Good morning gym rats. It’s been a while since my last post and that has been on purpose. I was planning a major life change that I was naively confident was going to work out and thought that my next post would be a grand end-of-year announcement. Unfortunately though, just like most of my “grand plans of 2013” have played out, my latest goal played out with a rude slap-in-the-face rejection and thus I’m stuck back where I started, sitting here miserable in freezing cold Portland, Maine for the foreseeable future.
I would share my plans with you but it has been recently brought to my attention that someone / some people have made at least one manager in my office aware of this blog and while I have never mentioned where I work or any coworkers by name, it was strongly advised to me that I choose my words extremely carefully on here.
I know I can’t win and something I say will eventually bite me in the ass but for now I’ll continue on because I know that the majority of my readers are here for fitness / nutrition / entertainment purposes and I’m not going to let one rotten apple spoil the whole damn bunch (so to speak).
Now that that’s said and done, today’s post is on the topic of off-season nutrition. This is something I’ve been struggling with a lot lately and seems to be adding unnecessary anxiety in my life. I have an extremely type-A borderline OCD personality and am a MAJOR control freak. I can’t calm down unless I have every second of my day planned out and this includes every calorie and macro being consumed. While this makes for a successful competitor, this does not make for a generally happy person.
Around the time of my two spring shows this year I noticed I was becoming more and more easily irritable. Not just mildly irritable but angry-irritable to the point of feeling like my heart was going to explode out of my chest and fumes were coming out of my ears! “Stay away, mutherfucker!” is the only way to describe how I’d feel when triggered by the tiniest inconvenience or irritant. I figured this was simply a side effect of lowering carbs in my diet and pushed onward. Things did seem to improve in my “off-plan” months of May and August but now that I am nearly 3 months into my offseason I realize that the anxiety has little to do with competing and more to do with my unhappiness with several aspects of my life right now, many of which are out of my control. In addition to this, the past couple of months have been the most outrageously random string of consecutive bad luck hits. So much so that it’s become a joke between me and a few close friends, a seriously bad joke albeit, because who has something bad continually happen on pretty much a daily basis?! These things have been personal, financial, work-related, you name it, it’s happened! Anyway, I don’t want to confuse my readers (since I can’t currently elaborate on this public forum) or go too off topic here but my point is that I’ve gotten to the point where the fuse is about to blow and I need to find a way to loosen some steam before this happens. That’s where the diet comes in.
Last night I realized I have been tracking my diet in myfitnesspal for 445 days straight. Probably a good 400 of which have also been macro-focused. That shit is stressful! While I have of course increased my overall daily calories and adjusted my macros to a more live able level in my offseason, I sometimes feel imprisoned by the requirements I force myself to adhere to. Yes, I do have cheat meals but I am so obsessed with staying within my daily calorie goal that I’ll end up doing extra cardio or lifting longer to make up for it…which probably totally defeats the high-calorie / high-carb day purpose! It dawned on me this past weekend that it is time for a break. I’m no moron when it comes to how I need to eat to both stay relatively lean and be able to increase muscle so I shouldn’t need to track every single thing all of the time, right? What really hit me last weekend was that I was out of town for a few days trying to enjoy a short stay in a warm climate and I couldn’t even fully enjoy a 5 star dinner in a swanky restaurant with a beyond fantastic bottle of wine because in the back of my head all I was thinking was how badly it was going to fuck up my calories and macros for the day and “how on earth am I going to input this meal into myfitnesspal when I don’t know every single ingredient going into it?!”
This is not normal and I recognize that. The problem is finding a way to cut myself some slack once in a while without causing myself even more stress. I don’t think that tracking my diet on a regular basis is the problem here; I think not being able to stop and enjoy life once in a while is the real problem. I should have been able to ignore the app for 3 days and get back on track when I got home without feeling any guilt over treating myself a little while on a trip. Especially when I walked about a million miles a day and spend a gazillion dollars on expensive gym day passes while there so that I wouldn’t miss a lift!
After talking to a fellow competitor yesterday who is also in his offseason, I decided to take a month off from the diet tracking. I know how I should be eating so I’m going to try to eat like I normally would and just not obsess over the small things. I mean, that extra apple with PB before bed may inflate my carbs for the day but the likelihood of something like that making my body fat percentage double in a month’s time is pretty slim. Also, I want to be able to enjoy Christmas dinner and perhaps a few holiday martini’s without feeling like a total failure. I plan to delete the app off of my phone starting tomorrow and will not track for 30 days straight. My current macros for the past week (which includes 3 days of “vacation”) are 39% carbs, 31% protein, and 30% fat. We’ll see where I’m at a month from now. This might be a little more personal than most of my past blogs but I knew that if I didn’t write it down then come tomorrow morning I’d start tracking again. Like I said, CONTROL FREAK. Going forward I will try to only be a freak in the gym ;)
