#getting healthy

I am officially over it and so happy I have no more bday obligations. I struggle with people pleasing but it super sucks when I feel like shit because some else's feelings got hurt or will be hurt when it is MY fucking birthday.

And somehow, I got sent home with the cake.

I did good right before my birthday. Had my elbow in a splint for about a week. Doc thought I broke my elbow but the second round of x-ray looked fine.

I am so over all the extra foods. And somehow, I got sent home with the cake.... but it wasn't the cake I wanted, it is the cake my bff is obsessed with.

So there we are then.

Today was good but the mental gymnastics from this weekend were exhausting. Too much peopling, not enough sleep.

But too much extra food. Time to cut the shit.

It is my birthday week. I am doing a challenge with my birthday buddy. I am freshly relaxed from vacation. My fur babies missed me.

I returned very needy and may have fallen down a tumblr rabbit hole of fun bahahahahaa. This celibacy may be wearing on me.

I feel mentally refreshed and able to focus on developing some new patterns to work on my goals. It is really time to get things moving in the right direction.

I deserve to present the world with the beautiful person I am, not the person that I have been presenting.

I realized today (between my anxiety about my paper getting scooped right as I'm about to submit it to arXiv) that I have a hell of a lot of professional confidence recently. The author who is going to submit first sent me her paper today to give notice that theirs will be released soon, and I went over it and noticed that she didn't cite my most recent (published) work, which adds context to their conclusions. So I flexed a bit and said thanks for sending over their manuscript, btw I wanted to point you to my prev work where we found a similar conclusion so here you go, consider citing it. It was a very dope academic flex, and it made me feel better about the fact that they will publish sooner if I at least get a citation out of it.

I also sent her a link to my publicly available PhD thesis which reports on the stuff I have done for this paper that she is scooping, so maybe she will cite that too if she feels any sort of way about it. The whole thing here is that, we met up at the IAU symposium in Oct last year, and I presented my findings. This seems to have inspired her to finish a student project that was in the works a few years ago, and suddenly within a couple of months this summer she found time to whip something together. Btw this person is an associate prof and I am but a recent grad (now postdoc) so tbh I think it's a bit bad form to only reach out NOW after you've seen my results at a conference and kept it under wraps ever since...

There have been other examples of my academic flex and I am not sure what changed. I think mainly, I am so much more financially stable that I am less stressed, and also because of this and not having to TA I am getting SO MUCH MORE RESEARCH DONE and being productive and people keep asking my opinions and expertise and it's DOPE. On that front, I am feeling pretty good about things.

It has been a long while and a lot of time adjusting to recent changes. The good news, I started a postdoc position ! The bad news, we moved back to the US. This change has been mostly positive though and I like the community and where we live. My partner is still working on securing a stable job (we moved here in Jan) and unfortunately this area is just such a small population it is difficult for him to get clients. At some point soon we will be more financially stable, and for sure it will be the first time we have been financially stable together. I am stoked for that.

Since I started here, it has been the expectation that I go into the office every day, so my days HAVE started getting more regulated. One thing I have been implementing since starting here is going to the gym after work, since part of my healthcare package is access to the College gym. But it is still a struggle, because:

My partner and I share a car, and the busses here are not reliable. They only run 1x per hour after 17h30 and in the mornings they are unpredictable. So if I go to the gym after work, I absolutely HAVE to get going by 16h30 so I can take my time and stretch and not be sore running to catch the only bus that comes that hour.

The gym I have been using is being revamped for eco-friendly reasons and is closed from mid June to end of August. The temporary one on campus does not have NEARLY enough equipment given the number of people who use it, and it has no airflow.

I have a gym at my apartment (it has AC and is nice because it IS just right here) but l am having a hard time going in the evening, unless I get there right as I get off the bus. This just means changing at work (and using the bathroom at the office, because weirdly this gym does NOT have a bathroom) and going to the gym on my way home, before I get inside and lose motivation.

So because of these reasons, I have been struggling to get back to the gym. But for a few months at least, I had a very regular schedule. I was even running up to 4x a week (just a short treadmill mile) before my workouts and I was seeing some nice results.

Some clarifying thoughts. I have essentially been thru a 2 year plateau, that started the week spme dude followed me around the grocery store.

There is an obvious connection there and I have done a lot to try to break thru. I have also been thru about a year and a half of distress with mom's illnesses.

I am trying to give myself grace for mishaps bit need to try to find a way to gently hold myself more accountable to what my goals actually are.

I think there are some factors: The solidifying relationship with marriage in the future means that I am not looking for partners, so Idk if the dude following me around the grocery store messed with that. I was raised religious, so it is possible that it sparked a really deep "don't let men look at you thing." Probably.

I am working to find the middle ground. I want to hold myself to a gentle weight loss and enjoy the process while not falling to the extreme behaviors of my past. Which isn't easy, since I am tend to black and white thinking.

I know cal counting makes me crazy. Carb counting was better but own carb is so hard to sustain and so high in fat, I am a bit adverse to that.

I know that I am likely going thru perimenopause with wild hormone fluctuations. This is likely making me hungrier. I am also working with practicing eating slower and sometimes not finishing all my food. I know that I love my sports and they tend to make me hungrier, so I am again been trying for a middle ground. I try to pack calories or carbs around my sports. The perimenopause thing seems to mean that I am just fucking exhausted all the time. I want to go to bed at 8 ans can't because mom needs to be put to bed. She is barely accepting her 10 pm bedtime.

Mostly I have been walking to reduce the likelihood of injury, of which I have had many. My steps seem higher than ever. The games I plan are intended to be a dopamine replacement.

I was all water/coffee/tea for awhile bit am currently on a diet pop kick, hoping the bubbles help the hunger.

I try to walk or bike will I am working. (Which is tough because I apparently have a HS outbreak on my keister).

I am trying to stay busy and focused on things that will put the house in order to reduce the amount of "boredom" eating and reduce the overwhelm of the house. I have been backed up with housework, acting as a 1 woman nursing home but I made great strides this weekend. It is so much laundry and my parents house has always been a clusterfuck.

I haven't been able to get myself to register for a class and I am struggling with the idea of school again. I know I need to finish before work decides to end the program, but the depression from last class was so deep I almost didn't make it out.

I am a work in progress. I hope that by writing some of this out I will be able to hit the switch to get things going again, in a gentle sustainable way. Because let me tell you, the vacation in 12 days does not say gentle and I am resisting that impulse.

It's better when I doing think about food too much. The counting stuff gets to get me so food focused I can't manage.

So things that are working- the step count and the games. High veggies. Home cooking.

I could try to add in some weighted workouts, some additional intentional cardio.

I am alive and weigh 202. Despite everything I have been doing, which includes a mountain bike race yesterday. (With a spectacular crash).

I finally took my summer clothes out of the bag. And tried on the shorts. The weight gain damage is about half are not fitting.

So there is it. The knowledge I have been terrified of.

Blah