I had a really bad week. It actually started last week, when I was too tired to make a meal plan and cook. “You’re at an off-site meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday, so you can buy your lunch those two days” is how it started. “Grilled cheese sandwiches are a totally logical plan for dinner every night,” is how it continued.

You know what happened, don’t you? Yeah, I know you do. I had three horrendously stressful days and I consciously and without prejudice decided to self-medicate with food. Combine this with some truly egregious back pain (thank you, lat muscle that will not heal), and you have yourself a banner week with no good food and no exercise.

I know better than this. I set myself up to fail, and I did exactly that.

But I’m wicked smart, and I learn from my mistakes. On Friday, I spent an hour combing through some cookbooks, looking for meals to make this weekend. While I’m at home all week this week, I’m busy all next weekend and am away a couple of days the week after. So I was really looking for meals that would be more than just this week, but which would have enough servings to cover the week after.

Canadian Living’s slow cooker book definitely came to the rescue, as did my good friends at Pinterest. I made what looks and smells like the best mac and cheese recipe ever (in the slow cooker, yo! What is up with that? I totally never would have thought of that!) – it has low fat cheese and cottage cheese and sour cream and ham and red pepper and fresh parsley in it. It’s not finished yet, but hello? Yum. Also, a full meal in a bowl. And pasta, which I really kind of miss but is hard to have AND still get a lot of protein.

I also made swiss steak. My mum used to make this for us in the electric skillet. It’s basically the cheapest cut of steak possible, slow cooked with onions and carrots and tomato paste for many many hours. Yum. I’m having it for dinners this week, with some crusty bread from Art-Is-In bakery.

On the stovetop right now is another slow cooker recipe, made in the dutch oven instead because I had a really long nap instead of cooking. It’s got ground turkey, a can of diced tomatoes, a can of black beans, some corn niblets and a zucchini in it. Oh yeah, and onions. It’s imaginatively called “turkey and black bean chili” and it smells pretty darned good.

Finally, I premade my breakfasts for the week. And as always, when making them, I learned something about the process of cooking. First up was the “egg in a muffin tin” recipe that was all over Pinterest this week. Basically, you beat some eggs, throw some fillings in to the cups of a muffin tin, pour in the eggs, and bake it in the oven. They literally rise like muffins. I used red pepper, ham, and cheddar (yes, I recreated the mac and cheese with eggs instead of pasta. It’s what I had in the house. Sue me.). Lesson learned: I should never have given away the silicone muffin cups my mum gave me. It is really a lot of work to get baked egg bits out of a muffin tin, even after soaking and scraping. Apparently they’re freezable and edible cold or reheated. I ate two and froze the rest in pairs.

To go with the egg muffin thingies, I made drop biscuits for the first time ever. Sweet mother of pearl, they were AWESOME. I can’t even remember what’s in them, but the recipe is from Cooking Light How To Bake. At 98 calories a biscuit, they’re beyond a dreamy companion to my 100 calorie egg thingies. I’m just saying. AWESOME. The recipe made 15, I had one to see what they were like, and froze a bunch for this week. Oh yeah, and I boiled a bunch of eggs.

I am unclear as to why I felt like forgetting stuff constantly when I went to the grocery store. I actually went five times. FIVE TIMES. Kill me now. I really need to bring a pen to cross things off the list.

I also went to the gym yesterday to play squash and today to play squash and do a hill set on the treadmill. There was a lot of stretching, which I’ve been doing all week to offset the back pain. I also cooked in shoes this week instead of slippers, which has worked out really well.

So, next week, I have my breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks all made. My lunches and dinners for the week after are also made and ready to go. I feel like a damned rock star. I’m setting myself up to win this week. And I’m going to!

I have notoriously tight hamstrings. I don’t know why. I honestly don’t know why. I do know that every physical therapist who’s tried to stretch them has said ‘wow’. More than one has asked me if I have back pain (did you know tight hamstrings can cause back pain?). Long and short of it is, they’re tight.

