Foiled

All afternoon I have been stewing over what might have been a decent post about depression: managing it, reducing it, breaking old bad habits without dropping the ball of day to day life...



Then I sat down to post, and Marble the wondercat leapt into my lap like a bellyflopping kitten-bomb of love and started grooming my arm while purring. She has now settled down to a nap, still purring, with her chin resting on the desk.

I can't channel my angst effectively in this position, so you will have to take my word for it. I was going to be deep and meaningful and full of fabulous metaphor.

But I got distracted by something fluffy.

Spl-ugh

Sticker shock: I weighed myself this morning, I'm "only" about 5lb up, but it puts me over an important threshold I had not wanted to see again. The Scale Demon has also recently taunted Matt.

The Grooviest Gym [TM] is a well timed addition to my routine. I'm currently trying to get hold of the membership guy so we can get signed up this month, while there's no evil registration fee.

Sploosh!

Continuing in the "spl-" theme today.

Matt and I are checking out a new gym. New to us, that is. We've got a free trial 7-day pass this week. It's a historic San Diego location, ON THE BEACHFRONT, with a lovely covered swimming pool, yoga classes, aerobics classes, the usual cardio machines, free weights and isolation machines, all in well- lit pleasant rooms with nice wooden floors. Except the pool, which has astroturf around it. Weird, but completely non-slippery. There is also a hot tub, with a view of surfing machines. I haven't gone to look at the surfing machines, but my understanding is they're tanks with a wave-maker, and people ride skim boards or small surf boards on the wave (one at a time). So at some point I will be hanging out in a hot tub overlooking the Pacific, watching surf monkeys skimboard on a specially made wave machine. I love California.

I swam yesterday and today before work, only 20 minutes each time, but my muscles are feeling it. The really great thing is that driving to the gym, then from the gym to work is actually LESS total time in my car every morning. I leave early enough to miss the West bound traffic heading to the coast, then the stretch from the gym to work isn't that busy. I do have to get up earlier, but I think it's pretty cool that I'm adding in a workout, and actually spending 10-20 minutes less time driving per day.

Splurge/Splooge

OK, the gig's up. My jeans are officially getting tighter. I suppose this is pretty good considering that I have not exercised in anything close to a consistent manner for at least 6 months, though really, more like 3 years. Also considering that I don't feel like I'm paying much attention to what I eat, this means I have ingrained new, more realistic eating habits along the way somewhere. We can just gloss over the 2 or 3 times in the past 6 months that I bought a 100g Ritter Sport, then ate a whole 100g Ritter Sport in one sitting ("just two squares" does NOT work for me).

Why does the cheapest good European chocolate have SPORT in the name? This is a cruel joke. I need to stop looking at the website too, it's making my mouth water.

I had a gym membership, and I wasn't using it enough. I made a valiant effort to go to the Sunday Yoga classes I love every week, and for 4 straight weeks it was cancelled at the last minute, only one of those times I managed to find out beforehand. Then they "cancelled" the instructor. She's started a new yoga studio, which I could go to I suppose, but Matt and I made the decision to try to exercise outdoors more. Use our feet and our bikes. Which means buying a bike rack. I gleefully cancelled both our memberships, freeing up $62 a month. Three months later I have still not bought a bike rack. Those things are expensive! Especially if you have a spoiler on your car, which I do.

Exercise helps combat depression. I resisted starting counselling for a very long time because I kept telling myself I was going to work on the exercise thing, and that would help more than talk therapy. So now I am working directly on the depression thing, I have to remind myself that progress will most likely be slow, now that I'm out of hair-trigger meltdown mode and back into my much more normal state of "moderate" depression. This realization is scary in itself: that "normal" for me actually falls somewhere between mild and moderate depression. I've always joked that I'm so practiced at navigating minor life crises that the real challenge for me is normality. I'm not sure if that means part of me knew that the depression wasn't just due to circumstances, but went deeper, or if, by saying that, I have somewhat created this emotional state for myself.

This is hard.

I need to exercise. I want to feel better. I NEVER want to go back up to a size 18 (though I realize that it won't be the end of the world if I do).

I'm stuck. I'm disorganized enough at home that Matt and I are still stumbling about with no real routine. Meals are not planned until 5 minutes before they happen, I waste half an hour every morning trying to decide what to have for breakfast, for 25 years I managed to fall out of bed and just eat a decent breakfast, now for some reason I need to THINK about it first.

Correction.

I FEEL stuck. See? Therapy = good. Therapy helps me spot these negative statements and edit them to a more optimistic version.

I'm still disorganized though, and it's making everything harder than it needs to be.