So, I had a bit of a mini-meltdown in my head last night. “Why?” do you ask. Well, a couple of reasons. My wedding anniversary vacation was last week so I took the week off from going to the gym. I overindulged a couple of times with food and drink. And about two weeks ago I did something to my shoulder  and decided to give it a rest and ice it.  So, last night was the first night in two weeks that I worked my arms. I walked up to one of my usual pull-up machines and was shocked! I can usually do 10-15 pull-ups on this machine. Last night I could barely get past five! I lowered the weight. It didn’t help. I walked away from the machine in disgust at myself for losing that much strength in such a short time. I moved on to other arm exercises and finished my workout, but I mentally beat myself up for the rest of the night. I even vented a bit on Facebook. I started to feel a bit sorry for myself. I thought “Liz, you have six weeks until your photo shoot and you are nowhere near where you wanted to be!” I really gave it to myself good. Beating myself up is a crappy family trait I wish I didn’t possess.

Needless to say, it’s pretty easy for negative self-talk to take over and sabotage what we have accomplished. After sleeping on it, I woke up this morning with a new attitude. Instead of focussing on how far I still have to go, I need to refocus on how far I’ve come. After all, I have lost 22lbs, I have gained a whole lot of strength that I never knew I could have, AND I RUN! Those are huge accomplishments. Ok, yeah, I don’t have the perfect “pin-up” body that I truly want. And to be quite honest, I don’t know if at my age, I ever will have it. But I’m not going to stop my journey! I have worked too hard the past 10 months to just throw it out the window because of what really isn’t that big of a deal. I just need to forgive myself and jump back on the horse.

Bottom line – LET’S STOP BEATING OURSELVES UP OVER SILLINESS!!! Let’s be happy with how far we have come, and look forward to where we are going to go!

Liz