100 Hard Week 2 and 3

Two weeks of Hell

If the first week was an exercise in physical hell, the last two weeks have been pure psychological hell.

I haven’t lost any weight in two weeks, and I had a fucking mental breakdown.

The last time I did a serious diet like this, I gained a little weight in the second week, which made me spiral mentally, and I crashed off the wagon entirely, so I was wary of the same thing happening to me this time.

Yet despite anticipating it, it still sort of did.

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The Problem

A man.

A fucking man.

A man with whom I have a delicate and emotionally complicated relationship.

In his words…

there is a huge danger of a very serious codependency developing between us

Within Week 2 just happened to fall an emotionally significant date, and of course he made things difficult, and I know that I would have handled it well otherwise.

I would have been able to just ignore him ignoring me, and power through on any other day, but not that day.

It had to have been the strain of fasting, dieting, pushing my body to keep exercising, and then on top of it, this fucking man pissing me off was the final straw.

It was so shamefully ugly.

I just broke down.

I sent a million text messages.

I called a million times.

I cried all day and stayed in bed sniffling and crying some more.

I’m so ashamed of myself, and part of me just blots it out and tells myself, it wasn’t me who did that.

But it was.

I can’t believe I did that

I have a complicated relationship with crying and expressing my emotions to men.

When I was a child, and especially when I was a teenager, I tried very hard not to cry when someone hurt me, because I was tall for my age, and perhaps because of it, people treated me with so much less empathy than shorter children of the same age.

When I started having romantic relationships with boys (and then men), I quickly observed that my tears were never met with kindness.

No-one that I ever loved (outside of family or close friends) ever comforted me when I was hurt or cried, so I learned to hide my tears and not cry in their presence for fear of being hurt worse or mocked or humiliated.

And so for this reason, it hurt me a lot that I have been vulnerable with this man, and that he has reduced me to tears, and that I could not hold back my feelings and how sad I was, and that I spent three days sobbing over him not speaking to me on his birthday.

And I know it’s because birthdays are special to me.

As an only child, outside of the ones that were celebrated, I have spent all other birthdays completely alone, in isolation.

So of all the days that love is formally expressed, my birthday, and your birthday matter the most to me.

But I wouldn’t call what currently exists between he and I love.

It’s not that yet.

It’s something formless and ever shapeshifting.

A dark cloud of mutual apprehension, because we’re both fond of, and dangerous to each other.

Love is peaceful and benign.

He and I are not.

The irony, is that these lyrics from a song he sent me describe how he made me feel the whole week.

Do you ever get a little bit tired of life?
Like you're not really happy, but you don't wanna die
Like you're hanging by a thread, but you gotta survive
'Cause you gotta survive

My Fucking Knee

Something is wrong with my knee.

It had been hurting just a little bit once in a while for the past two months, and feeling a little stiff here and there, but two weeks into my consistent streak of walking 20,000 steps a day, and my knee went on full blown strike.

Pain, stiffness, feeling swollen (without actually looking swollen).

I pushed through even though it hurt so badly.

Half of week two and all of week three was just me waking up every day hyper aware of my knee, and walking hours and hours with pain in every step.

I felt like my knee wasn’t as solid as the other one. It felt like my bones were just moving around in there and I just didn’t feel steady standing on it, and sometimes it felt like something was moving out of place at the back of my knee. Plus my thigh above my knee just constantly felt tight and painful.

Finally I couldn’t take the pain anymore and I had to see the doctor.

Last night I did an MRI of my knee, so now I’m waiting for answers as to what’s wrong, but all of my googling suggests quadriceps tendinopathy, popliteal tendinopathy, and a meniscus tear of some degree.

I didn’t think it could be a torn ACL because I can still walk and move my knee properly, it just hurts a lot to do so.

I’ll let you know if I end up being right.

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The bad place.

Inside my mind is a very harsh place to be.

I was angry with myself and ashamed of myself that it affected me so much that it derailed my efforts, and resulted in me completely plateauing for the last two weeks.

