A Taste of Sparkle

So lately, I’ve been having a hard time with my confidence levels. No, surprisingly, not my level of confidence about my body…my level of confidence about my intelligence. I go to a rather challenging school that has very short semesters and crams as much material as possible into them, plus it seems like I am surrounded by geniuses 24/7! It’s enough to make me feel very stupid.

This is a new feeling for me. If there is one thing I have always been confident about, it’s my intelligence. I’ve struggled with many things over the years: body image, feeling “cool” enough, etc, but my intelligence was the one thing I knew I could be proud of.

Recently, however, some tough classes and tough exams have really shaken my confidence in myself. I am finding myself going into tests thinking things like “I’m going to fail,” and “I’m so stupid.” Needless to say, these are NOT helpful thoughts! I think part of the reason I have always been able to succeed in academics is specifically because of my confidence I had in my abilities, and since this has been shaken, I find that I’m having a much harder time.

So I decided to use something I learned in treatment for my eating disorder and body image issues: affirmations.

An affirmation is “a carefully formatted statement that should be repeated to ones self and written down frequently. For an affirmation to be effective, it needs to be present tense, positive, personal and specific.” Affirmations are part of positive thinking, or “fostering a positive mental attitude.”

However, instead of making affirmations like “I am beautiful no matter what,” I made these:

This may seem silly, or even a bit conceited – but it’s really helped! Instead of going into my classes with negative thoughts like “I will never understand this,” I am thinking more positive things like “Alright, this is going to be a challenge, but it’s going to be one I can handle!” Just this change in attitude has made so much of a difference. So yes, when people walk into my room and open my closet doors, they may think I am silly – but if it’s helping me, who cares!

Affirmations about my body have never been extremely helpful for me, but I have to say that these affirmations are working! If you’re like me and think that affirmations will never be helpful to you, maybe you haven’t tried the right kind of affirmations – so keep trying!

Flowers of the Week:

A purple spider mum flanked by white mums!

In this episode of “SparkleTV”:

1. Nutritionist appointment

2. Half-Marathon Training

3. Exciting news!

I had my second appointment with my new nutritionist this morning. My goals for last week were to swap out some of my soy milk consumption for something else, and I succeeded doing that with almond milk.

We talked a lot about meals and snacks and hunger and fullness. My “experiment” for this week (to be taken with a grain of salt) is to “eat as little as possible” at lunch, but still end up full. My lunches have been including lots of fruits and veggies, and while that’s great, I have been getting super full afterward, but forcing myself to finish because I was scared that I would get hungry immediately afterward. We decided I will have a fruit OR a vegetable serving with each meal and fit in what I am cutting out from meals during snacks.

It worked well today. Instead of having a Gardenburger-hummus wrap with carrots and almond butter AND a cup of melon, I just had the carrots and almond butter – and get this: I was full after the meal and I stayed full for three hours. When I got hungry again, then I had a piece of fruit, right before my run. I will update you all on the continued experimentation

Today I went for a 3.5 mile run at about a 10:00 min/mile pace. It was very hard to force myself to get out the door and get running, but once I was, it was no problem and turned out to be a pretty good run.

I have a 35 minute tempo run tomorrow which I am ready and excited for. My plan is to go out with a plan to break the tempo run in two segments of 17:30 and take a small break in between, but if I feel good, to keep going.

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I haven’t been blogging as much because I’ve been “blogging behind the scenes”! Expect a brand new look within the next week!

Good night!

Today I had a great run! I decided not to do my speedwork on the track, but to do more of a tempo run instead. I did a 4 mile loop and pushed myself pretty hard – I was so excited to come back and calculate my pace, and it was 9:10 per mile! That’s a great pace for me, considering my 5-K pace is around 8:15-30.

I also took a chance and wore a workout shirt that I literally bought 3 years ago for “when I’m skinny enough to wear it” – well, enough with that! I wore it today and at first I was a little self-conscious, but by halfway through my run, I was working so hard that I didn’t even have time to think about how I looked! When I got back from my run, I felt great and confident – not because I am finally “skinny enough”, but because I am proud of myself for pushing myself.

Run Stats:

Time: 36:42

Distance: 4.00 miles

Pace: 9:10 min/mile

Lunch was a yummy Gardenburger hummus wrap with carrots and almond butter and three little pierogies my friend made yesterday. I had a yummy GM to drink.

Come back tonight for:

1. Flax Pak review

2. Gardenburger GardenVegan review

3. A surprise product review

And more!

My mom is driving up to visit me today, so we’re going to go check out the Farmer’s Market in the next town over and go out to dinner.

