Why Is Exercising Making Me Feel So Exhausted?

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I Admit I Am a People Watcher In the Gym

Okay I don’t mean that in the creepy way of course where you can just feel people looking at you and you want to yell at them “what are you looking at” (lol). I mean that in the flattering, I wonder what their routine consists of and how do I move to that phase in my journey, kind of way.

I will glance at the person one the treadmill next to me, or two treadmills away, and see them running and think “I can’t wait to get back to the point where I can run” and wondering when that day is going to come. Or I will see these women who on the outside don’t look like they can lift what I see them lifting in the gym but I look and just say to myself “wow”.

I wouldn’t say that it is envy because I know that everyone has different goals they are working toward and their goals may not be what mine are. Also I know that it is foolish to wish you were in anyone else’s shoes because you don’t know what walking in their shoes is really like. However, I look not only in awe but also in frustration because my mind keeps telling me that I should have reached that level by now but body keeps telling me “no not yet, be patient” and I don’t know if I’ve told you all this before but patience has never been my strong suit and I am hard-headed.

My hard-headedness usually ends with me in more physical pain then I would’ve been if I had listen to my body instead of my mind. Those people I watch, I watch them in admiration because they inspire me and make me believe that I can get to that level, but only when my body and my mind are both in agreement. But I can’t lie and say that I wish my body would hurry up already, I’m ready to go to the next phase of this journey, at least in my mind anyway!

Jimmetta Carpenter

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If Only My Body Could Do What My Mind Says It Can

I can’t wait to shed at least half of the weight that I want to shed. I know that it’s not really about the number but rather about being healthier but there are some things I want to be able to do in the gym without having physical ailments get in my way and I know that getting more of this weight off will help with that.

Right now I just have to push through the pain without overdoing it and hurting myself to the point where I can’t workout at all. I want to be able to run on the treadmill like I had once before but I can’t even walk for a thirty minute interval without getting sharp pains in my leg and the pain in my knee kicking in halfway through it.

I look around at the other people on the treadmills running and I want to be able to run as well and ordinarily I would just ignore the pain and run anyway but in the past when I would run before my body was really ready I would end up suffering the consequences sooner rather than later so I’m trying my best to be good this time. But it’s hard to have my mind tell me that I can do something and have my body be in such disagreement with that.

In my mind I’m already able to run marathons but my body knows better. See it’s not so much about the number for me as it is about the relief on my body so that I won’t be in so much physical pain. I can only imagine how much more effective my workouts will be once the pain lessens. I’m waiting for that day to come but until it does I will just have to stay steadily on the course I am on and persevere. That just means I will have to increase the time of my workouts since I can’t increase the intensity just yet. But I do love working out!

Jimmetta Carpenter

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It Feels Good To Know That It’s Working

So when I started this weight loss journey again I said that I wasn’t going to get obsessive and weigh myself every single week like I did before, but that I was just going to do one weigh in at the beginning of each month. So today was that day that I weighed in and guess what. I have already lost 9lbs!

I can’t even begin to say how proud I feel of myself and how happy I am because I was really worried that I wasn’t going to see too much of a loss if any. But it’s working, it really is working. Not only that but I am feeling so much more confident and energized since starting back at this and it is even helping in the area of my creativity and my writing. I feel like everything is improving and I feel like it all started with me working out again.

Now make no mistake the physical aspect of working out and losing the weight I want to lose is definitely an important factor, but it’s not even just that. It is the mental changes that it’s making in me and the emotional changes that working out has made in me. When I look in the mirror lately, yeah I see that I still have a long way to go to get to my goal, but I see the woman that I want to be slowly coming into focus.

Jimmetta Carpenter

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Foolishly Pushing the Limits Of My Body

I pushed it slightly a little too hard today in the gym and couldn’t push as hard as I wanted to because my leg began to feel like I might have pulled something. That’s another one of my downfalls that I have to work on correcting, listening to my body. I think about 20 minutes into the first machine that I was on I could feel this pain in my leg and like something was pulling but even though my body was trying to tell me that I should’ve stopped, my mind said “don’t you dare” and psychologically I was thinking I can’t be a quitter so I kept going until my first 45 minutes was up. It was clear when I got off the machine that I had overdone it.

