With just twenty months under her belt, my daughter buckled down and started her potty training regimen. I actually had nothing to do with it. I'd pretty much thrown in the towel after the harrowing ordeal of trying to coach her twin brothers in synchronized peeing a few years earlier and had resigned myself to letting her future husband handle it. Nevertheless, there she was, ripping off her Huggies and rushing to the bathroom where she lifted the seat and stood in front of the toilet like her aim-challenged mentors.You can imagine where that went. However, still, determined to be a Big Girl, she tried another approach, and by the time she was two, she was a regular potty pro.

Then something happened. Perhaps it was just too much, what with all the inconvenient interruptions and running, trying to stay dry in the wet world of 2-year-olds, I don’t know, and I can’t afford the therapy to find out. But suddenly, all of her training efforts went down the toilet. I could deal with the regression, but I could not deal with changing sheets in the wee hours of the morning. Since this kid couldn’t make up her mind, I put her indecisive tush back in Depends for toddlers. This irritated her to no end, most memorably, during a standoff in the Walbaum’s parking lot where she bellowed, “This freakin’ freakin’ diaper is killin’ me!", then yanked the bloated mess out from under her dainty pinafore dress and tossed it onto the asphalt. Unfortunately, her public rebellion did not induce her use of the toilet, so we kept using the freakin freakin’ diapers.

And then about three months later, my daughter approached me and declared, “Tonight I am going to wear my Big Girl Pants to bed!”

Hooray is not what I was thinking. What I was thinking was where could I be besides home at 2am when my daughter needs her sheets changed?  But of course, I just smiled and said “Great!” because that’s what mommies who don’t want to be taken away by social services do. Then I hauled out a big plastic tarp from our last paint job.

The next morning, to my surprise, my daughter’s bed was dry. Her little Pink Power Ranger undies were dry too. I looked at her and said, “That’s so amazing, girlie! What changed that you are all trained up now?”

She looked me in the eyes and said, “I changed my mind”.

And from that day forward, my daughter has been one of the most focused, powerful and accomplished people I know. She’s actually a living, breathing Super Girl, and it all started the day she changed her mind and put on her Big Girl Pants.

From the mouths of babes, my friends…you get that this is not just about my daughter and potty training, right? This is us. This is what it takes to be all trained up. 

We simply have to change our minds.

Most of us have been down the training road before and it hasn’t always gone in the right direction. We try a few approaches and they don’t quite work, or we feel like we don’t really know what we’re supposed to do, or it's all just too difficult and inconvenient to maintain…The people around us smile and say "Great!" when we announce we’ve started another diet, when we make our New Year’s Resolutions, when we begin new training regimens. They want us to succeed. We would be nicer to them if we weren’t so miserable with ourselves. But they have their suspicions about where it’s going to go, and they wonder where else they can be when we start shrieking, “Nothing fits and these freakin’ freakin’ Spanx are killing me!”

At some point, we just get too uncomfortable with our freakin’ freakin’ selves. We want to blame someone or something for what we perceive are our failures--it’s the kids’ snacks that kill me, my husband eats whatever he wants, my friends don’t exercise, my body just doesn’t respond to…We distance ourselves from our circumstances with complaints. Upon closer inspection, however, have you noticed that the one common denominator in all of these circumstances is, um, us? Wherever my complaints are, there I am! It’s you and me, standing there in a mess we made ourselves. The only way to clean it up is to change our minds about what we are willing to accept and who we declare ourselves to be.

When it comes to our health and fitness, it is the moment we give up the idea that our circumstances dictate our success; that we haven't got enough _______ or aren’t _______enough. Fill in what you want there. 

Then change your mind.

I have seen incredible transformations as a trainer. I have watched women who have been training and trying to lose weight and get in shape for years, suddenly create extraordinary results. Diet and exercise, time and money, can support you once you are in motion. But they are never the impetus for the initial action, and there will never be enough to sustain your envisioned future until you choose to change your mind about who you are, right now, in this moment.

It is always and only a declaration to empower yourself that creates results. 

You are Super Girl, powerful and responsible for your life, so toss your freakin’ freakin’ complaints, put on your Big Girl Pants, and get going!

I worked out hard all last week. I tried my very best to eat "clean". So when I got up Saturday morning, I went straight to the bathroom to weigh in and see if there was any measurable result. 

Yes! Down a pound! It ain’t much, but hey, down is down. I waltzed through the rest of my morning feeling Dancing-with-the-Stars svelte. I stood up straighter. I put on my flattering (read: extra-strength Lycra) leggings and a slim fitting top. Maybe I strutted a little. And then I pulled off a super killer workout. I was pretty sure I'd sealed the deal on my new slender, one pound lighter, weight.

