A Healthy Mind A Healthy Body A Healthy Soul

As I continue on my journey of health I realize how I am also changing mentally, changing how I think about life and the people around me, how I enjoy time alone to think and relax, even more now than before. But it’s so much more than that, my entire aura has changed over the past year and a half.

I find myself constantly researching nutrition more than ever before, I find myself enjoying local markets and cooking fresh. I am the queen of quick meals but those meals consisted of cutting corners like buying canned tomatoes and beans. Now I am cooking more from scratch with almost every meal. I can’t lie, I will probably still buy my kidney and garbanzo beans in a can most of the time depending on my time schedule but I don’t mind chopping up tomatoes. Frozen vegetables are a great choice so there’s always an alternative.

It’s so crazy how you think you are alone on your health journey, like you’re the only person who has stumbling blocks until you read someone’s story and they are or have gone through exactly what you are going through, or how you are having a hard time in the gym and that pain is kicking in and you realize that even the people who have been doing it longer than you and seem to be in top fitness health is also fighting through the pain that you’re fighting through and at that moment you realize that you aren’t weak, you aren’t as less experienced as you thought, that pain is part of the process and what separates people is their ability to work through the pain and fight to the finish line. I know now even more than I have ever known before what “no pain no gain” means.

Wednesday night I increased my mph on the treadmill, I’ve also found myself utilizing the last few minutes to push my mph even higher so I finish out stronger. My current goal is to be able to go a certain amount of miles in a certain amount of time. I am .5 miles away from that goal. It’s crazy because at one point I was a lot further than that. I am currently 1.2 mph faster than when I started out.

For me running was my hardest thing to do, even when I was 110 lbs with a high metabolism, I hated running. I have never in my life enjoyed running even though I was always pretty fast, even now I am fast but a quick race is a lot different than running for extended periods of time. So taking my time with running has really worked for me, it has helped me build up my endurance and work on my breathing method. Last week I ran 1 mph faster than my usual mph for half my normal run time and it was intense, soon I will be running my entire time at that pace. When I find myself feeling like I am not running fast enough or I am becoming bored and handling the run too easily, I increase my speed and even if in the beginning that speed seems difficult I keep going until it becomes too easy.

I also increased my weights in the gym recently, I felt like it was time to introduce more of a challenge to my workout.

And…It Is What It Is!