The bad thing is I was still trying to figure out if I could go ahead and do my mile on the treadmill. I did some weights and things (by the way it was legs and abs day so that probably didn’t help it) and was still limping a little. The trainer that I consult with on occasion told me that it was most certainly not a good idea to do the treadmill and although it pained me to leave the gym feeling as if I had not completed my entire workout, I listened to the word of someone who clearly knows more about this weight loss thing than I do.

Talking to the trainer also helped in another area because we got to talking about the proper things to eat and the nutritional value of some things as opposed to others. She clued me into a lot of different things as far as the right nutritionally rich meals and options for healthy snacks to eat. There is so much more to this whole healthy lifestyle thing then just the exercise and even choosing what we think is healthy to eat.

It’s clearly a lot about nutrition that I need to read up on and a lot of meal choices that I have to sort through. I said in a previous post that I really needed to focus in on my eating habits and make sure that they are not doing more harm than good. Talking to her today was very enlightening and showed me that I have so much more to learn about this weight loss and healthy eating thing. But I’m ready!

Jimmetta Carpenter

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I’m Trying To Get A Handle On My Eating Habits, and I think It’s Working…

I think that I am finally starting to curb my really bad habit of snacking at night. Okay maybe I still have some work to do in that area but I am certainly better at it then I was three weeks ago. I do admit that I go to bed quite late (about 1 to 2 am) so in fairness when I eat dinner before 7 in the evening it’s hard not to get a little hungry before I go to bed.

It is a struggle to maintain a healthy eating regimen because the cost of food has only gotten higher and I have a specific grocery budget that I have to stick to if I want to be able to pay my other bills as well. It’s hard to not go for the “not so good for you” foods when you go to the grocery store and all of the inexpensive and sale items happen to be some of the not so healthy things they have to eat. I try my best to do what I can with what I have and that leaves me with some options that aren’t always the best in terms of being healthy.

Now another thing concerning my eating that I have to absolutely get under control is my emotional eating and my bored eating. For the most part I will say that I don’t so much eat when I am bored but I have in the past been known to occasionally snack just because there wasn’t anything else to do. My main issue (in which I have recently managed to reign in a bit) is eating when I am feeling upset or depressed. That is something that I know I need to stop doing but it is hard to just expect myself to stop doing that cold turkey.

They say that losing weight is 20% workout and exercise but 80% what you eat and if that is in fact true then I have to really start focusing on my diet. I have to learn how to cook some of my favorite things (or close to them) but in a healthy way and how to eat the proper foods at the proper times. Living a healthy lifestyle is not something you can do with ease. It takes some serious work and effort but I am definitely willing to put everything I have into this effort.

Jimmetta Carpenter

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Settling Into My Journey, Even Though My Goal Seems So Far Away

Okay so I am well on my way in week three and I’m starting to feel even stronger in my workout regimen and I am very happy with my level of consistency (particularly since my consistency has been complimented on) with my working out. I know that the next thing I have to work on tackling is my eating habits and it’s not just my eating habits that I need to work on fixing but also my daughter’s because I am not fighting this struggle for myself but also for her sake.

In many ways I think that I am at fault for my daughter’s being overweight and after taking her to the doctor’s office last week for a sick visit and seeing her weight and what it has ballooned up to I am very ashamed that I have seemingly transferred my weight issues onto her. I won’t give her weight on here because even though she is a child she is entitled to some privacy in her numbers but I wanted to cry when I saw the number because I realized I had not only got relaxed in my health plan for myself but also the one that I was on for her as well.

So this weight loss journey that I am on is not just for me but for my daughter as well. I want her to have the healthiest life possible and I need to do better. There are no excuses that I can make, I simply need to do better. I know that it may seem backwards to get the workout program back on track before addressing the eating habits and the food that is consumed but I feel like getting the habit of exercise going again first, both in me and my child.

I think now that I have gotten back in the swing of things as far as my workouts and I am getting my daughter back use to exercising again (just starting), I can begin to try and focus on what foods to keep on our monthly grocery list and what foods not remove. Also figuring out the appropriate times of day and proper amount of meals to have is a huge part of it as well.

So this journey of mine as turned from a journey of one to now being a journey of two. Now to find some sneaky ways to sneak vegetables into the meals for a picky eater (my daughter) who does not like any vegetable besides green beans! Hope your journey’s are going well and please share your journey’s with me. Let’s strengthen each other!

