Do you ever get wrapped up in all or nothing thinking? …cuz I do and it was even getting to the point where I didn’t want to share my day today because I didn’t think I could really do it justice.

On the surface, it was pretty normal

• Breakfast:

• Bootcamp:

warm up

workout 

20 minutes: as many rounds of 20 each

• squats
• pushups
• lunges
• step ups
• tricep dips
• situps
• leg raises

marathon abs

cooldown/stretch 

• Lunch (more sausage–Alex you’ll appreciate this!)

• Snacking:

• Packing

• Dinner:

• Driving to Sarnia

But I also had two big awesome things that I know are worth blogging about, even if I can’t do ‘em full justice yet.

One was my life coaching session, the other was a visit to Gainsborough Family Chiropractic. You’ll probably think I went because I fell off my bike, but the truth is I went more thanks to all the run ins I’ve had with Dr. Kreso–who I think might spend more time at Starbucks than I do and whose suggested By Design Americano (with heavy cream) was pretty delicious (as photographed above) and Dr. Rachelle, who came out and kicked ass at one of my bootcamps last week. You might remember the impromptu pep talks/discussions that I mentioned that got me thinking. Or maybe you clicked on the Life By Design podcasts that I keep linking to (I’m making my way down the archives). Anyways, all of it led to me realizing something: I want more and I deserve more. And that’s the same thing that I’m realizing via my work with my life coach.

Keeping this short and to the point, I am seeing a lot of parallels in my life and starting to make some shifts. Example A was my decision to start working with my life coach and realizing that you don’t need a problem to have a life coach. Unlike earlier in my eating disorder recovery, where I was very focused on my issues and my problems and on fixing things, I work with Jennifer with a very positive attitude. Regardless of whether I’d had an eating disorder, working with her would be empowering, enlightening, and AMAZING. I look at it this way — when wanted to go past “okay” and “better” and “in recovery” points to “RECOVERED!” “ALIVE!” and “HEALTHY!” I started working with a life coach instead of with a therapist focused on the negative stuff (I’m not discounting therapy, BTW).

Similarly, I am starting to see the light of doing something for your health before you’re in crisis. Yeah, I don’t have a specific injury right now. My hip nags, my knees hurt sometimes, and all that stuff I try not to whine about too much. But if you’ve been reading for a while, it’s actually rare for me NOT to be nursing to something, as much as I try to respect the “Listen to your body when it whispers so you don’t have to hear it scream” advice that someone passed along to me. And I often turn to physios, chiropractors, acupuncture, massage, etc. to “fix” the stuff. But something has been on my mind after the hip injury this year: WHY? And am I good to go? How do I know it’s not going to keep recurring or coming back in another form. In other words, I want to be proactive. I want to make sure the way I’m training and treating my body and taking care of myself is right before I get hurt or before I hit a crisis point. So going in today had nadda to do with my fall (though I feel like a train hit me for some reason today so a rest day was awesome and watching my participants work at bootcamp, I felt grateful, not guilty!) but everything to do with me taking a step in the right direction and owning up to the fact that what I’ve done in the past hasn’t worked. It’s been the wrong balance, it’s not been enough of some things and too much of other things, and it’s time to address that!

In other words, it’s okay to want to be better without having anything wrong. 

Bam.

Epiphany.

Love it!  Need more examples? There are a few where I’ve failed in the past but see myself making progress, as random, petty, dorky, whatever as they are:

• My dishes: I used to let them pile all the way up in my kitchen before I’d put them away. Now I have a habit of just putting the dry ones away before I do the dirty ones. Genius.
• My laundry: I struggled with this one forever. Seriously, it’s like I don’t have the gene that makes you care about having to wear your ugly clothes if it means not doing laundry. It’s kind of like a game when you have to sort through a huge pile of clean but unfolded and unsorted clothes to find a sports bra, right? Wrong. Another spot where you just have to take care of things before they get out of hand.
• money and bills
• My car: The day all those lights came on was a sign from the big guy, I’m sure. Actually, I’m sure it was just a signal that you can’t neglect things and expect everything to work. Maintenance. Before things break down.

Essentially, the post-recovery gem in this is that I realized something: we don’t need to be wrong to want to be better. There are more applications of this and it’s further reaching than it might seem. The more I think about it, the more I see how thinking the opposite–that we need to have something wrong or an issue to address in order to try to improve or to ask for help or guidance–has held me back or brought me down. Whether it’s creating a problem via self-sabotage (bingeing, gaining weight,  spending too much money, etc.) that’s obvious or just living a small life, this is a belief worth busting.

Give it some thought: we all deserve to be as awesome as possible. That entails working on ourselves whether we think we need work or not. Why settle? Mediocrity? Pffffft! You’re better than that. We all deserve all the happiness and health in the world–not just to NOT be sad or sick. Remember my mention of the analogy of getting married to not get divorced? Or to go into business to not go bankrupt? And how stupid it sounds? (Those were Dr. Kreso’s words, BTW). It’s all similar. We don’t live just to survive…or we shouldn’t!

Even if you’re awesome, you can be more awesome.

And that brings me back to those podcasts and the conversations I’ve been having (and I’ll say it one more time: I am NOT drinking the kool aid):

“Nobody ever died from being too awesome.”

So I think this all calls for some Cheryl approved cheese:

And one final word: do what you can. But you can always do more!

Where are you settling for okay when you could be better?
Do you relate to any of the things I mentioned?
Have you listened to those podcasts yet?