Tag: fit mom

The Slump

The Slump

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Ah, the dreaded slump. It always seems to creep in for me as I know it does for many others. You work really hard for a while, and then a couple of bad days roll along and you just can’t seem to pull yourself out of it.

A few weeks ago we went on a road trip to Marceline, Missouri. If you don’t know already, I’m a mega-Disney fanatic. Like, think of the biggest Disney fan you know, add an extra pair of mouse ears and some pixie dust, and that’s where I’m at. Marceline, Missouri is the place that Walt Disney always considered his hometown. In fact, he famously stated “More things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have happened to me since or are likely to in the future.” The Walt Disney Hometown Museum is there, as well as the Disney Family Farm and a couple of other notable places that inspired Walt throughout his lifetime.

The Walt Disney Hometown Museum – Located on the same spot where Walt Disney arrived to Marceline with his family in 1906

One of the things about Marceline that makes it special is that it is a very small, rural town. We stayed at a very small motel (one of 2 in the whole town) and you could walk from one end of Main Street USA to the other in a few short minutes. It poured down rain, but we did manage to find a small gym on Main Street and purchased a day pass so that we could get a workout in. BUT – There were only a couple of places to eat: Ma Vic’s Corner Cafe (open only for breakfast and lunch), a small bar with only fried food options, a Mexican restaurant, a gas station, and a Dollar General. My nutrition suffered IMMENSELY.

I ate horribly, and with an 8.5 hour drive each way, I also ate pretty poorly on the drive to and from Marceline as well. It only took the 3 days we were traveling for it to take a huge toll on me. The sodium made me bloated and my extremities began to swell. I also felt horrible.

It was so bad that I just couldn’t get out of the slump. The last few weeks I’ve felt sluggish, and completely unmotivated to workout or even to cook healthy meals. We’ve eaten take out more times than I can count, and I’ve only worked out a couple of times. Last weekend I biked 5 miles and then ran 5 miles with Jon, and I was sore and in pain afterwards, when just a few short weeks ago I ran a 15k (9.3 miles) and felt great. That was also discouraging, and for the last week I haven’t worked out at all.

Thankfully, my weight hasn’t gone up much – only a couple of pounds. Last night I sat down and started thinking about what I need to do to get out of this slump. A seemingly endless slump is what got me to this point, and I can’t let it get the best of me.

Most of the time you hear people say that you should set the bar higher, but in this case I actually think I need to set the bar lower for myself. What I’ve been doing has continuously felt inadequate. If I run 5 miles, I feel like I should be able to run 10. I also compare my fitness level to others a lot, which is a terrible habit that I’m continuously working to break. Jon’s fitness level far exceeds mine, and I beat myself up every time I can’t keep up with him. It leaves me feeling defeated, and then I struggle to see the point in trying.

This week I’m choosing to turn another corner. Although I’m sure my habits will creep back up on me again, I’m determined to identify when they do, and then do whatever I can to avoid falling back into a slump. I am setting myself some small, and attainable goals for this week (no soda, hit my water goal every day, and 20-30 minutes of activity at least 4x), and am going to build on those rather than pushing myself to train for and run a half marathon over the course of a few weeks. This is what is attainable for ME right now, and I am not going to compare my goals to anyone else’s.

I’m grateful for this outlet where I can pour out my thoughts, and share with the experience and support of others. What are some of the most effective ways that you have found for getting out of the dreaded slump? I’d love to hear your tips!

Welcome to the Circus

Welcome to the Circus

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Hi! I’m Lauren – a 32 year-old mom and small business owner living with a blended family of 6. You could also add “Ring Leader” to my job titles, because having 4 kids (15, 8, 4, 3) + 3 dogs + 1 lizard + a bunch of fish in my house means our lives can feel like a circus. And a ticket to this circus can get pretty expensive.

There was a time when I had a “Fitstagram” account, which I created after I had lost about 40 pounds in my mid-20s. I thought about restarting that, but I feel like that was a lifetime ago. My life looks nothing like it did 7 years ago. I’m serious – almost NOTHING is the same. I was married, had 2 young kids, and was working on climbing the corporate ladder. Now I’m divorced, self-employed, and living with a blended family of 4 kids all the way from teens to toddlers. And I’m not already fit like I was when I started my last platform… this time I am starting with 50 pounds to lose.

My health & fitness journey began in 2012. My mom, who was morbidly obese when she started her journey, was seeing a personal trainer and wanted me to come along. Ever the “yes-woman,” I agreed. I soaked up a TON of information – from the trainer, books, and online resources. I taught myself how to eat a much healthier diet and picked up running as a hobby. I lost about 40 pounds between 2012 and 2015 including the birth of my 2nd son in 2013. (Oh, and my mom lost 125 pounds and became the poster-child success story. She’s now a personal trainer and yoga instructor. Amazing, right?)

In 2013 I was also really struggling financially. Being a young mom with a lack of household finance management experience had caught up to me. I was in a lot of debt, and I was starting to realize that all of my hard-earned income was being doled out to other people. I’ve always been a numbers person, and always kept a budget, so it was clear to me that something needed to change. I took Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University, and my whole philosophy of how to budget began to change. I do not follow DR’s advice to a tee, but to this day I still live by several things I learned through my time in FPU.

By 2015 I was in the best shape of my life both physically and financially. Then in 2016 all Hell began to break loose. My daughter was born in 2016, and though I had managed to stay fit during my pregnancy, the transition from 2 to 3 children proved to be quite the challenge. I didn’t lose the weight. In fact, I started to gain. In 2017 I was laid off from the corporate job I had been working at for nearly 8 years. I like to pretend that the jobs I had between being laid off in 2017 and becoming full-time self-employed in 2020 didn’t even happen. A lot of toxic environments lead to a lot of stress, and a lot of stress equates to total metabolism-sabotage. In 2019 I got divorced. Despite the fact that it was amicable, we are still friends, and we are very good at co-parenting, getting divorced is stressful even in the best of circumstances. And expensive.

Before I knew it I had gained 50 pounds since before I had my daughter. At this point I have had every opportunity to pull it together and get back on track, but it took getting past a lot of my excuses before I finally decided to make changes late in 2020.

I started small, and have started to see some progress. We have started to rebuild some of the savings we lost through divorce. We plan our meals more and eat out less. We also used equipment we already had to set up a gym in our home, eliminating the need for a gym membership.

I’ve lost about 10 pounds, but I have another 40 to go. For the first time I have invested in the help of a weight loss coach. As I am writing this I am on Day 1 of a new 6 month plan intended to optimize my metabolic efficiency and health. I’ll explain why I call this an “investment,” and the different phases of the plan in later blogs.

SO, my point is that this time it will be about the journey to get there and not just the results. I thrive on accountability and support (and admittedly sometimes a little bit of competition), so I have created this blog as a space for me to keep myself accountable and share my experience. I hope you’ll subscribe and follow along!