So I was totally pleased when the massage therapist said they were feeling pretty good! I was all bouncing around (okay, not bouncing – I had some kind of virus last week and a crazy week at work and toughed it out) and stretching my quads and hip flexors like the massage therapist said to do. When I went to see Kelly at BMI on Tuesday morning (at an ungodly hour), she even showed me a new quad stretch. Side note: I tried to do it today and faceplanted (sadly, literally) onto the carpet at the gym. Yeah. I work out there five times a week. If only I could have nonchalantly Tebow’d while I was down there, it would have looked like I did it on purpose.

Anyway, I was perhaps a little cavalier. I played squash Tuesday night and Barb worked me over but good. And yet, because I was really really giving it, I won. That was my first victory this year, which kind of sucks but at the same time felt AWESOME. I love winning. I’m very okay with losing, but really, who doesn’t LOVE to win?

You know what? I didn’t stretch afterwards. I was so excited that my pulled lat muscle didn’t hurt and I was so hungry that I bolted home so I could eat a very filling dinner of… soup (and peanut butter cookies, which was a bad bad thing to make on monday night and which have subsequently been thrown out). And I didn’t stretch before bed, other than a 15 second toe touch.

No problem, right? You don’t stretch once, no worries. You’ll make it up. Except yesterday I had to do this weird scooting movement for something and got the worst hamstring cramp. Oh my word. And last night I didn’t stretch again. AGAIN! Every time I got up from my chair, I got a reminder about my lack of attention.

And then I went to the gym. Ow. I did the hill program on the treadmill (shorter time, higher intensity than the 60 minutes of boring, per Kelly’s suggestion). Then I did the bodyweight “weight” program that I have.

I would like to point out that when you plank, you support a good half of your body weight with your hamstrings and calves. Same with the side plank. And bridges? The pain, people. The pain!! Even the pushups were painful! And then we got to a special series of pain: wall sits and lunges.

While I know I’m beating them up so that my Camino doesn’t hurt so much, they’re sure letting me know how grumpy they are tonight. I know when I get up to go to bed, I’m going to make that whimpering sound that my dad makes. Oh, the shame.

My house is the one on the left. This picture is taken directly in front of my neighbour’s house (597). You’ll see how much the snow pile your operators have created has obscured the driveway to 597.

This is the snowpack plowed and blown directly into my neighbour’s driveway. The new area is almost 6′ wide.

Here’s an alternate view that shows you how wide the driveway is and how much your snow pile has obscured it. Also, what I do after your visits (ie shovel the snow as best I can out of his driveway).

My house is on the right of this picture. See that blue house on the left? The driveway is around the corner. Please move the snow from my driveway to this area of the road IN FRONT OF #591.

I went to the gym last night, did some body weight exercises (no extra weights needed for wall sits and lunges and fun things like pushups), walked on the treadmill for an hour, and then did some stretching. All good. I ate exactly on schedule and what I needed two days in a row. All good. I even went to the massage therapist to get my creakiness looked at (a legacy of playing way too much squash lately).

Here’s my major victory, which to most people will probably think of as relatively small. Today at the massage therapist, she said that my hamstrings and my IT bands felt in great shape. No creakiness, no groans, no feeling like she’s stabbing me with a hot poker. I have to say that this is awesome news. It’s a bit of a miracle, and I’m totally attributing it to the foam roller, which I kindly think of as the home torture device. Solid IT bands are critical for stable knees. I like stable knees, especially when I’m carrying a backpack the distance of mroe than a half marathon every day for 32 days. I’m just sayin’.

I do have some structural work to do on my quads and my butt. Not so much in strengthening them, but in keeping them limber. I also need to keep working on ankle strengthening on a balance board. I did that yesterday and it sucked pretty hard. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s a bit scary, bouncing all over. Basically, if I can maintain stamina and do a touch more strengthening here and a bit more stretching there, my Camino should be of average intensity. YAY!

I’m totally on track, people. I can do this.