Of course, I took it out on myself.

I mostly stuck to my diet and fasting, but I kept gaining weight.

Some of it was muscle, so at first I wasn’t alarmed, but this second week just plateaued, and I was so mentally spooked by it, it was really uncomfortable psychologically.

Still, I pushed through, not wanting to break my walking streak no matter what.

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Sleep

What made it so awful, is that I barely got any sleep this week.

For whatever reason, I started every day late, exhausted from the night before ending late, and spent each day having to catch up my steps too late in the day, and well into the night.

I was walking on the treadmill at 11:59 pm one night. Finished my workout at the ass crack of midnight.

What a shitty week.

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Diet

Little by little, I fell off my diet.

I also started putting Baileys Irish Cream in my protein shake to numb the pain because I was crying every few hours.

Which in hindsight is odd, because I don’t drink alcohol.

And by don’t drink, I mean in 365 days of a year, I might drink one alcoholic drink on one day (usually Christmas or New Year), and then go a few more years without even drinking any at all.

But my frustration with this annoying man made me finish a whole bottle of Baileys in the span of a few days.

And I know why.

It’s because I was in emotional maelstrom, and under emotional stress, I find that I am either unable to eat anything at all, or I eat constantly to dull the pain because I cannot feel calm.

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Water

My water intake fell off as my stress rose.

I was drinking maybe one litre a day (not counting other drinks like tea), when I was supposed to be drinking three.

Being dehydrated made my body feel out of sorts, and probably made me even more miserable.

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Walking

This is the only thing I managed to keep up with, but even the way I did it suffered terribly.

As I was waking up late, I was consistently missing the 6am walk, then too depressed to catch up, and that snowballed into frequently missing the 9am walk as well, which put me on track to have to shift all the subsequent walks (12pm and so on) forward, in order to catch up steps and hit the goal.

The only upside of how miserable this was, is that I gained muscle and lost fat from it.

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Transfer Addiction

I also found out that once I quit my usual social media (Twitter, Clubhouse, Reddit etc) and ordering food from DoorDash and UberEats, I suddenly started shopping and spending a lot more money.

I started taking more Ubers.

Started buying more stuff on Amazon.

It’s almost as though my dependency on the former set of addictive things just switched over to something else just as addictive rather than lessened.

Transfer Addicton is a real thing by the way.

Even the fact that I started drinking more alcohol than I’ve had in the last five years is probably part of it.

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Tracking

This is where I did the absolute worst.

NOTHING is working.

I am very orderly in my mind.
I love to keep track of things, I love to have precise measurements, I love data.

So this is precisely why I feel like I am losing my sanity because I completely failed at recording things in my bullet journal, or in Todoist, or anywhere besides random scraps of paper I reached for out of desperation.

Writing broke down. Reading broke down. I now have an accountability debt, and I owe 5000 words of my novel.

The Purgatory of Intention

I haven’t done any exercise for the last three days, ostensibly to give my knee a rest, but with each day that passes, a terror grows inside me, that perhaps I can’t really do this.

There is this fear that perhaps the version of myself I dream in my mind won’t survive if it becomes reality.

But my greatest fear of all, is to remain trapped in the purgatory of intention.

To forever just be waiting, and wishing, and wondering, and dreaming while life passes by.

I want to be free to go wherever I want and meet whoever my heart wishes to meet, without fear of being judged before I’ve even been properly seen, or struggling to hold together my confidence.

The last two weeks have been a complete disaster, and I have cried almost every single day, but I am going back on my diet, I’m going back on my fast, and I’ll keep walking.

This is so hard and miserable but even if nobody believes in me, I believe in myself.

This guy on Youtube said “There is always a piece of you that wants to quit just before good things happen. Don’t do that. Keep walking.”

So I’m closing this one out like this.

April, take this one.

First week of April, a mess.

Didn’t start my 100 Hard until the second week of April, unlike as planned.

Last week of April, also a mess.

No wahala.

Come hell or high water, May will be perfect.

I will make it so.

💛,
Lotanna

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