‘Til tonight,

Ouch! My legs are SORE. I went for a great run today through the park trails, about 3.5 miles, but my knees are hurting a bit now. I have a speed work day on the track scheduled for tomorrow, but unless I feel miraculously better, I think that I’m going to have to push that back and do yoga/cross-train a bit on the elliptical tomorrow instead. My body is speaking, and I’m going to listen to it!

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Run Stats:

Duration: 35:58
Distance: about 3.5 miles

I felt a little sore the first mile, but after that I felt great – I made sure to walk down any steep downhills and mostly avoided hills to protect my knees, but I pushed myself on the second half of the run and it felt really good to fly along the trail like that!

When I got back from my run, I was starving. I was going to try my new Gardenburgers tonight, but instead made a quick go-to meal of mine: a pita spread with pb, topped with a sliced banana, and folded in half. I had a gala apple on the side. Not long after that, I made some dessert: one tofutti cutie (peanut butter flavor) with one tablespoon of White Chocolate Wonder PB. Today’s snacks were a Peanut Butter Cookie Larabar before lunch (delicious! Will be buying this again!) and a mini ClifBar around 9 p.m.

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I was planning on re-capping last week’s half-marathon training, but I feel like talking about rest days and listening to your body instead. The first paragraph of this post sounds very positive, like it is easy for me to take a rest day. Well, it sure isn’t! Even now, I am second-guessing myself about it.

One side of me thinks that I’ll be fine, it’s just soreness, I just need to push through the pain! I’ll get my speed work day out of the way, and then I have a shorter run Wednesday and a scheduled rest day on Thursday. I can make it until then! I already made one change to my running plan last week/this week, and I really shouldn’t screw around with it any further!

The other side of me has these facts.

1. My knees hurt. The pain isn’t terrible, but it’s bad enough that I have to limp a bit to go down stairs.

2. Running repeats around a track with knee pain is not going to help with my training. I am at my best for training when I do not feel pain. It is okay to feel sore, and I do feel sore – but not pain, which is what I am feeling in my knees today. Running speed work with pain could make this minor pain, which will probably go away if I just take a rest day, turn into something more serious and lead to taking more time off than just one rest day. It could even turn into an injury that would prevent me from running my marathon!

3. I talked with a friend who lives in my house who pushed herself too much running and didn’t take enough rest days. She now has chronic knee pain and has to be very careful about her running. I love that I don’t have any recurring running injuries and I would like to keep it that way.

4. No training plan is set in stone. I found my training plan online. It is a good plan for the average intermediate runner. However, it is not Lindsay-specific; it was not designed especially for me, so how in the world could it be the perfect plan for me that I absolutely must follow? Reason: it’s not! Adapting the plan to suit my own needs and my own body will not be harmful; it will be helpful! As long as I use the plan as a general guideline, which I am, I will be ready for my half-marathon.

Obviously the logical thing to do is to take a rest day. It is the perfectionist in me telling me to stick to the schedule, to push through the pain! But tonight, I’m not going to listen.

I’m going to make a commitment not to run my speed work tomorrow.

Instead, I will cross train on the elliptical and do a yoga video. I will tentatively adapt my plan for this week to:

Tuesday: cross train, yoga
Wednesday: 3 m easy run
Thursday: 6×400 at 5-k pace
Friday: cross train, yoga
Saturday: 4-6 mile run

I am a bit anxious about this, but I’m sure that it is the right thing to do, and I will just have to stick out the anxiety! I’ll update tomorrow on how it’s going

Good night everyone!

Good morning A Taste of Sparkle readers!

Before I run off to class, I just wanted to make a quick update about the nutritionist’s appointment that I was so scared of last night. It went really well! I think that she will be very helpful. She met me where I was at, instead of treating me like someone who has no knowledge of food or nutrition.

Before I left, I had a quick breakfast of Flax Multibran with raisins and soymilk.

She had me give a run-down of what I ate yesterday, and complimented my overall healthy eating! When I told her about my Green Monsters, I said, “Ok, now this is going to sound weird, but…” She laughed and said she admired my commitment to health. It’s not such a hard commitment when they taste so good!

We did talk a bit about my vegetarianism/veganism and how she was concerned about my calcium/iron/protein intake. I am going to see my doctor soon to get my iron levels tested, just to make sure they’re ok, because she said that even a slight decrease in normal iron levels could highly impact my running and overall feeling of wellness.

She introduced me to the greatest calcium supplement I’ve ever seen! Stay tuned, I’ll share it with you all later today.

What I’m going to work on this week is decreasing my soy milk intake and replacing it with other sources, such as almond milk, protein powder, and (eek!) cow’s milk. This will be a challenge, but I want to be the healthiest I can be!

See you all after class!