“Vanity Thy Name is (Me) & What is Beauty”

On the one hand I am ashamed to admit and on the hand I don’t think I should be ashamed to admit that I have some vanity.  I have chased “Beauty” or what I thought was beauty almost all my life.  This chasing has not been an easy path. In fact the concept of beauty has been a love hate thing for me.  You might be thinking what a jerk; thinking that I should just get over myself.  Well that’s pretty much what I have been telling myself most of my life.  But if you will be honest with yourself for a minute, you can just think about your own ideas and thoughts about your own state of beauty.  I think that if you are honest you will acknowledge that everyone, including yourself, is concerned about how you look.  It is natural.  That is why women and men put great amount of effort in choosing clothes, getting a good haircut or finding products so that our skin is as good as it can get.  If not the pursuit of beauty why then is the cosmetic industry a multi-billion dollar industry?  So let’s all be honest, we all aspire to be the best version of ourselves in many respects including beauty. 

Starting from a very young age I have had a tremendous battle with how I looked.  In addition to the normal craziness that young girls go through I had the added issues with being of mixed race.  I am half Chinese and half African American.  Through no fault of my own but rather through genetics inherited from my parents I have a very exotic look. For most of my early life I just wanted to look normal because looking strange is not a good thing when trying to fit in with your classmates at school.  The last thing I wanted to do was to stand out. I was teased a lot, really a lot and sometimes in pretty vicious ways.  I learned to survive by either fighting back or by trying to make myself invisible.  As a teenager I purposely made myself look unattractive by wearing horn rimmed glasses and two ponytails on the side of my head until I was almost 18 years old.  But there was one thing that I could not disguise and that was my body.  Since the age of 13 I had a really hot body, not skinny and not fat but just right.  So no matter what kind of frumpy clothes or stupid hairstyle or lack of make-up I always had the knowledge that my body was “smokin”.  This was like my secret weapon.  As a young woman I finally came to terms with the way that I looked.  I started to appreciate my uniqueness and no longer wished to just blend into the crowd.  I don’t believe that I was vain; I was simply grateful for what I had.  I realized that my brand or version of beauty is just that, mine.  I never sought after looking like someone else and I was never jealous of someone else’s beauty.  That was their brand.  You might ask yourself what have this got to do health and fitness because this is supposed to be a blog about that topic. 

Well you know the story if you have read my previous post; along the way later in my life I lost the one thing that I thought I would always have, my smokin body.  I knew that I would one day get older and that my face was not going to be the same.  I was not prepared for how my body would fail me.  So in that pursuit of fitness and health as I embraced CrossFit and the Paleo diet, initially it was to gain back my ideal body again.  I wanted to be “slim” again.  Slim was my idea of beauty.  All I could think about was what clothes I would be able to wear once I got slim.  You know the kind of clothes that only very thin models can wear.  But something happened in the last few months. 

I had a change in perception of what is beautiful.  As my body started to change, not only get smaller but to get more muscular I realized how beautiful a deltoid can be.  Sometimes when I inadvertently catch a glimpse of my arms or my legs and see a slight shadow of bicep or quadriceps I get a tingle of excitement.  I sometimes can’t hold in my amazement and have to giggle to myself.  Gaining this new appreciation for this different version or brand of beauty has made me not necessarily jealous of others but somewhat envious of others that are much more endowed with this beauty.  At the CrossFit gym I am overwhelmed on a regular basis at the beauty that I see around me.  Men and women with such perfect bodies and radiating with health and vitality.  I want that! What I want now is so much more than what I had when I was a younger.  What I had before is not good enough anymore; my current ideal of what is beautiful no longer fit into that paradigm.  So yes “Vanity, thy name is Della” but it is a vanity born of the pursuit of true beauty that can only come from being fit.

“I’ve Got My Mojo Back” ?????

The voice in my head was saying in my best Austin Powers imitation “Where is my Mojo”? “I’ve got to find my Mojo baby”. The fog of uncertainty about my ability to push myself during the workouts seems to be clearing up a bit.  Ever since I purposefully decided a couple of weeks ago that I was not going to let myself off the hook I have been having better results in the gym.  That is not to say that I have become some kind real athlete or anything; I still pretty much suck at most every movement or exercise.  I just don’t suck quite as much.  During the workouts I have been having a mental conversation with myself on the merits of my performance.  Dialogue such as “I don’t believe you really maxed your lift”, “You call that a kettle bell swing?”, You know you better add more weight than that” and “you need to go faster cause you don’t feel like puking yet”.  I know this sounds very negative and actually punishing but it worked. I know that all the psychologist say that positive reinforcement works better. 

