#MondayMotivation My Fave Fitness accounts on Instagram

This Monday I thought I’d share a little of my #MondayMotivation with you.  I’ve written before about how instagram specifically can play a big role in fitness and fitness motivation.  It’s a less interrupted feed than facebook, plus we “follow” more than we friend.  Above all, it’s so visual and can help us see our own goals when we see everyone else crushing theirs.  

Here’s a few of my fave accounts from my feed

@AnnaVictoria

Anna Victoria is the main personal trainer type that I follow. I prefer accounts that I guess at least seeeeeeem less like the ultimate interaction with them is for you to buy what they sell.  Obvi it would be ideal for Anna if you’d like her content so much you buy her products BUT the reason I’ve followed her for so long (and even bought some of her products) is that she is the QUEEN of #realtalk about body positivity. Her fit body is her business – her body is the ultimate ad for why you should pay to know her workouts – but she still shows us the rolls, the changes, the things that bug her.  She practices the kind of body positivity she preaches and I love it! 

@thefitwaywithashley 

If there’s an overall vibe for an insta account…thefitwaywithashley is perpetually cheerful. She always smiles and her captions are full of real talk and honesty about how this fitness journey goes.  She shares about having “good body image days” and also douting if she should post a certain photo because of that pressure we all feel to only share the things we feel amazing in and nothing where we think our imperfections show. Plus all her workout photos are a great reminder to get your butt to the gym, on to the matt, wherever it needs to be for you to get your sweat on! 

@Fatgirlfedup

There are SO many reasons to love this account and about 1 million other people agree.  This account follows Lexi’s journey and 312 pound weight loss, achieved with diet and exercise, over two years. She also gets real about the less photogenic side like loose skin and skin removal surgery.  She provides so much motivation by sharing her story and makes you feel like if she could wake up and start this journey 300 pounds ago, you can too!  

@robinmolyneaux__

I love that Robin’s account showcases a little bit of everything. She’s stylish, she’s funny, she’s real and she’s fit.  We’ve messaged back and forth in the past and she’s the sweetest, most encouraging soul.  I love that there’s so much support out there in the instagram fitness community and Robin is a real life example of how awesome that can be! 

@losinggravity

Okay at this point is it a surprise that I’m sharing another AMAZING account full of #realtalk? It shouldn’t be.

I love the story of a big girl getting it together and sharing her fitness success. Especially when the bio is clear that these results are from diet and exercise. From where I’m at (ahem, way bigger than I want to be) these are the stories I admire because these are the stories I’m trying to write for myself with each healthy meal and every work out. Plus there’s a lot more to it than “I didn’t have abs and now I do” or “this dress didn’t fit and now it does”.  Changing our bodies can have a lot of side effects and losinggravity is here with the honesty about it all.

@inked beauty.getsfit

I love this account because as of literally today hers is a body that shows progress (She posts great before and afters) but she still looks real. Gorgeous. Fit. Strong. and REAL. I get so discouraged when alllll the”fit girls” I see look the same and as amazing as they look, as happy as I am for their success, as much as they should keep chasing their goals… it makes me feel hopeless because I am SO far from being THERE with them.

This account though is so much realness and honesty it’s amazing.  Plus she is some pretty legit fashion and tattoo #goals so it’s not just the same content over and over! 

@bodyposipanda 

No list of my fave instagram accounts could ever be complete without this one.  In the midst of my insta-scrolling and fitness motivation bodyposipanda is the voice of self love and body positivity! She’s here to remind us all that we don’t have to change a thing about our bodies and we can celelbrate and love our bodies even when we know they don’t fit in a certain box (or size!) Seriously, she’ll make you smile every damn day! 

Introducing more Creativity to how I look at Fitness

This post has been updated. =) Read on for an in-depth look at the topic.

As I was planning out my week I started thinking more about how I wanted to incorporate workouts and good food.  I did really well throughout October in terms of working out often and making little changes to my eating habits.  The start of November though has seen a lot of that fall away and old habits proving their strength. As strong as those old habits are, I’m fairly certain my determination to improve is stronger.

Update: This is a continuous pattern I’m still working on – a big part of it, I’ve discovered, is teaching myself not to think of eating healthy as hard or complicated.  Eating a few clementines for breakfast is just as easy as grabbing a bowl of cereal with lots of empty carbs.  Making a smoothie or frying an egg for a simple breakfast sandwich is as easy, if not easier, than frying bacon and cooking up a pile of breakfast potatoes.  However, if we let ourselves stay in the mindset that the junk food is an “easy option” then we’ll continue to think of that instead of teaching ourselves options for every energy or effort level on the healthier side of things.