Jimmetta Carpenter

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CEO/Writer/Editor

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There’s More To This Journey Than Just the Outside

There’s something that I have noticed that I am starting to get back now that I have started going back to the gym and working on getting my health together. Yes obviously I am starting to feel a little more in shape (a little), and yes the obvious bonus here is that I will be increasing my life span by losing the weight I need to lose and getting it under control. But there is something else that I didn’t realize that I was loosing when I had stopped going to the gym and got off track. My confidence.

Before when I had lost the weight I lost and was feeling healthier and stronger physically, I realize now, that I was feeling better mentally as well and I felt this air of confidence developing inside me that was never really there before. I’ve always struggled with self-esteem issues and issues with self-love and self-acceptance but that period of time when I was on track I had started to feel more confident, and started to love myself even more and my confidence, while it wasn’t through the roof, it was finally present.

I think that among other things, that is what finally made me realize that I have gotten too far off track and that I had to find a way to start back up at the gym again because I was starting to lose the bit of confidence that I had built up. I was starting to look in the mirror and see that woman that I didn’t like so much again, the one that didn’t really like herself. Now that I have been back at this for a couple of weeks now I know that I still have a long way to go but I feel that confidence coming back again and I feel the change in myself on more than just a physical level.

This weight loss journey for me is not solely about the physical matter of losing all of this weight that I have put on by eating emotionally and being able to be medically healthy. This journey is also about me getting to that place emotionally where I am confident within myself and strengthening my self-love and self-acceptance. I’m getting back to loving me again and I’m feeling really good about that!

Jimmetta Carpenter

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There Are Times When the Towel Should Be Thrown In

Well when I anticipated going in to this week I had hoped that things would all go according to my plan, along with the schedule, and without any hiccups. I should’ve known better because I can never plan around mother nature (snow delays at my child’s school), and physical pains that creep up on me unexpectedly. You would think that with my size that I would anticipate these physical pains, particularly since I went for quite some time without exercising but it always seem that I have some type of physical ailment that pops up when I least need it too.

Today I missed my workout at the gym because as soon as I got to the gym after dropping my daughter off at school the school nurse called me to come pick her back up because she wasn’t feeling well. In some ways I think it might have been a blessing in disguise because my ankles were really bothering my last night and I was truly wondering how I was going to get through a workout with my ankles in such pain.

Sometimes even the most pesky little obstacles will creep up to let us know that even when we want to go all in, we have to still be aware of when we need to back off and ease up so that our body can get the appropriate recovery time. That’s not to say that I think my daughter feeling bad was in any way a good thing but I think that God knows me well enough to know that my daughter (or something she needs) is probably the only thing that could get me to possibly slow down and examine the current situation and perhaps deviate from the normal routine that I had in my mind.

I get told constantly that I have to listen to what my body towels me and not what I keep trying to tell my mind to tell my body. In my mind I think “I can keep going, all or nothing” and I try to communicate that to my body but in reality my body is telling me “you have to ease up so that I don’t completely shut down and then you won’t be able to do anything”. Have to learn that my body has a say in this fight for healthiness and I need to listen to it. In my quest to never give up and not throw in the towel I have to learn when I am pushing a little too hard and may need to, in fact, throw in that towel.

Jimmetta Carpenter

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Week 2 Has Begun and I’m Still Pushing Through

Week 2 has started on my redo of this journey and this is the point where a lot of people with weight loss goals as a New Year’s resolution begin to fall off the map (seriously, that’s what the guys who work at the gym say) and go back to their old ways. So when I walk in today the guy at the desk said they were glad that I didn’t seem to be like the others and that I was sticking with it, well seemingly anyway because it is only week 2.

I actually rested over the weekend because my leg was so sore that I almost couldn’t straighten it out and I could barely walk. Walking in the gym this morning I felt more rested but to be honest my leg was still a little sore. Not to mention, because of a 2-hour delay with schools, I didn’t workout as long or go as hard as I would’ve liked to but I’m kind of glad that I didn’t because I really don’t think my leg was up to it. The important thing, after all, is to keep moving forward and to keep pushing even when it gets hard, especially when it gets hard.

Now if I can just get my issues with food and the times that I eat straightened out then I think I would really have something that can work effectively here. But the food part is going to be another post for another day. Nevertheless, my workout week has started off relatively good and I hope that all of you out there are having a good start to your workout week as well! Don’t quit, hang in there!

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

The Diary: Succession of Lies (Now Available)

Writing as “Jaycee Durant”