Gosh, I have some work to do on myself ……

I’ve been looking at and assessing where I’m at lately and I’ve come to the conclusion that I have some serious work to do. I have been caught up in life with two kids and naturally the focus has come off myself. I need to write this down and get it out there because I’ve had almost no motivation to do anything about it for the last couple of weeks.

I’ve started to feel fat, lazy and a bit blah and this tells me I need to get back on track. I know I feel better when my eating is how it should be, I know that exercise gives me mental clarity and helps me feel so much better physically and I want those things again. I feel that if it goes on for too much longer I’ll start to feel that I have lost myself and I don’t want that to happen.

Having a small baby makes it hard for you to put yourself first because their needs always feel so much more important and immediate than your own. I think I might be starting to get to the point where there will be some space and time for me to get a bit of what I need too. This is where my strong tendencies for organisation and planning can be helpful. I say can be helpful, because once the baby figures out you have something planned they do their best to get in the way of it!

To get on top of my eating I need to cut out the snacks and reduce the carbs. I know now that sugar and carbs hugely drive my cravings and make everything else ten times harder when I’m trying to eat well. Since the early days of breastfeeding baby number two I have had snacks on hand at home because you never know if you’re going to have time to make a proper meal but I was also having a few snacks a day. I was justifying it to myself that because I’m breastfeeding I need it to help me keep my milk supply up.

I think the scales that are going in the wrong direction are proof that I don’t need the snacks and carbs. The last couple of weeks I have stopped buying snacks in the supermarket shopping and now that there’s none around that I fancy my consumption of them has markedly reduced. I need to keep this up. I’m also thinking of my mid-morning coffee as my ‘treat’ and hopefully that’s going to help me break my snack habit.

While my actual proper meals have, for the most part, been pretty good and what I would usually eat anyway more carbs have started to sneak in. My morning protein shake is great but I’ve been tending to have carbs with lunch and dinner and, if I have them at all, I usually will only have them with one meal a day. I’m going to focus on carb free lunches this week because I think if I have a specific focus I’m far more likely to be successful with it.

Since we got back from America exercise has completely gone out the window. I have all the excuses for it too! I’ve been super busy, it’s rained sooo much the last couple of weeks, I’ve been sick, the baby’s schedule hasn’t worked in terms of fitting it in. But this needs to stop. I either need to get my butt out the door or onto the treadmill that’s sitting in my garage. I’ve even got a heap of podcasts to catch up on that will keep me entertained.

I hate feeling unfit and I really have been lately. Being unwell didn’t help but I was starting to get puffed walking to my kids’ school and back which really isn’t far at all. I am keen to get right back into walking and want to build up to running again because I really miss it. Since I first got into running I’ve never felt more back at square one exercise wise.

I really feel being a parent adds a whole new and hard layer in terms of looking after yourself and making the right choices for you all the time. I had started to get a lot of that back with my older child before the little one came along so I know I will get back to that. I need to find the new balance, whatever that is, and I know it will be skewed towards the kids far more than me for a while but that’s okay.

After my gastric bypass, having lost 70 kilos and peeling back all of those layers I’d built up around myself over the years, I really feel like I had found me. I hadn’t had the chance to know that Melissa before because she was waiting there, being held back by her weight. Now I feel like I know her quite well and I miss her. This is the beginning of me finding my way back there. My body is amazing, it grew a whole human being, but now I need to start claiming it back as my own and treating it in the fabulous manner it deserves.

Have you been in a similar position before? Feeling like you need to find your way back to yourself and your normal body?