This is actually the first week I’ve truly planned out what my fitness and food looks like based on reflection for what I want.  Usually, I am working more closely with a program like the Anna Victoria Body Love app but I sort of got bored with the repetition of that program. I enjoyed it, in a lot of ways, but for a number of reasons I had trouble making it stick.

Update: I’m back with Anna Victoria since the app has been updated to include improved work outs for home (Hello, COVID), as well as adding additional programs and trainers to keep it fresh. 

I’m realizing that maybe what I’m lacking right now is creativity and taking the time to listen to what my body and mind actually want. I know I want to be healthier but I’m thinking of how that looks for everyone else. I see all the “fitness gurus” and “health experts” that post gorgeous photos of their salad and encourage you to commit to their workout program.  While that works for some people, it hasn’t been working for me.

It’s really easy to feel like a failure when what works for everyone else isn’t working for you.  If it works for all those people then maybe I’m the problem, right?

Every other aspect of my life seems to be taking off and fitting together.  So what’s missing with fitness?

Creativity.

In every other aspect of my life, I’m engaging those cliches like “follow your heart” and “be yourself”.  Creativity is the common thread guiding my work and improvement.

So this week, as I plan out my creative projects like writing, social media and content creation I’m including fitness.  I ask myself questions about my work and projects such as what I have time for, what I’m interested in, what I’m craving and feeling.  This is a big part of how I develop my writing especially, and how I determine what I want to broadcast on social media.  It’s acknowledging what is happening in my life, what is happening in the world and the direction I’m interested in developing towards..

Now, I want to apply that to my fitness strategy.  I’ve developed a plan to incorporate focusing on different parts of my body with focused workouts each day, similar to how I did with Anna Victoria but open to more creativity in the actual movements and routines.

I’ve also planned to include yoga in my day because it allows me to reconnect mind and body and celebrate a movement that feels good.

Update: I’ve continued to bring creativity in to my fitness routine.  Recently I’ve been exploring how a routine doesn’t have to limit creativity – and actually can improve it – both in my creative work and my fitness.  I always kind of felt like working out on a program limited me to just that program.  I’m seeing now the opportunities to modify the program slightly when needed – swapping out moves that don’t work for me and including moves that address the same muscle groups.  I’m also recognizing that I can actually go “above and beyond” – which maybe should have been obvious but it hasn’t always felt obvious.  For example, adding extra cardio, extra reps, extra moves that feel good.  

What popular strategies have you tried and hated in self-improvement and fitness?

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My (Ongoing) Battle with Body Positivity

The body love movement is just so freaking happy, bubbly and pastel coloured. Seriously… check Pinterest. Go ahead and search “body positive” there. I’ll wait.

Did it look something like this?

Gosh there are some great messages but it’s just sooooo pastel. Nothing wrong with pastel, in and of itself, I like pastels… but there’s something missing in this movement and these messages. Something I need.

My mom and I spoke not long ago about how it seems so ridiculously easy to be kind and see the beauty in others but when it comes to ourselves it seems impossible.  Working in retail I used to be someone women I didn’t know confessed their insecurities to… they’d tell me “I love this dress but I can’t show my legs…” or “That top is adorable but there’s no way it’d look good on me.” I was there for them, more than happy to encourage them to let go of those negative ideas and embrace wearing whatever the f*ck they wanted.

Retail is a notoriously menial job but damn did I feel proud of myself when customers walked away glowing because they found a bit of confidence in the outfit I helped them pick.

Then I went shopping and passed right by the shorts, skipped the crop tops, and wouldn’t even look at anything fitted because my mind told me don’t you dare – you’ve gotten too big for all that!

How was it so easy to embrace the positive and help other women fight the very same demons that I would let win me over? Why did I tell them to go ahead and buy the short shorts while I searched for a way to hide my body?

It took a few days for it to click but I think I’m beginning to realize what makes Body Positivity so illusive in how I think about myself:

I see my body as a personal (and public) failure.

I can’t be skinny, even just for a second. I can’t look a whole lot smaller than I am. I can’t show people what I intended to look like or wish I looked like… I can’t make them not see all the things I pick on myself for.