And yet, there’s that part of me in the back of the brain (not too far back, cause that would be too easy) that wonders why I’m not an athlete. I work out a lot. I’m strong. But I’m not an athlete. In my head, I know that even after having hiked 700km, I’m still not going to be an athlete. Why not? Because anyone with the mental strength and strong joints can do this hike. People in their 70s regularly do this hike… like, annually. It isn’t hard – it’s just long, and meditative.

Then I read stories about people like this woman, who had a baby in September 2010 and was back at the international elite level of running in January 2011. Um, yeah.

And then there’s this video:

This video is apparently controversial because it’s too sexy. Whatever. LOOK AT WHAT SHE’S DOING!!! I watched that video and realized that I don’t even do a downward dog correctly. I am so unbelievably jealous of what she’s able to do.

Because I have a best friend, I emailed her about this. Because she’s my best friend, she sent me an email smack upside the head which read as follows:

Dude, how do you even find about these crazy people?

You are SO not a sloth.  You’re playing squash, doing weights, etc.  You are an athlete too.  Don’t beat yourself up.  This woman runs for a LIVING.  It’s her JOB.  She went back so soon because that is her life.

Intellectually, I know she’s right. But sometimes there’s a big difference between what you know and what you feel. I feel like I have two choices: stop reading about super fit people, or change the way I think about my own level of activity.

I choose the latter. I’m not quite sure how to do it, but I’m going to do some research. Have you ever had to change the way you think about what you do? What were some of the things you told yourself?

Fast forward through him encouraging me to do a ridiculously hard sounding tent backpacking trip through the Alps (hello? hills? I did hills. I did the grand canyon. That was a lot of sweating and red faced action.), and he reminded me of the pound on the foot like 5 on the back issue. And he out and out stated what I’ve been trying not to think about: it sure would help if I lost the weight of the pack I’m going to carry before I hit the trail.

Did I mention that I backpacked the grand canyon? Awesome vacation! I got altitude sickness and puked all over the side of the canyon, saw a tarantula up close and personal, and experienced the joys of backpacking for the first time. And I trained my butt off for that trip. I would watch entire episodes of Buffy (the Vampire Slayer, who’s beyond awesome) on the elliptical. I climbed the only hill in the city of Ottawa (at Mooney’s Bay) over and over again while wearing a 25 pound pack. I lifted weights. I did it all, people. I literally trained myself “skinny”. Well, skinny for me. It was the first and only time in my adult life where I was healthy and weighed less than 200 pounds. (Don’t judge. I carry it pretty well.)

I lost 40 pounds before that trip, and my pack weighed 32 pounds. It was totally doable. In fact, I might have the most red verging on purple face, but… well, I rocked that trip.

Flash forward 9 years and 20 pounds. I’m not backpacking this time – I’m staying at hostels. My pack should weigh around 20 pounds, including food and water. There’s no getting around the fact that it would be a lot easier to walk that 700 kms with 20 pounds less on the foot. I’ll likely weigh less at the end of the trip than at the beginning but it’s also going to be harder at the beginning because really? Who normally walks 25km a day? No one. Not even a postie.

I’m leaving April 30th. There are 16 weeks between now and then, so that’s a little over a pound a week. I know what that means. That means bumping up my activity a bit and cutting back the fun foods. It means being very organized in my eating. It means, oh holy hannah, making all my food. It means not having toast and peanut butter three meals a day because I’m too lazy to make something or even reheat what I have in the fridge. It means making snacks instead of buying them. That’s what it means. It also means building indulgences into my life where appropriate but not every day. It means going to see the nutritionist and working on food timing and how and what to eat when I’m working out for 90 minutes at a time.

It isn’t rocket science. If I can get back to Grand Canyon weight, carrying a 20 pound pack will be no problem. (Especially if I work on stabilizing my knee and ankles, etc.) That should also put me at the right size to wear women’s rain gear, which would be nice since men’s rain gear would need to be altered for my pitifully short arms. Also, women’s rain gear would just plain be more attractive.

Anyway, suffice to say I’m focused. I got it. I’m all in.

It’s a thingy that fits into the roof of your mouth when you’re eating that makes your mouth smaller. This in turn makes you take smaller bites, and chew them more. Smaller bites chewed more means that you might actually feel full when you eat, instead of having to force yourself to stop when you’re still hungry.