The funny thing is that I can’t stand for anyone else to talk to me in that negative tone.  In fact I am quite notorious for getting into arguments with my trainers when they get the least bit harsh in their coaching style with me.  But I am allowed to beat myself up.  It’s just like when I was little and I used to get into fights with my brother but I won’t let anyone else beat my brother up. 

That feeling, that nebulous exhilarating feeling, started to come back.  That feeling you get when you know that you have gutted out every ounce of effort you could muster.  It began to clear away the fog in my head. That feeling you get when your body is exploding with a power and a strength that you didn’t know you had.  I began to feel confident and worthy again.  The first time during this period that I started to feel this way was when I looked at the recorded times for a workout and noticed that I wasn’t last like I always was.  I thought maybe it was a fluke, maybe everyone else was just having a bad day and then it happened again.  I WAS NOT LAST! This was no fluke.  I can and I have improved.  I can and I have pushed myself beyond my comfort zone.  I have not allowed myself to simply accept my inadequacies as the future state.  Now that I’ve got my Mojo back, I’m hungry for so much more.  I am still struggling to keep up with most of the people in the gym but I realize that the contest is with me. I know that I will have good and bad days but that the power to bring back the motivation is with me.

“Break on Through to the Other Side”

I intend to go back to sharing more about myself in other postings so that you can relate and stuff.  But for right now I am facing a dilemma. It is not a crisis situation or anything however it is stressing me out.  You see I’m stuck; stuck in a rut. I am referring to my inability to improve my performance in the CrossFit exercises and therefore become fitter and lose more weight.  Oh yes for a while I was able to tell myself things to make me feel better about being in a rut.  Things like – I’m just taking it easy because I’m trying to recover from the competition (the games).  The games are a whole other story that I will get to in another posting.  Or things like – it’s natural to stabilize once in a while; you can’t always make great gains. Another really good thing that I tell myself is that of course I couldn’t go at the exercises very hard because I was doing that crazy Paleo challenge and I was in a weaker state due to lack of glucose in my system.  That sounds very logical and almost scientific.  So I love that. 

I’ve got all these great reasons why I’m doing just under my best every single time I go in to workout.  If they are so great why do I have this gnawing terrible guilt feeling all the time? Because I am guilty that’s why.  I am guilty of not putting my best effort out there.  I am guilty of putting on a charade to my workout buddies and hoping that they think I gave it my all.  I want the high fives and back slaps at the end of the workout to mean something; to be real. I am guilty of cheating myself of the feeling of true accomplishment and the physical benefits derived from that.  None of these reasons are true reasons.  They are convenient excuses.

So why am I not really giving it my all?  I don’t know if I have an answer.  Somehow I have lost that spark, that motivation that I had just a couple of months ago.  Some of it is due to the fact that I came in last at the competition which made me question my abilities.  Am I fooling myself thinking that I was some kind of badass?  Because obviously not.  Part of the answer lies in the fact that even after all that stringent clean eating from the Paleo challenge I only managed to lose 6 lbs total in 4 weeks.  What is wrong with my body and maybe it’s just hopeless for me.  Yes this is whining but this is also self-reflection.  Somehow, some way I have to find a way to break out of this mode of thinking.  I have to be able to get back into that state of mind where I was highly motivated to improve.  I want that feeling again. I can almost taste what it felt like.  I want that rush that came from me putting every bit of what I had into a workout and coming through the other side in a state of intoxicating euphoria.  Ok, ok, too much drug allegory but that is the truth.

I am going to make a promise to myself that for the next two weeks I will consciously make an effort to recognize my level of effort every time I work out.  I may not be able to raise that level up every time but at least I will be honest with myself and not pretend. The first step to solving any problem is to first recognize there is a problem; so that’s what I’m doing.  The hope is that in acknowledging the reality I will have no choice but to address it.  I can either choose to do nothing or I can choose to “Break on Through to the Other Side”