me than it used to, but I can taste the sour in there too at the same time. Sometimes an apple is just the most outstanding taste explosion. Other things can taste too sweet, usually vegetables, tomatoes and squash in particular. I made a butternut squash curry soup the other day and it was just way too sweet, I couldn't eat it. But then desserts don't taste that much sweeter to me, but they do make my teeth hurt. Weird.

The other most important thing I've learned from pcp is the power of breakfast. The pcp breakfast is a beautiful thing. I've kept up with that and it's probably the only reason I don't feel like total crap. I've stopped with the egg and am instead drinking more milk, but all the same it's great. My office had an "appreciation breakfast" for us the other day and all that was there were pastries, muffins, and bagels. How can you fuel yourself for the day with nothing but processed carbs, sugar, and caffeine. No wonder people drink like 5000 cups of coffee a day just to keep going.

Before doing pcp, I was aware in an abstract way that food is the body's fuel and that what you eat affects how you feel, but since I'd always been eating the same things I couldn't really see how better food makes you feel better. Now I've felt it and lived it and it's so clear how much what you eat affects how you feel.

Ok. I still need to write about working out and maybe drinking needs its own post. But right now I have groceries to buy and a fridge to clean out.

91. Day 90 wrap up

So I did the day 1 workout and man what a difference. I did the 5 sets of 50 jumps all in one go and didn't trip at all. My jumping is still pretty poor and I trip all the time so it was nice to finish everything out with one solid jumping session. The exercises were eye opening. I remember not necessarily thinking that the exercises were hard, but seeing that I was getting pretty close to all that I could do in the given reps, so it was really nice to be able to go back and do them again and breeze through them, although I did get sweatier than I expected.

Then I did 8ma and tried out the new ab exercise that I finally dug up. Circle crunches. Kindof like a combination of side crunches and regular ones. They're one of those movements that are just kindof hard for me to get my body to coordinate and I can't manage to get the circles to be symmetrical. I was doing them really slow and it's kindof cool to feel each set of ab muscles working.

Also, in the absence of a forum to stay in touch, I made a facebook group. It's a closed group so you have to get approved to join, but I you can just hit the request to join button and I'll approve it. Here's the link: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=122595677792293 If you want to search by name instead it's called Peak Condition Alumni.

I'm still sorting through my thoughts to sum everything up. It's totally so hard, I've definitely had a wild ride over here. I am experiencing one thing really acutely in the hours since I've been done: now that all the rules are off, I'm totally having the urge to go try everything I used to like to see how it tastes now. I'm of two minds about this. 1) I want to keep on the diet and just stay strong 2) I want to just try everything all at once and just eat until I'm sick to really cure me of my stupid old food cravings. I'm trying to find a middle balance. I ate like I would have on a previous "normal" day at work today: blueberry muffin and cup of coffee for breakfast, grilled cheese and onion rings for lunch, oreo cake when I came home for lunch and I was so tired and hungry all day. I ate a nice dinner though, chicken pad thai with a bunch of spinach stir fried in and not too many noodles. It was so pungent/savory compared to pcp eating. Fish sauce and ketchup will do that though.

90. Not done yet

This won't be my last post; I'm still collecting my thoughts and still have to do today's workout. But I just had to stop in and say, my word yesterday's workout was hard, but I made it through. Hooray!

Looking forward to today's easy street wrap-up.

87. Body of lead

My body just feels heavy after the supersets. Like every limb weighs 800 pounds. It's a good feeling. But still I'm so tired, I just napped all day after working out. Good for the body, not so good for the to-do list. I'm not so sure that I like the supersets but they do change up the feeling of the workout. I posted this and then read everybody's blogs and seem to be in the minority about the supersets. Maybe it's just the fact that I'm thrown off by the change in routine and the fact that the v-sit plank set was particularly hateful. Not sure. But I can definitely tell that my body would only be able to take about a week of these.

I did manage to make borsht today, although my grandmother would laugh if I told her it was borsht because this recipe is totally not Eastern European grandmother approved, only pcp approved.

2 lb beets, washed, peeled if super dirty, and chopped into pieces.

1 lb russet potatoes.

thyme

5 c veggie stock, hopefully homemade,

2 shallots or a small onion

a little bit of red wine vinegar

Roast beets, potatoes, and shallots with the thyme in a pan that has just enough olive oil in it so they don't stick. Roast about a half an hour to 45 minutes at about 350.

After the veggies are roasted, put them in a stock pot with the stock and simmer for 15-20 minutes.

Then you can either leave it chunky or puree some or all of the veggies. Mix the vinegar in and serve hot or cold.

If you use chioggia beets (the ones with red and white stripes) the soup will end up an unappealing color but taste the same.