I kinda want one.

Simon Doonan is a writer for Slate.com and a general provocateur. He has written a book called “Gay Men Don’t Get Fat”. Um. Totally wrong. I’ve known all sorts of gay men who were at the very least quite chubby. Admittedly, they have tended to obsess about their body image like women, and have done all sorts of crazy crash diets. But still, they do exist.

Mr. Doonan’s premise is that gay men eat less meaty, fatty foods. Sushi, for example, is a gay man food. Mexican is very hetero. No avocado – way too fatty. Gay chips are baked, hetero chips are deep fried.  His tongue in cheek (thank heavens) concept is that people need to find a balance between gay eating and hetero eating.

Okay, if it weren’t for that caveat, I’d be crankier. Clearly this is intended as a humor book. Right? Right. It must be. Amazon classifies it as a humor book.

The thing that kills me though is that the tongue in cheek concept – balancing fatty and non-fatty foods, is actually probably quite right. So, this is another book about how to eat in moderation, about making better food choices. That’s good, right? That’s smart?

So why does the gay man angle make me so mad? Because it’s another stereotype related to obesity. People of all types are fat. People who are black, white, asian, aboriginal, tall, short, fit, unfit, single, married, divorced, widowed, employed, unemployed, high income and low, straight, gay, and transgendered. You can be skinny and fat (you know, those people who are skinny everywhere but with weird pockets of fat?). I just… it enrages me that people apply stereotypes to obesity. I think we can safely say that in this world, there are a lot of fat people. And they come from all walks of life.

Gay men get fat. Parisian women get fat. That dude who was the high school football star with the smoking hot bod? He got fat. He liked beer a little too much and thinks that steak is the only meal he can cook. Jessica Alba lost her (minimal) baby weight by getting all her food delivered (all 1200 calories of it, which is the lowest calories I think you can plan for without being medically supervised) and working out pretty much immediately.

There’s a line in the  movie Notting Hill which is a total classic. The character played by Julia Roberts (who’s portraying a movie star) says that she’s been hungry since she was 18 years old because she’s constantly on a diet.

Everybody gets fat. And everybody has to work at it to maintain or lose weight in today’s world. It is too easy to eat out, and when you do, the food you get is, well, loaded with calories. We’re all in meetings or sitting at a desk, or in a job where you need to ask permission to pee, let alone take a break where you could assemble a healthy snack. So we eat snack cakes and chocolate bars and bags of chips. Pretzels start to look healthy because they’re not fried, but they’re still 400 calories a bag.

Food fads suck. They suck because they prey on people who want an easy fix. There is nothing easy about weight. Everyone hits a wall at some point. I’m picking on Mr Noonan because his is the latest title that I’ve seen, but it could be any number of other authors whose “plans” are really nothing short of ridiculous.

I have a challenge for the publishing industry: Get some ethics. Put the nutritional info on all the recipes you publish. Put some guidelines in all your cookbooks for what are reasonable calorie intakes. Get your chefs to make good food that doesn’t include so much …. goodness. And don’t make up a jazzy title that you know is nothing but crap. How about this for a title: The Battle For Your Life? Because that’s what it is.

Challenge issued.

I treat New Year’s like a weekend night, which, conveniently it is! That means my squash partner Barb took her regular licence to try and kill me (seriously dudes… we broke a ball this morning). I’m going to have a nap, then will head to my BFFs house to hang out with them and their kids and H’s about to pop out her first kid sister and her partner. We’ll rile up the kids a bit, eat Chinese food, and play some board games when the kids are asleep. If I’m super lucky, the baby will let me hold him without screaming his face off. I’m not holding my breath on that one, though. For sure I’ll be home before 11pm.

Yeah, it might be lame, but I’m okay with it. There will be laughter and trash talk and I’m totally going to lose whatever board game we’re going to play because I always lose and we’ll eat and and did I mention the trash talk and laughter? I’m not going to spend $100 for dinner and I’m not going to get someone else’s vomit on my shoes (including baby vomit, cause I don’t do that). I won’t be hungover, my head won’t hurt, and I won’t wonder who that guy is that I made out with last night. On the whole, I’m thinking that my way is pretty awesome!

