Month: March 2019

I head down next week to my first fitness conference since deciding to get my certification. The sessions have been selected and changed 4 times, my networking business cards have been printed and picked up. The fashionista in me stalked instagram feeds to see what people were wearing at earlier conferences so I would know what to pack. I even splurged on a brand new Yeti water bottle, thinking it’ll remind me afterwards why I’m on this journey. I’m mentally ready to go, hopefully I won’t be that weird kid starting a new elementary school newbie.

So the plans for the weekend are simple to learn and make connections. It would be amazing to find a training job lead that lets me vocalize my passion, but keep my day job and its health insurance. I’m limiting myself to paying cash for anything I want to buy at the event marketplace–I know how I can impulse shop.

Plus my favorite college restaurant has a location down the block from the conference hotel. Fitness convention or not–I am so looking forward to a Miami Vice and an order of nachos.

Full disclosure, on too many occasions I woke up in the middle of night and couldn’t fall back to sleep I ended up sucked into Pinterest to the alarm went off in the morning. It’s like my dependency on caffeine, I own up to it. The weird pins were there to prove it, at least I wasn’t going for the middle of night Amazon binges. Middle of the night Amazon binges can be scary.

A couple of months ago, I realized I had to do a full social media purge if I was going to create an online persona. Facebook was the easiest, my account has been Grandma appropriate since she joined 7 years ago. Twitter, I mainly use as my news source, I only had to update my avatar. Instagram I barely touch, I need to get better with utilizing it.

Then came the boards, they looked worse than my dresser drawers. It was a watching TV and waiting in Doctor’s offices project. I searched for how to create a unified experience–on Pinterest of course. In the end I learned a lot about doing the purge.

1. I had boards I hadn’t used in years. My scrapbook from vacation 2016 is still not done. Why did I need a scrapbook board? That board got archived. I had a board on closet organization from when I was an early failure at the Marie Kondo thing, it got deleted.
2. There was redundancy I had meal prep pins on both my workout board and my recipe boards. I streamlined them into one sub section. There easy to find now. Recipes I’ll never make got taken off. 200+ pins of liquor and sangria recipes were cleaned up.
3. I unified my board covers, it meant about an hour on Canva, but I now have the same background across all my platforms. I had a picture that I took last summer on vacation that I love. It also gave me the perfect color scheme to work of off.
4. I got picky about what I pin, goes back to the clean up. I eat clean 90% of the time I don’t need to pin elaborate desserts.
5. I created a board for all the random stuff. It lets me save what I want to save, but it’s all in one spot. That board is my weird pin home. I thought about making it secret, but I decided it can be my quirky part. I did make boards about unrelated stuff secret.

Online presence I’m still a work in progress. I’ll get there. What matters is that I found my balance and I’m creating the best me.

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Thanksgiving Morning when most people are in pajamas watching the parade, I have this view. For 2 1/2 miles I run up and down behind a balloon making sure it doesn’t crash into anything. It’s an awesome cockatail party introduction. I thought I was in decent shape Thanksgiving 2015 when I took out the Pillsbury DoughBoy for the 2nd time. It was a crazy parade that kept me on my toes, and I was wrong. As the one who runs balloon operations, I had to make 2 first aid calls, which required me running up 2 NYC blocks, both times I was totally winded. On top of it I take the center rope of the balloon when we deflate post parade, I couldn’t lift my arms Black Friday morning. Anybody who works in retail, will tell you that’s a recipe for disaster.

So after I recovered from that holiday season by escaping to warmth and actually sleeping for a week, I knew I needed to get myself into a gym. I started small, hell I could barely hold a plank with my trainer bracing my feet for 30 seconds. I was 34, and probably in worse shape than most women twice my age. I knew I had to make a difference quickly, I hated that I was popping Advil like tic-tacs. I was winded walking up 2 flights of stairs. It wasn’t who I wanted to be. By August the change was noticeable, 2 1/2 years later the scale hasn’t changed much, but I’ve leaned out and put on the muscle.

I hate that it took me this long to get to the healthier me. I’ve never maintained a loss more than 4 months before this. It really is about finding the balance that makes a lifestyle sustainable.