Paleo took a little vacation

On Wednesday, the snow day, I freaking white knuckled it through the day trying to stick to my Paleo plan. I haven't felt that way in a long time and I didn't like it one bit. I knew I was going away for a girls' night the next day to the casino with my friend so I had a pretty good idea that the next day would be a planned cheat meal but even that annoyed me. Why should I have to plan a cheat? The last year+ have been about me learning balance and self-acceptance. Again, I don't talk about diet or weight loss in this blog too much because it started out as a chronicle of my NYC training. But I will say that I've lost a ton of weight and I learned how to stop punishing myself for being human. Those miserable feelings of being on the brink of losing self-control on Wednesday brought me back to a dark place in my life and I decided that I don't need that again.

I did go on my little getaway and I did have a great time. Even now my "cheats" are well within control and what used to be what my daily diet was. So I don't even feel bad about what I ate.

Today I had a good run. Having 2 days off from working out had a good effect and made going for my run today a treat. I only planned on 4 miles because I'm planning on 8 tomorrow for my long run. I got into a nice groove with the fartlek training and 4 miles came and went and by the time I finished my last fartlek interval I was at 4.6 miles so I just slowed down and went for 5. My overall pace was 9:54/mile, which is good considering that includes 4 minutes of walking warmup and cooldown. I spend a lot of my intervals in the 8-something range which makes my recovery intervals of 9-something seem so much easier. I'm really hoping to get to the point where I can do a 1/2 marathon distance at a sub-10 pace. That's an ambitious goal for me but I'll keep working at it.

Monday I will get back to Paleo. There are good principles in it that I think would benefit me but I'm not going to make myself miserable trying to stick with it religiously. I feel like I've learned the hard way what works for my body and mind to get me to a healthy place and if this is too stressful then I'm not going to risk derailing all my progress.