Happy New Year to you all! Enjoy your evening, and may you all have a fantastic year to come!

Maybe being an adult in my eyes is the way that I respond to things. I had a year that could have thrown me right over the edge. A guy I loved told me he was never going to love me. I had to lay off 1/3 of my employees in a process that took an entire year. I got another new boss (that would be my fifth boss since 2009). My best friend had her third baby (I know that’s a thing of joy, but you kind of lose your friend for the first almost full year, and this is her third baby in four years!).

Any of these things could have sucked donkey balls. They could have thrown me into major depression, binge eating, and poor personal habits. But they didn’t. They didn’t because I now have coping strategies that do not involve crawling into bed and hiding for a year or so. They don’t involve going to the grocery store at 9pm to buy a pie and eating the whole thing that night. They don’t involve hurting myself in any way, or avoiding people who love and/or care about me.

Nope. This year I employed active approaches to dealing with the shit that happens in life, the stuff that adults have to deal with. I’m not gonna lie, these strategies were HORRENDOUSLY expensive. But they worked. Here’s what I did:

1. Booked travel. Give me a shitty situation and I’ll book a trip. It gives me something to research and look forward to for weeks or months. This year I went to California to a four day music festival (Coachella, ho!) and to New York City for a month.
2. Got more involved in a crafting community. Did you know that there are literally thousands of craft blogs out there? I follow about 12, for different perspectives on sewing and some general crafts. These gave me some great ideas and encouraged me to fail in some pretty spectacular ways. My favourites are where the blog posts show how they screwed up. It makes me feel more effective as a crafter.
3. Got more involved in a fitness community. Not only did I play in the Goodlife Squash League three seasons this year, I also moved up a level and didn’t suck too badly. I didn’t win a lot, but I didn’t suck too badly. I also hooked up with the Losing it in Ottawa group on Facebook, where other women like me moan, bitch, whine, complain and inspire each other to drink more water, move their bodies more, and reframe their thinking. Also, did I mention that I did a triathlon? Yeah. I know. I still can’t believe it.
4. Paid attention to professionals. I went to the same workshop at BMI three times. Same topics, same slides, different participants. It’s about changing the mental roadblocks to weight loss, and reframing your self-talk. Honestly, I would take it every month if I remembered to sign up. I listened when the BMI professionals told me to “eat more protein” (like, a thousand times), and gently castigated me when I got into activity lulls or made choices that I bemoaned. It’s my choice, and I need to be accountable for the choices that I make, and I heard that loud and clear.
5. Did I mention that I did a triathlon? Ha! I also canoed for 6 hours. In one day! With my dad, who was a hero for finding that activity and doing it with a crushed finger.
6. Reached out to friends. I had a breakdown in 2009 that was pretty awful. Over the course of an entire year I started withdrawing from my friends, showing up at my parents’ house in tears, and basically turning into a total train wreck. It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve turned a corner. This year when I needed help, I asked for it. I met professionals. I hung out with friends. I don’t need to agonize over my problems with them, but I found relief in hanging out with people who didn’t need to grill me, but who provided comfort in the form of trash talk, board games, and great food.
7. Learned when I need to engage and when I need to be alone. I’m an at home introvert. It takes a lot to get me out the door, especially in winter. But committing to participate in things and then not doing it hurts my relationship with my friends, so dammit, I went to activities this year. I even went to two parties. Parties!
8. Fixed stuff myself. I have a handy dad and a very handy brother. But I can’t always rely on other people to fix my stuff. This year I started doing it myself. My brother showed me how to fix my toilet, and I did some basic home repairs. This, on top of my major decluttering and purge of “stuff”, has made me love my house. It isn’t perfect, but I can’t get better at the home repairs if I don’t try them, right?