In that sense, my body is public.  Whether it’s the figure I want or not, it’s part of my public image and how I’m viewed.

And I haven’t made it a secret that I wanted it to be a small, toned imitation of what we see in literally all our media.  I have an instagram account @fitishkitten which is public – anyone can follow it – and 850 or so people do. They’ve all seen me, in my underwear taking “before” pictures… and 6 months later taking “before” pictures again because time passed but the pounds stayed. And the process just repeats.

I’ve never posted “after pictures”.

I’ve written about it on this blog… not a lot, because I don’t always have the right thing to say, but none the less. I’ve written about wanting to lose the weight. I’ve written about the excitement of losing 4 pounds.

4 pounds didn’t make my jeans fit. I am still down those 4 pounds but I haven’t lost more (yet?).

So that I want to be smaller is my very personal relationship with myself, but it’s also very public knowledge.

I know that doesn’t need to be past tense. I know I can still (and will still) continue my efforts to lose weight.

But I realize that not being where I wanted to be, where I said I’d be, is a big part of why I can’t seem to make my thoughts more positive.  It’s not as simple as telling myself that I can’t wear this or that, or that I’m unattractive because of my size. In telling myself that I can’t have this or that because of my size there’s also a narrative of you could have had that, could have been better but you weren’t good enough on your diet or at the gym. This is your fault.

I know the way I think about myself and body positivity is flawed. I love reading the posts of body positive icons and I understand the message that nothing needs to change for us to love ourselves. I know I’m supposed to love myself at any size. I know that I’m allowed to love myself even if it’s not the way I planned.

Yet here I am – spreading a message of body positivity that I let myself believe doesn’t apply to this body.

This shit is so much harder than it looks

Real. Talk.

I love the messages in the pastel pinks and purples. I love the illustrations of girls loving themselves and I am HERE for the insta-babes rocking their rolls, their swimsuits, their everything and not giving a f*ck who finds it “attractive” or “insta-worthy”.

But if it was as simple as being told “love your body” and “size is just a number” or “Don’t let your mind bully your body”… well if it was as simple as that I wouldn’t be so far in to this post.

Some days I put on my stretchy pants and my fave comfy sweater and I enjoy being able to just breathe. But other days I need to leave the house. I might have something to do where I want to look put together, polished even. Or I might be going out with my beautiful girlfriend who has style for days. I want to feel good about how I show who I am to the world.

This is where it turns out that the quotes on pinterest don’t help very much. They don’t make my jeans fit. They don’t take away my dislike for that gentle collection of pudge around my midsection. They certainly don’t make it look less violent when that pudge is squeezed in the wrong way creating some god-awful muffin top.

The idea that I cannot be seen to have such a soft and chubby body is so deeply ingrained that it’s like if I just searched harder or adjusted my top this way and my pants that way… maybe I could somehow fool people looking at me in to just not seeing the 100 pounds of body I wish I didn’t have. Right?

Like a little well placed draping of the fabric fools everyone.

These demons know how to protect themselves better than I know how to fight. These demons don’t just tell us that we are fat, that we are unattractive or that we don’t deserve certain styles or experiences because of our body.

These demons tell us that body positivity doesn’t apply to us. That the “chub rub club” is a punishment, not a babe squad, and that this body can’t have my love. So even though I might surround myself with body positive messages my mind is a fortress against their positive effects.

It is the thing that body positive messages aren’t equipped to help us with; we need a body positive movement of leather wearing, mohawk rocking, force weilding badasses with better advice than “have a bubble bath” or “repeat “I deserve happiness” until you’re happy”. Sorry girls – I love the girly, pretty, bubble bath image but I’ve sat in that bath-bombed water until it was cold and when the bubbles disappeared I still hated the body they hid.

I need a movement that answers the demons of negative self talk and the crippling effects of low self esteem with equal force and fury.

It has to be bigger than the industry selling me my skinny self one pill and one protein shake at a time.

So let’s band together and create it. We can still sparkle. I will still love pastels. But let’s make our edges sharper, let’s get sassy and crazy and be bold.

Let your inner tough girl beat down the inner bitch who calls you fat

How do you make your body love louder than your doubt? I wanna know 😀

Discovering Progress

I struggle to think of what I might want to write when it comes to fitness. Mostly this is because I often feel like I’m not really getting anywhere in my weight loss journey and I don’t want to repeatedly write about how it feels to fail.

