Control this!

I'm laughing looking back at last week's blog and a funny comment from my friend Karen. She said it read like a diet confessional and she's so right. I've been watching too much reality TV! I'm happy to report that I ate well all week, exercised four days and feel great. Although I did splurge on a decadent dinner on Friday and didn't get my swim in, overall I am happy with how I handled my week food-wise and training-wise. Also, I broke in my new running shoes which feel like they were hand-crafted by cherubs in heaven. The are actually New Balance 860's. I get fitted for running shoes at Dick Pond Athletics in St. Charles, IL. If you are contemplating buying running shoes, I highly recommend that you get professionally fitted for them. Fleet Feet is another great place to do this. I am a super frugal person who is smug about finding great deals and scrimping when needed. Good running shoes are not something to scrimp on. Spend the $100 bucks, it's totally worth it.

One of the reasons I didn't get my swimming in was that I had a big event over the weekend where my best friend/co-author and I did a huge cooking demo and sold our cookbooks at a Diabetes Expo put on by the American Diabetes Association (the publisher of our two cookbooks) at Navy Pier in Chicago. That event required me to be on my feet a lot and haul heavy things. I'm not 25 anymore and it wore my sorry ass out. I joke that I used to be a work horse and now I'm a show pony...I was exhausted!

I don't want to use this blog as a forum to promote myself professionally, but my published cookbooks are an important part of my life and a huge part of the reason I want so desperately to get back to a healthy weight. You see, they are healthy cookbooks for people with diabetes (links to the books are here and here). They are also really for anyone who wants to eat healthy because I think the diabetic diet is the healthiest one out there. Now, imagine the irony of me up there lecturing and demoing about cooking healthy food. I acknowledge my weight struggles when I'm demoing so I don't come off as too much of a fraud but I do not believe in the "Do As I Say and Not As I Do" approach and it's hard. I do think people like someone they can relate to (and there is A LOT of me to relate to) but I'd love to be up there saying, "I cooked this healthy food and look where I am now!"

Again, it's that worrying about people judging me that messes with my "I Can Do This" attitude that I so desperately need to get through this struggle. We sold a lot of books and we had more than several people come up to me and tell me they love us and our books (and one extremely creepy guy who was hitting on me...I wanted to tell him that I prefer men with all of their teeth like my husband, but I politely disengaged myself from him instead). So the validation from the people using our books and loving our food from the demo helps and it means the world to me that people are positively affected by our books. The whole point of doing the books and demos is to help people and teach them that healthy food can taste great and is easy to prepare. So to hear that validated is the best feeling. Ever. And I really mean that because anyone who thinks we did it for the money is cracked. Unless you are famous, or JK Rowling, most authors cannot live, even poorly, on book royalties alone.

So, that was a really long way to get to the point of my blog today. It's about control and worrying. This is a problem I have also struggled with for a very long time and I am working on focusing on what I can control and forgetting about that which I can't. This is not a new idea, of course; ask anyone who has suffered from any addiction and is in recovery. I do pride myself on not being one of those people who gets upset over every little uncontrollable thing like the weather, late trains, idiots who talk loudly on their cell phone anywhere they shouldn't be, people who use rolling briefcases that really don't need to, tourists idly standing in the middle of the sidewalk during morning rush hour, etc. That sort of stuff usually rolls off me. I'm talking about when I need to be somewhere important, like the cooking demo this weekend, and forcing my co-author to leave 4 hours early because I've worked up every possible scenario in my head of what can go wrong, from car accidents (which I was in one on my way to prep for the demo, by the way. Everything is fine except the jackass who hit me tried to tell the cop it was my fault and I went batshit crazy), to traffic, to not being able to find parking, etc. Now, to be successful, you need to plan well and double and triple check everything, but unless you're Nostradamus, you can't plan for everything, which I try to do. To the point where I wake up gasping for breath in the middle of night worrying that everything won't fit in the car! This is not healthy! And it's not mentally productive when working on a goal like a triathlon and weight loss. It's exhausting, actually. And worrying about what other people think. That's another one. I just need to get over it and realize that no one is watching me wheeze along the running path. And if they are, and they are judging me, it's probably because they are too scared to look in the mirror and judge themselves.

All easier said than done, but if I was perfect, I wouldn't need to write this blog and you wouldn't have something to waste 10 minutes on at work! So, this week, along with my goal of training five days and maintaining a healthy eating record, I am also going to work on not worrying so damn much and only controlling those things I can. You know, like my husband...ha ha, just kidding honey!

After all, that little fender bender I was in over the weekend could have been a heck of a lot worse, and I'm grateful that I have my crazy life to worry about, instead of being paralyzed from a car accident. It's all about perspective and while everything is relative, it's also good to be grateful and live like no one is watching you wheeze down the running path.