Day 47: Misery Loves Company

I wouldn't exactly say that what I'm experiencing now is misery, really -- maybe ennui, maybe angst, maybe a little some other fancy foreign word. I'm not miserable -- that would be more active somehow. I'm not struggling against the PCP, I'm just feeling subsumed by it at the moment.

But the really powerful and amazing thing is to hear that my PCP compatriots are going through the same thing right now! I don't derive joy from someone else's suffering (that would be schadenfreude, by the way) but it does make me feel better to know that I'm not a uniquely weak individual who can't cope with the challenges of this project. To hear that my feelings are normal and predictable and that other people, regardless of where they started, are having similar feelings makes me feel... right on track.

I got some extra rest today, which really helped. I got up super-early so I could work out before my husband left for work -- and I was planning to be on solo kid duty all day long, so I wanted to be able to just relax and eat my lunch while she napped. I ended up sleeping for about 90 minutes while she slept, even though there are so many things I wanted to get done around the house. Then my husband got through with work early, came home and said, "I'm taking her for the afternoon, go do whatever you want." Oh I love that man. They went off to the zoo while I got a manicure and pedicure, a nice treat for my jump-rope-roughed-up feet. I've been sitting on the couch reading a magazine for the last 30 minutes and just breathing deeply. If I get one more good night's sleep tonight I think I'll be in great shape tomorrow.

I can question why I'm feeling this physical fatigue all I want, but it doesn't really matter. I'm not sick, I'm just tired. So when I'm tired, I need to rest. I haven't been making an effort to do that until today.

The mental fatigue is easier for me to understand. I'm making major changes in the way I live my daily life, rewiring my brain in a lot of ways, so it's going to be tiring. I've gone from exercising sporadically and half-assed-ly (is that a word?) to exercising EVERY DAY, deliberately and with attention to what I'm doing. I'm carefully considering everything I eat, and I'm trying to break old habits that evidently still have a foothold within.

My worries about the post-PCP life come from friends asking me "What happens after 90 days?" and I don't really have a great answer yet. I know that any "diet" can work for a certain length of time -- you can lose a lot of weight doing Jenny Craig or Slim Fast or whatever, but if you don't learn how to make your own decisions about eating, you'll go right back to where you were. Patrick's email today about explaining why we do certain things on the PCP made me feel a lot better -- I have more confidence that by the end of this, I'll have the knowledge to keep doing things right, not just because Patrick tells me to eat so many carbs or whatever.

So, in closing: slogging through, hope you are too, onward and upward, time for some egg whites. (Which, I've just discovered, are realllllly improved with a dollop of Grey Poupon!)