Eyeing the world

 So I started doing Noom. I know it's bad for my eating habits, I was only interested in the articles, and did learn some useful things as well. One of them is the motivation model, which, very shortly means: one large peak and decline at the start, and then continuous slips and surges (yes, I did steal their terminology). I am now going through a slip. Or is this my initial fall, since I was experiencing "success" for about 6 months? It's also autumn, and I feel awful. I'm also going through what is, for me, a breakup - and for the person I used to refer to as my man, I have no clue. It sucks. I miss him terribly. And I'm not gonna tell him anything. But all this has made it so that I don't feel the same rush of happiness throughout or even at the end of my workouts, while my daily mood is still low. I'm not sure, what to do - if I stop, it can only get worse, but I'm also not as motivated to keep it up. The one thing that still sparks joy in me i...

 This is the question I ask myself before every workout, every time I look in the mirror, before falling asleep, and in so many other situations that I couldn't possibly count them all. I ask myself this, because I'm hoping the answer will be "no, there's nothing to be scared of". I don't want to set this up as being afraid to be fat again. I'm still fat, and my goal weight is specifically more than what's "appropriate" for my height. What I am afraid of, is seeing all the effort go to waste. Yo-yo dieting, that's what I'm scared of. I know my worth as a person, I know the worth of my skills and knowledge, but the emotional states I'd experienced and that led to me gaining so much weight in the first place terrify me. I'm not the woman who eats her feelings anymore. I have to do this affirmation-style. As much as taking all this one day at a time feels easy at times, I'm already looking months into the future, to the desig...

 I re-read my post about what I plan to do after reaching my goal weight, and, of course, I have some comments to add. Since September, I've been feeling less amazing, even though the workouts still keep me going. My weight is quite firmly stuck at 92 kilos, which is not an issue. I also introduced a No-scale November, because I was curious, what effect it would have on my mental health to not have to step on a scale every morning, and, I hate to admit this, but compare the number to expectations and performances. I have days where I eat a lot, and then weigh less the next day, but more on the third and fourth. I have days where I don't feel like exercising, and, of course, I have days when I just go wild and almost end myself with a workout. I actually started journaling and meditating, and they are genuinely awesome habits for me right now. I have a slight problem though: I have no idea what my body looks like anymore. I find strange confidence in comparing myself to old phot...

 I cannot explain what is going on. I may have had the worst morning of the year. I woke up at 2.50 am and did not manage to fall back asleep until my alarm. Then I did allow myself a few minutes of sleep after this alarm, before I went to the gym. I am halfway through a third cycle of Insanity. Today's workout was not, in fact, an Insanity video, because I felt really bad. I'm having some relationship problems, miss friends, family, habits... But, and I don't mean to discourage anyone from their goals... I have to tell you about my last week. I could start this by complaining, but I'd rather emphasize the time I spent with a really good friend. We made some really good looking breakfast together, we go out for a run each morning, and to be honest, her presence makes me realize a relationship might even fit into my life. So, among all the things we did together (me having taken 4 days off work) I did attend two of her university courses. They were literal torture. They ...

 I went through Insanity twice. It's almost undescribable, and yet, somehow trivial after all this time. The way it impacted my mental health should never be overlooked - working out daily pulled me out of a very awful depression, and I only see how deep I was after being out of it for a while. To be honest, it's been hard to navigate my mental states even during those two cycles - I was happy and content, but only barely, and I had to pause for a while to allow my joints some recovery. By the end of my second cycle, I'd had problems with my knee and pain in my hips, which was overall very concerning. After a month of pause, I feel lost, bored and too demotivated to do it a third time. I could do another program - in fact, I have acquired the P90X3, and I'd love to try it out - but also, for some reason, I can't. I'm not sure where I'm lost. Is it my depression, family, stereotypes...? Do I just not have a strong enough why, as they call it? And I know that ...

 My experience so far has been that as a beginner, you simply get screwed over. Maybe not even intentionally. You might come across people who have been training for months or years, and you immediately start to compare yourself to them. Well, at least I did. The first time I saw photos of a girl who runs a running tumblr, I immediately registered that she was still heavier than me, and my first thought was "aha, so I can run better than her then"; and I couldn't have been more wrong. I did not learn from this experience at the ripe age of fourteen, but decided to look at other fitblrs, and ended up somehow finding the Insanity program. We all know my most recent experience with it, I lost 20 entire kilograms of weight and gained 2 kilograms of muscle doing it. But I also mentioned my first experiences, which were total disappointments to me. Hell, the workouts warn you that if you acquired them in any other way but the official Beachbody site, they aren't going to be...

Can you imagine how excited I was to see this movie? I loved most of the superhero films, starting from Batman (well, technically, I only liked The Dark Knight, but I watched the entire trilogy because I thought I'd appreciate all of it together). And I really, really enjoyed Wonder Woman, and how I could actually see her be a person in all the action - something that not many characters get. If you are doing an origin story, you will need to put the character's personality into it, but for "classical" action, where you just turn your brain off, it isn't really required. I didn't really enjoy Captain Marvel, though, and I'm sure it wasn't because the main character was a woman. I just felt like I couldn't connect with her the same way I could, for example, with Iron Man, who's basically the least similar person to me. I believe that was because of writing. I have seen many arguments saying that her movie is actually good precisely because it...