But today I was working on my fitness notebook – more on that to come – when I realized I am making progress. It’s slow, and a little inconsistent from week to week, but it’s progress. That realization inspired this post with the goal of sharing two things:

First, a friendly reminder (because I needed it) that how we feel isn’t always a good reflection of reality. For example, I feel like I’m the biggest I’ve ever been, and like I haven’t made any progress. I feel like I constantly choose to eat junk food despite knowing that it isn’t conducive to my goals. I feel hopeless.

Part of this is because I track my habits on a micro level. Each meal and snack of each day, and taking my weight every morning… the day to day fluctuations are often times all I see.  This is the down fall of micro tracking.  The benefit, for me, comes in two ways. First of all knowing that each thing will be measured keeps a constant pressure to make better and better choices more often.  It also means that when I take a moment to mentally “zoom out” and see what all this daily tracking is adding up to over time, I have more information to complete that zoomed out understanding.

This is how today I was able to realize I’m down 4.2 pounds this month. It’s not the spectacular progress we all hope for in our first month. Some weeks I lost more than expected and other weeks none at all. However it averages out to about 1 pound a week and that’s better progress than I thought I’d achieved.

I got caught up thinking about all the mistakes. Every spontaneous drive through and indulgent snack… until I realized that while I should continue striving to cut unhealthy habits I do have some progress to celebrate going in to week 5 with the notebook.

Now that’s the second thing I wanted to share today – the notebook.

I’ve attached a picture of my weekly layout because we all know a picture is worth a thousand words. The cover really just reminds me to be a whole person and not let weight be my identity.

I use this place to physically track my day to day weight, food, water and movement. I use a stencil to make it cute and organized.  It’s pretty simple but the process of recording and being able to flip back and look at how things are changing week to week is helpful for me to stay focused.

I’m not following any explicit plan. I spent about a month working through the first 3rd of the Body Love app by Anna Victoria. Ultimately it wasn’t the right program for me. I really want to be the kind of person that can strictly follow a program but I’m realizing I may not be. It’s well known that following a strict workout plan exactly is impractical for many people with busy lives (hello!) but I also struggle to stay focused while being flexible. If i forgive myself for having a busy day and missing a work out the next day I am full of excuses about why I can miss another work out, and so on. If I am not following the plan perfectly I am too lenient with myself and feel like a failure. There’s no big win for me.

Maybe at another time in my life a fully developed program will make more sense.

Since I was reflecting on the last month I brainstormed some ways to get moving in the next month. More on those ideas later!

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A Story of 60 Pounds

The first time I remember stepping on the scale and wanting to make the number smaller I weighed 140 pounds. Damn – wouldn’t it be nice to be back there?

Today, I’m at the beginning of yet another new fitness program, planning meals and workouts with the most sincere hope I’ll be taking inches off my waist. Oh yeah, and I’m 200 pounds… how did I step on the scale, decide to lose weight and wake up six years later, wait, 8 years, and 60 pounds heavier?

Well a lot happened in those eight years. A lot of excuses about what was possible when trying to lose weight and live a healthy life. But also a lot of really valuable living.

I finished a joint major and got in to a graduate program. Two of those years I spent researching incarceration and finding myself in that grad program before deciding to move foreword with other projects.

I married Ben.

I divorced Ben.

I developed a beautiful relationship with Tom.

We bought a house.

I’ve advanced my career.

The growth I have experienced in the last six years is far greater than the growth I see on the scale.

But there was comfort eating, a few extra meals out with friends, and a whole lot of snacks.

None the less, it’s time to rewrite these pounds. It’s time to begin a chapter where the weight actually does come off. That means figuring out how to make this time different.  Really, truly different.

So join me on this blog where, among other things, I will share my journey to a healthier lifestyle. You’ll see a few posts from previous attempts, as well.  We don’t all get it on the first try, do we? I’ve circled back to update this post and found some solace in it and some renewed motivation.  So I’ve added to it and it’s helped me to figure out where I need to go from here.

P.S. there’s an amazing community of people on this journey on instagram, follow my little corner of it at @fit.with.carmen

Drop a comment and tell me: How much does fitness play a role in your life? Are you on your own fitness or weight loss journey, or perhaps you are focusing on other areas of your life. I want to hear all about it.

Carmen