I Confess

One of the things I like about writing for a blog is that it holds me accountable. A knitting blog is the best way to ensure you knit a few rows a week, if only to keep up with some of your more prolific blogging friends. There are many times when I’ve spent just five minutes knitting a couple of rows just so that I can honestly say ‘Yes! I was knitting this week!” on a blog post. It is time to come out of the closet about something else that the Internet may hold me accountable for. You don’t know this about me.

One of the great things about nursing is that I’ve lost my pregnancy weight. One of the bad things about nursing is that I’ve lost my pregnancy weight without watching what I eat. At. All. I can eat all kinds of things in all kinds of proportions and not gain weight. In fact, I still sometimes lose. A few weeks ago, I somewhat sarcastically decided to try and OD on junk food so that I could become good and truly sick of it and exorcise the beast. Well, my friends, it’s official. It is not possible for me to get sick of junk food. In fact, the more I eat, the more I want. I can drink Coke, eat a large bag of chips (you know, a LARGE sized bag), and three chocolate bars a day and it still takes about a month to notice any difference in the waist line department. That, my friends, is downright scary.

It is especially scary because weight gain is one of the ways I ensure that I watch what I ingest. Yes, it is a bit of a vanity issue. Partially a vanity issue and partially because I usually notice my jeans are too tight at about the same time I realise that I’m not feeling as well as I used to, my hips hurt and my skin looks terrible. My waist line watching helps ensure that I eat healthily and that at least something in every meal was ‘alive’ recently (e.g. green vegetables, fresh fruit, etc). When I can eat what I want and do not need to worry about the ol’ waistline, well, it seems that things can get out of control.

So bad is my addiction that threats of illness, or worse, do not affect my eating decisions. Heart disease and Type 2 diabetes run in my family but fear of those developing have not dampened my urge to gorge. The guilt associated with still nursing and eating crap (and it’s effect on the quality of my milk supply) hasn’t changed my ways either.

One of my blogging friends, Jen over at The Life of a Busy Little Bee, is one of my heroes. She has been running and is training for a big race. I did that once. I ran a half-marathon in 2005. I ran the race in May of a year, and a month, that were horrendously difficult due to a couple of personal tragedies. In fact, the final few weeks before the half-marathon saw me train very little because of the other events happening in my life. However, I had decided that a half-marathon is a mind game. As long as you can run 10K, I figured you can run just about any distance you put your mind to. I use the Running Room founder, John Stanton’s, running methodology of running for 10 minutes and walking for one minute and it works a charm. In fact, I guarantee that you can walk away from a half-marathon like I did: with a spring in your step and no muscle pain the next day. I finished the half-marathon on sheer will power, determined not to let the events of the past month ruin a carefully prepared lifelong dream.

Anyways, I was visiting Jen’s blog and left a comment about, perhaps, running a race with her sometime. I admit it, it was kind of an off the cuff comment. After all, I have an almost 11 month old and am living in a community with no family members (apart from DH) who I rely on for childcare during the day so training for a big race would be crazy, right? Well, Jen wrote me right back and was very interested in running a race together sometime and I got to thinking. Really, why not? I love to run. My hips are bugging me from lack of exercise. A friend has a jogging stroller that she has offered for me to try out and see if Iain and I like it so that I could train with him during the week…And my eating habits are out of control and need to be changed.

So, Jen? Here’s the deal. Yes, I’m interested in running a race with you. If you’re willing to nag me on occasion about how the training is going, I’m willing to make a commitment. Starting this week. Maybe even starting on Monday. I’m looking at the Valley Harvest half-marathon in Wolfville (NS) on October 12th as a potential 2008 goal, with a 10K race sometime before that. Even if we can’t physically get together for a race, we could do it ‘virtually’. Willing to take on a self-professed junkaholic who wants to mend her ways?