 I decided to write this to you. It's me, from the future, and I wish I could be by your side to tell you all this when you need to hear it. I know you've struggled a lot and it seems like there is no way out, but trust me: there is. I'm not yet on top of the hill you need to climb, but I'm through that initial shrubbery that was cutting you all over, and I've found some really tasty berries to eat and a stream of water to drink from. The view is also incredible. I wish I could hold your hand on the way here, but I'm going to continue just as you did, completely on my own. I want to tell you how utterly proud I am of you for undertaking this journey. You saw the hill, and you've tried before, and you were so close to giving up forever, so thank you, from the bottom of our heart, that you didn't. You made this happen - which means you can make so much more happen, too. There are very few people that understand us. So many admire the climb, but are scared ...

 Disclaimer: at time of writing, I'm quite far away from my goal weight, but it doesn't really matter to me. The same way I lost 10 kilos, I'll lose any amount. I had a brief relaxing period between my two Insanity challenges, with the express purpose of testing how I'll be able to maintain my weight (and, well, I was foreseeing that my body would be totally exhausted after the first one, so I wanted to give myself a bit of time to recover, to get over soreness or any other pain), and I did fucking great. On the day of my first weigh in, I weighed the same as on the day of my last fit test, so that's amazing. It gives me a bit of hope for when I'll be 60 kilos, and will want to maintain that. Now, I won't want to be counting calories even then. I want to continue this lifestyle of "I eat whatever I want and I train because it makes me feel good", but I'm not sure how I'll be doing that. So I did what everyone would do, which is: a google se...

 The other day, my mother attended a seminar with this exact title. It was supposed to be related to her inner life and issues, but I really took offense with that presentation. Of course, she couldn't watch the entire thing, so I'm just gonna criticise my understanding of its first half: the half about self pity. The presenter started talking about how people who pity themselves get trapped in a cycle of negative feelings; how they complain a lot, and by complaining, they emphasize their own bad situation even more. They aren't interested in help, or helping themselves, instead, they actively try to feel worse. At this point, I basically blew up. The presenter was a theologian and a "mental hygiene specialist", but not a psychologist, or, dare I say, a psychiatrist. I could remember my depressive episode way too well. It wasn't about me not wanting to get out: I genuinely felt like there was no way out. I was too fat to train, I was too sad to work, too poor ...

 I'm trying to make a vlog of the experience. I just loaded all the not-workout recordings into my editing software, and I have 4 and a half hours of footage. Pray for me. I'm not even entirely sure of the story I want to be telling. After all, it would come off as an ad for people to do Insanity, which I don't intend it as. I don't want people to get the impression that this program will melt ten kilos off of them in two months. I don't want to make it look any less challenging than it was, or any less fun, or any less painful. There were weeks where I was sore, periods when I was training with a knee brace, and moreover, this is just the start of it all. I'm gonna do the program again, for two reasons: one of them is I'm hoping to lose another ten kilos with it, but the other is to see if I even would. I think I should emphasize its effects on my mental health more - for that it would help if I'd actually been diagnosed with depression. I did write an ...

 I don't know what I could tell anyone about discipline that they wouldn't find out from an influencer or some inspirational quote. Or maybe I do? Maybe. I don't believe in discipline. I don't believe in self-control. We aren't "in control" of things at least 80% of the time. Discipline might get you out of bed for a week, but to actually do it long enough to form a habit (in theory, 21 days) or an entire lifestyle (apparently 90 days), you won't be able to rely on it. Discipline lasts you a day, maximum, but in my experience, about an hour. I don't think we're able to "suck it up" for days, but maybe it is my brain being different from everyone else's. So, how do I wake up at 5 am and train? People do tell me that I sound so disciplined, that it's almost as if I were in the military. And what gets me to wake up? Is it David Goggins? No shade, but no. No amount of inspirational speech can get between me and my love for sleep. ...

 I didn't want to call this one Drama 3, since the actual interaction went just fine. I have hypothyroidism, and half of it was removed when I was 14. I've been taking hormones since. This monday I went to an endocrinologist, to get results, a prescription and... dunno, a shoulder to cry on. She did look at my results, said they were okay and that I should keep my current dosage, which I will definitely will do, and was glad to hear. Then she asked if I had any problems at all - yes, this turned into a discussion about periods. So now I have an appointment with a gynecologist, and will have to do blood tests too. We did talk a little about my weight - first she only asked if there had been any changes to my weight in the past year. I told her I gained 25 kilos in 2020 and was now trying to lose that. I had lost 10 kilos in the past two months. We carried on for a while, but then returned to this and she said she'd calculate my BMI. I said it would be around 38. She asked me...

