Struggle #19: Thanksgiving Break

The best girls to survive PT
school with!

Sorry it has been awhile, this week has been insane for me. I officially finished my last final of physical therapy school yesterday but that was after a crazy week of studying. Going home for about a week for Thanksgiving created a challenge for me trying to make time to study unfortunately, so when I got back to St. Louis, I had my nose in the books! It was soooo hard to find the motivation to study but thankfully I was able to make it through this last week successfully! My friend's parents were in town last night to move her out of her place so they were kind enough to take us out to dinner to celebrate this exciting occasion with us! It feels so weird to say that I am done and when everyone asks me how I feel I can't say much except that it hasn't really set in yet!

Anyways back to the struggle, Thanksgiving break. I was pretty confident that I was going to be able to stay strong throughout the week and made good food choices all week. However, reality kind of hit me in the head at my first family Thanksgiving meal. All of this delicious food was sitting in front of me and I'll be honest I indulged... Not excessively but I definitely had some mashed potatoes and noodles. I may have also had a few desserts because they are just too tempting. The rest of the day I ate well and Friday was going really well until I didn't eat dinner and was hanging out with friends and presented with pizza. Yeah I definitely caved on that as well. I wasn't very happy with myself but more annoying was my body being mad at me as well. Not eating a lot of gluten, cheese, and other things my body decided to hate me when I ate some pizza. Oh well lesson learned. Only consume pizza if it Chicago deep dish pizza and worth your body hating you.

I definitely slipped up a few more times over the week but I won't bore you with all of the details. As much as I tried to be good, it is so hard when there is really only "bad" food in front of you for most of the week. My mom was adorable and bought ingredients to make a salad out of spinach, cranberries, pecans, and a raspberry vinaigrette for me (which was really good)! But besides that the meals in front of me were never really tailored for me. Which I am totally fine with, I can find something to eat almost anywhere but it is also really hard to eat a minimal amount of food/selection when all of these bad things are in front of you.

Cauliflower bake meal prep

I know I made a lot of excuses and that I feel bad making them because I should know better. Like I said in my previous post, a few bad things here and there doesn't matter but in about 4 days they all added up to a lot of bad things... You can't turn around and look back at it, so all I can really do is learn from it and hope that when I go home for Christmas I am able to control myself a lot better! I do know that when I got back to St. Louis, I immediately went to the grocery store, bought delicious healthy food, and meal prepped for the entire week. I made salads for lunches, had lots of food for snacks, and prepared a few dinners that I could pop into the over for cooking later in the week. Boy oh boy, did this make me feel a lot better!

Some chicken and salads for the
rest of the week!

One awesome thing about going home was that I got to train with CrossFit North Peoria's competitor group! I love going elsewhere and really just getting to do my thing. It allows me to show my strengths but also really focus on my weaknesses. I can't get away with things because I don't want to leave a bad impression there! One day we had to do 3 sets of 10 deadlifts at 65%, which is normally something I would freak out about, but I just had to do them there and I did well for me! I was happy. While there I also did 30 muscle-ups for time for the first time ever! Interesting thing about it though was that I had to do 10 wall balls every time I broke on the muscle-ups. It was a definite game changer but it was a fun and different workout to do!

Overall the week at home taught me that I am still not perfect with the way I eat. I could punish myself for these things but I have learned that it doesn't help me eat better, it just causes me to crave things more and makes it easier for me to indulge. I really just need to learn when it is alright for me to deviate from my food plan and when I need to take a step back. I feel like I keep getting better with this but there is still a lot of room for improvement. While I have found a lot of delicious options to eat, it is also really hard to always be perfect with temptations everywhere. But I can definitely feel the side effects in my body and training if I eat poorly so this helps keep me motivated to stay the course. Slowly but surely I am getting better, it will just take a little more time. Or a lot, but who's counting?