Musing: The Weight of the Holidays

I’m ticking away the days until I a) hit my first runniversary on Jan. 1; b) can start running again; and c) can stop annoying myself and everyone around me about inevitable no-running-during-holiday-eating weight gain.

While I don’t even own a scale, I’ve been getting paranoid and insistent that my clothes don’t fit.

Granted, guilt might be making me swell or retain water, but I’m promising myself everything will smooth out by the time I hit the track in January. I’ve been keeping up with virtually every other type of exercise imagined. Running has just become the key to feeling good.

All this complaining after admitting I downed way too many cupcakes? That’s right. And so the holidays begin…

The best way to spend the holidays, however, is not thinking about how much the extra 16 cupcakes will weigh me down when I kick up training in a couple weeks. I realized I wasn’t allowing myself to enjoy my holidays this evening, so I turned it around.

How’s this for a Saturday evening: wrapping presents while sipping lemongrass-green tea, snacking on cranberry biscotti and listening to the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas with Ninja Warrior on TV. We’re celebrating Christmas with Neil’s family on Sunday, my mom on Monday and my dad on Tuesday, so it was a good time to relax. I stopped obsessing over what I have or have not eaten, run, gained, broken or lost and just chilled. Not bad.

For the first time in my life I’m happy with where I am (in my fitness, career, school, family, life… knock on wood), and I think this recent guilt thing is just my way of making up for not having anything to feel inadequate about. Sure, life’s not perfect (and I’m definitely not), but I’m cool with things the way they are. The state of things is all too transient, so I need to appreciate the way things are right now.

And I can’t wait to be happy about these things while I’m running. Soon. Hee hee. Happy holidays!