 I am honestly beyond shocked with what has happened to me so far. Yes, I did go into this with the expectation to actually get down to 100 kg by the end of it, which would be around 2kgs a week lost, and I still feel attached to that outcome, but much, much less. I can definitely feel that my mental health is better, it is like I'm a new person now. I hear my coworkers complaining and my brain goes "couldn't be me". But then, at the same time, it says "remember when this was, indeed, us?" and of course I remember. I do feel like exercise is the thing that's keeping me out of that horrible rut I'd fallen into in 2020. So, now, as I'm at the end of my first Insanity cycle (one week left!!), let's sum up what expectations I had and didn't have, and how I did on them so far! I actually put all the things into an Excel sheet, thinking it'd be really helpful for me to track. And boy, am I tracking! I'm tracking my weight daily, the wee...

 So, 2020 hit me quite hard. I could play it in any direction, in fact; i could say i'm lucky for not getting the virus and already being vaccinated, and for finding this wonderful man of mine... or i could just as well say that it wrecked my mental health, deprived me of contact with my friends, even maybe that the events caused me to gain circa 25 kgs. It also made me wonder. What was it, that didn't allow my brain to tank like that, since apparently exercise is my main antidepressant. It isn't always efficient, but greatly improves my quality of life. And I recalled that not only did I go to some classes (kids aerobic and ballet) when i was 8-14 years old, I did in fact start to get worse mental health after I stopped with ballet. I did that for two reasons: my old classmates made fun of me for it, and I wanted to give myself a better chance at socialising with my new class, and the surgery I had to get on my thyroid, which brought me a one-month sit-down prescription. I...

 i've heard this concept a few times during the last year. first, it was on some witchy tiktoks, a "friendly reminder to do your shadow work", and i had absolutely no clue what that could mean. my mother read some books about childhood trauma, and talked to me about how not only do people have an inner child, this child has two aspects: one is your shadow child, all the times you've felt rejected, for example, and one is your sunshine child, the moments you've felt happy. then, finally, my man came along and told me that the shadow is a concept in jungian psychology, and what is meant by it is all the parts of one's personality that are repressed or rejected. and, well, in my life it was this shadow that got me into martial arts. i was (am?) really interested in death, how monumental and mundane it is, and how causing death is supposed to leave a stron emotional impact. before i started, i didn't really reject or repress any of that, i was after all a teen...

 i must have mentioned already that i purchased a menstrual cup (well, actually, two, but the second was free). and how much of a hassle it was to bring home, and how much i like it. well, today i got my period again, for the first time since march, and i decided to put it in again. all the struggles from last month were nowhere, not only did i know how to fold and keep it folded, my stomach is now a lot smaller and it was very easy to coordinate everything. it didn't open on my first try, so i wobbled it a bit, and voila. i'm a master of this now. and then i went to train. it's semi-important to note that i am sore from yesterday, because it had TWO workouts: the fit test, where i presume you're supposed to go allll out, and then some interval cardio max whatever, that is about 59 minutes of work and 2 to 3 minutes of ads. i did them both, naturally. so today i trained a bit lighter, and i did notice some exercises seemed easier - others though were a lot harder, becau...

 Anyone who's ever tried to change their body on purpose would know that sometimes your body's plans don't really align with yours. And I don't strictly mean weight loss here, though this is the area I have the most experience in. The only time I don't hit a plateau is when I eat "normally", that is, without any purpose or goal, just when I want to; because then I can go up up up as much as... well, I can't say I'd like. And I bet it would be harder if I was actually trying to bulk. But where exactly is the balance between loving your body in every shape or form, and taking care of it? I only presume there's something twisty here because of internalised fatphobia (I presume). After all, you can be healthy at a heavier weight, and even better, health is not an indication of worth. The thing is, though, that health is a goal of mine. Not my only one, I want some aesthetics to happen, too, but without doing all the stuff I'm doing in a healthy...

 whoever read my posts from January, or just has heard me talk about my life, will recall how deep an impression the film had on me. And it's kind of banal, to be frank. I originally watched the film after having read that "the pizza scene" changed someone's life, or body image, or whatever we wish. So, let me first describe what the movie elicited in me. I was, honestly, stunned. Stunned by the travels, the gorgeous foods and people, though I might say the cinematography was average. Good editing, of course, is what doesn't call attention to itself, but good cinematography might be harder to define. I just haven't felt like any of the shots had left any lasting impact on me, or the soundtrack, for that matter. The single exception is the Brazilian song, Samba da Bencao (I apologize for not using the proper letters), the Portuguese immediately stroked my eardrums in a familiar way, and I found the song to be quite soothing, enjoyable. I even have it on my spot...

    I barely got away from home, and I already dove head first into finding queer cultural places and events in my new city. I wanted to claim this place with all my being, especially since I was dating a girl at that time, and she really didn't want to go out in public with me. Not even to hold hands. No parties, either, only if it was Very Straight. So I wanted to find us safe spaces, and in fact, the only time we kissed outside of "the four walls", was at a party specifically organized for queer women (though straight women were also welcome, and men tolerated, if chaperoned by a woman). This resulted in me finding (but not actually visiting) the city's one gay bar. and then, later, desperate, searching for the terms "cluj pride", but mentally I was already disappointed, because I assumed we only did Pride in Bucharest. I was wrong. It was a happy accident, maybe, but my search did bring up a website (that is still up today!). At the time, in March, it o...