There are things I’m not so proud of, but you know what? They’re totally outweighed by the stuff that I did right this year. I worked through some serious crap by getting everything else in my life in order and on track. That’s a depth of maturity I was pretty sure I’d never reach.

So, what’s up for next year? Oh, it’s a big year for me. Epic. First, I’m finishing my basement. My mum came over today to help me purge the basement, and man, did we kick some butt. I have an entire car of stuff to go to St Vincent de Paul, but I have five sets of shelves that are now empty, one full storage room, and empty bins leftover. That space is ready for a ceiling, lighting, a couple of doors, and some flooring. It’s going to be lovely.

For the month of May, you’ll get sporadic blog posts from me from the Camino de Santiago, an 800km trail in northern Spain. I’m walking about 700kms of it, spending some time in Barcelona before and after. I’m taking six epic weeks off work to do this trip. Since I’ve been talking about doing this trip since, oh, 2002, you might wonder why now? I’ll tell you why: it’s the one epic trip that I have left on my list. Once this trip is done, I have nothing left to regret not having done. I know, I’m 36 and my bucket list is almost done. Not the full bucket list, but the really expensive stuff.

Why is that important to me, you ask? Because it means that, should I decide that  I want to try to have a kid, I’m not going to resent the child because he or she prevented me from traveling, or from doing something important to me. I’ve done it. I’m in a good place. I’m responsible and mature. I have coping mechanisms and a support network that I know how to use.

So, 2012 is going to be a fun year. An interesting year. One full of no doubt much stress (hello? reno hell!) and meditation (nothing like walking 25km a day for 30 days to provoke meditative thoughts). And I’m going to know not just how to handle it, not just how to survive, but how to grow. It’s going to be awesome.

What was your favourite part of 2011? What are you looking forward to in 2012?

The person I was speaking with fired back a “but what would you DO?” Whaddya mean, what would I do? Do you ask that of retired people? No. No you don’t. You just look at them with jealousy and think to yourself “man, it’d be nice to have that extra 10 hours a day back like buddy who retired… maybe I’d look that happy if it happened to me”.

Why would I have to do anything? Sure, if I won an obscene amount of money, I’d figure out a way to give most of it away. But that’s not really a job for me. After setting up the parameters for how it should be distributed, I’d pretty much be out of the game. So, what would I do if I ‘lottery retired’?

Well, obviously there’s the trite answer. Of course I’m going to travel. But you can’t travel all the time. At least I can’t. I like my own stuff. I like my routine. I like my friends and family. So no, I wouldn’t travel all the time.

And if you’re not travelling, then what? I’d like to tell you that I’d be all altruistic and stuff, but I don’t know. I did a lot of volunteering when I was young and it was a lot like work. Even volunteers get sucked into administrivia.

I think, if you had to define what I’d do, it would be this: I’d become an artisan. Oh, I know the word “artisan” is so overused that it’s almost meaningless now, but I mean it in the truest way possible:  A worker in a skilled trade, esp. one that involves making things by hand.

That’s right. I’d make stuff. For a living. Stuff that wouldn’t have to be so perfect that it would sell. Stuff that allowed me to grow and learn and be impractical because I can, not creating stuff that has to be “sellable” in order to make my mortgage payment.

Part of my making stuff issues are that I want to make all different types of stuff. This means I never actually master anything. You have to sew a thousand seams before they’re consistently straight. Even experts have to rip out seams. Same thing with hand sewing (though I think that might be genetic – I’m actually really good at it). I’d like to learn how to paint. I’d like to craft three dimensional objects. I’d like to… well, make stuff.

I could re-prioritize my life so that I made stuff more. I could. But it would be so much easier to be ‘lottery retired’ so I could get up, have a healthy breakfast, go to the gym or for a walk and do my errands, have a healthy lunch, and craft for four hours or so before having a healthy dinner, don’t you think?

I wish I could a) remember who I was talking to about this; and b) change my answer from “duh… what?” to “become an artisan”. Not only would I sound way more intelligent than I actually did, but it would be a true reflection of who I am and what I love to do.

Who knew I’d turn out to be this person? I certainly never would have guessed.