86. So strong

Guys we are so strong. I was doing the workout yesterday and I was struck by the fact that at the beginning, I would have never been able to do this. Like at first I really struggled with teh shoulder raises and could never get my arms up as high as Patrick's in the picture and now with a lot of struggling I can do 6 sets of them. That's crazy. The progression of the exercises is so slow/small that I didn't really realize it was happening; I mean intellectually I knew that today we were doing 17 instead of 15 or 6 sets instead of 5 but it never felt like there was a huge jump in hardness. Just a consistent hardness the whole time, although this past week has been really hard, but I might just be working harder in a burst of pre-finishing enthusiasm. But yeah we are so so so strong now!

I also did my homework. I'm starting school in January (I don't know if I told you guys that, but I got in to an accelerated bachelor's of nursing program and so will be doing that for a year and a half) and so I went over to check out the rec center under the guise that I wanted to see if I wanted to buy a membership for the three months before I start school. I was actually pretty impressed. It's brand new, spacious, bright and airy, which is a 180 from the gym I currently belong to (I got suckered into paying a flat rate for like 3 years, because you got a bunch of free personal training (turns out their trainers are jerks)) which is in the basement of a building downtown and feels cramped and stinky. There weren't a ton of people there, but there were some, just your general student types with a few older folks mixed in. There was the gaggle of skinny blondes yapping away while running on the ellipticals, there were some muscle-y looking dudes lifting weights, then a smattering of regular sized to overweight people using various cardio machines, but most of the people were playing basketball and there were two people playing squash or maybe raquetball. I forgot to ask about if I could jumprope there, but I'd assume I could because there was a ton of space. They offer classes too, not just like the normal cardio classes, but kung fu, boxing, ballet, belly dancing, and yoga. Being a member of gym also gets you access to the olympic sized pool and the smaller pool. What I noticed most was that I didn't feel the crippling insecurity that I felt at my gym that usually resulted in me fleeing halfway through my workout. Everyone seemed either very nice or like they could care less about you, which I don't mind at all. I probably won't join before school starts because I'm cheap and can workout at home just as well, but once school starts I might take a class and use the pool and maybe see if I can learn to play sqaush.

So yeah the gym wasn't totally filled with gym bunnies and muscleheads, and a lot of people could stand to get off the treadmill and with a jumprope, but it wasn't all bad and it was nice to see people playing.

85. OMGZ T - 5!!!!!

Guys I cried last night. Cried so much. Cried all through my jumps. I was/am so sad that this was my last pcp weekend. And then I looked at the website and the orange bar is touching some of our little blue guys, and I'm really not ready to be there/here yet.
That being said, we could probably add being able to cry through your jumps to the list of indications that you're doing them at the right speed. Crying and talking, they're both the same right?

Also, I made the mistake of looking at this week's workouts. I knew I shouldn't have, but I did and holy moly supersets.

82. Not feelin' it...

my body that is. PCP things are good. But I'm just feeling blah about my body. I know that Patrick told me not to look at it til the last day, but Jordan needed pants and I needed clothes so we ended up at the outlet mall to go to the Levis outlet. I was pretty excited about getting some new jeans, as my one pair have holes in the thighs (they had just started when pcp started, if only I had been with Team Sexxay, maybe my pants would still be in good shape). We walked in and I knew this wasn't going to go well as sometimes all the outlet has are juniors pants in any of the styles I would be interested in, such was the case this time. I figured I should still be able to find a pair that was ok, just to tide me over, but no, every single pair I tried on was wretched. I know that it was just the teenage girl cuts, but I looked awful in every single pair I tried on, if I could get them on in the first place. Some more strike outs at a few different stores and all that time in front of full length mirrors and I was feeling pretty bad. Then we went to a concert. The concert was at Oberlin College, which if you're not familiar with it seems like it recently has become the college for rich, little hipsters to go if their parents are willing to spend $50,000 a year for them to practice looking contemptuous at everyone except their friends and to learn four syllable words to tell people you think you're smarter/cooler than them . The show was filled with more 18 year old girls wearing spandex than gymnastics meet. They were all there being tiny and pretentious and I was there feeling like a whale, an old, boring whale.

I'm just sad. For as good as I feel, I still feel bad about my body. I feel like I saw a ton of changes during the first month or month and a half, but nothing much has happened since then. Everyone else has had these massive changes and while I definitely have had some change, I'm still fatter than what everyone else started out as. I was really afraid before this started that I would be the fat girl and everyone else would be so much better than me, and it's true I'm the fat girl, although I think I do as decently at the exercises as everyone else. I just feel like I have so much farther to come and that when I get released back into the wild, so to speak, next week that whatever I've got won't be enough to keep things from rolling backwards and then I'll be just as heavy as before. In better shape, but just as chubby. It's not like all this effort is for naught, it's just I would like to be able to buy some pants without it being a fucking emotional nightmare.