Monday, December 06, 2004

More on the Fighting Life

Had a good MA class tonight. 2 min kicking techniques, 1 minute jump roping, repeat for 45 minutes. Great fun, actually. I had a good partner.

Also, always inspiring, Ray is now 6 months pregnant, and still jumping, kicking, punching and just basically kicking ass.

It's totally cool.

I've been hard on myself, as I didn't go to class Thanksgiving week due to a little holiday hysteria and traveling to visit my folks, and last week, I suffered from insomnia on Monday and zonked into bed Wednesday instead of going to class, meaning I only got in the Monday and Saturday and not the Wednesday.

For some reason, I always expect that if I miss a week of class, I'm going to revert to incompetent weakness.

In fact, I end up coming to class and surprising myself.

My arms continue to get buffer-looking. I think I'm starting to condense again. I cut my calorie count during the week again because, I mean really, I have a frickin' desk job.

Weekends, however, are another matter. I'm not a frickin' prude, afterall.

2 comments so far. What are your thoughts?

Anonymous said...

Congrats on all the success you're having with the fighting!

You're certainly not alone in having slightly excessive fears of backsliding if you miss time- I run, and if I go a week without running I start to obsess about my calves shrinking or something. I think in my case at least it's directly tied to a fear of falling to where I used to be- 50 pounds heavier. I've always wondered if people who are naturally thin have that kind of fear, and I kinda doubt it. 

Posted by Brendan

Anonymous said...

According to my buddy Jenn, it takes two weeks of non-training before you start to lose muscle mass (she's got some helpful women-and-fitness books that I really need to get around to reading, and I'd think that guys, having more muscle-building testoserone, on average, would have a little more leeway time). So yea, skipping a day or two won't kill us... and yet, all the angsting.

Yea, I'd say a lot of that springs from fear of backsliding. For my part, I've been up and down the same five sizes three times in twelve years. And knowing that cycle is definately driving some of my no-workout-today fear. I've got to find my healthy, stable fighting weight (about 170 lbs) and figure out how to stay there. Dammit.

The one thing obesity-panic and healthy-weight people both preach is that binge eating is really bad, and so is non-pregnancy-related weight fluctuation of the 80 lb drop-and-gain cycle that I've been doing since I was 12. It needs to stop.

As for "naturally thin" people fearing weight gain, I think you'd be surprised. Though there are people with super metabolisms like a friend of mine who literally has to eat five meals a day to stay at 130lbs, a lot of thinner people do stress about weight - which is likely why they're thin. Even my buddy Jenn, who's never been fat, had her metabolism catch up with her when she first moved to Chicago, and has been strictly watching what she eats ever since (in fact, her eating habits have been really good for *me* - whenever we go out, we split an entree, and there's never any junk food in the house). There's a deep fear of fat even when you've never really been there - it's all relative.

I have a friend who's about 400lbs, and shakes her head at me whenever I bitch. Just like I shake my head at my 120lb roommate. Again: it's all relative.

Then there are actresses who just freak out about it all the time, because their body's their job. And not just those who've always struggled, like Kate Winslet: I know Madonna used to be a little more chunky in the late 80s, back when she was preaching body acceptance, and now she's confessed to having nightmares about being fat. And, of course, there's Elizabeth Hurley's infamous comment upon seeing Marilyn Monroe's famous white size 14 dress in a museum somewhere and responding with, "If I was ever that fat, I'd kill myself."

And I'd bet she's never been fat. Well, until she had her baby. A process she apparently found quite terrifying, unsurprisingly.  

Posted by Kameron Hurley