Cocky as all get out, Sunday morning, I returned to the mirror and lifted my shirt to make sure nothing bad had happened in the night.  I thought maybe I looked…dare I say it…thinner? But how could it be? If sleeping does this, well, I am going back to bed…But first, let me just hop up on that scale...

Let me be honest, I jumped off that sucker before it could finish the reading. (The last scale that betrayed me ended up in the RETURNS pile at Bed, Bath & Beyond...) I saw where things were heading and it was most definitely UP. A pound up. It was lost and now it’s found. No amazing grace here. Overcome with disdain, I glanced back up at the mirror. 

Oh. My. God. Seriously, I looked huge. And old. And lumpy. And...

Now mind you, only 3 minutes had passed since I'd awoken from my slimming slumber and performed the Big Reveal. The difference in my weight from Saturday to Sunday was one pound. Not 20. One pound can be explained by water retention, muscle growth, constipation…Lord, you could blow your nose and lose a pound! One single measly pound should not transform me from Slenderella into King Kong. You would certainly not have noticed it. 

But I have Fat Eyes.

They cannot be trusted. I can look at myself in the same mirror on the same day within the same hour and see vastly different bodies. Fortunately, I have learned not to give much credence to my unsightly visions. Which is not to say that I am not troubled by weight gain or bloating. I am not nearly that enlightened. But I do get that no matter what weight I am, whether my stomach is protruding, or my torso is twisted, or my knees appear to be mini kangaroo pouches, it doesn't mean anything about me personally.  

Being a pound up, or twenty pounds up, or stuck at the same weight, etc. does not mean that we are failures. It's just the amount of pounds we weigh. I am finding that I am only free to transform my level of fitness when I drop the negative conversations I have about myself. Making myself wrong for being exactly where I am leaves me feeling defeated and powerless. But, as I accept that at any given moment, it is what it is, and isn't what it isn't, I can create   what comes next. So, instead of consoling myself with a cookie, or skipping the next workout because "what's the use?", I hit the reset button. Right here, from scratch, I am training to be my fittest self ever. That's my commitment  Some days, I reset every hour, on the hour! 

I am not sure that my Fat Eyes can be corrected. But recognizing that sometimes what I see is just a distorted view projected by my own negative conversations has helped me to focus on the fitness goals I have set for myself. 

Do you suffer from Fat Eyes? Join me on www.fitnessbyloren.com and create a clearer vision of your fit future!

As I begin my 50th year in the business of being me (a tough business, let me tell you), I have this nagging question:

How did I get like this? 

Now, the “this” about me from your perspective might be something like, why is she so driven (read: nuts) when it comes to working out? You may even have a theory about it like maybe she was a competitive athlete when she was younger. Nope. Or maybe she’s just a can-do kind of gal. Nuh-uh. Or possibly, her mother dropped her on her head. Will look into that... But for me, the “this” is a not a question about what moves me; it’s about what stops me. 

You see, although there is nothing exactly wrong, there is also nothing is exactly right. I've been feeling stuck and resigned to my stuckness, loping and moping around like Eeyore’s aggravated Aunt Eelore… Of late, I have taken to reflecting on my past for an explanation. To the best of my recollection, here’s what happened: 

In 1966, when I was 3 ½, my sister was born, and when she came home to live with us, she had a dried up prune attached where her belly button ought to have been and I felt sort of bad for her on account of that is just a disgusting way to be born. A few days later, the thing just dropped off like a walnut, and I took pity on my little leper sister, Lesley Lynn, who was clearly going to have a lot of problems. 

But I digress…(it’s what I do). Shortly after my sister was born, my mother rented a big, noisy machine. It was a kind of blender for humans, and its purpose was to shake the damage inflicted by my sister off of my mother’s hips and thighs. Apparently, the prevailing theory on weight loss at the time was that if you had some loose parts, all you needed to do was wiggle them around a bit and they’d fall off—like a loose tooth. Each morning, my mother would mount the machine’s rubberized platform and secure a wide nylon belt around her hips. Then, with the flip of a switch, she transformed into a load of human laundry, getting the fat beat out of her in the agitate cycle. The violent motion, like an electronic hula doll gone berserk, was supposed to whip away any unwanted curves. Whether by sanding clear down to her fatty deposits or by shaking her bowels into emission, I cannot say for sure. But the image rattled me to the core and I sure was glad when I discovered a more stable alternative. 

It was still dark when I climbed out of bed and padded across the floor to my dresser. Pulling open a drawer, I extracted a floral “baby-doll” top with matching bloomers, otherwise known as my Exercise Pajamas. Of course, the question that begs asking is exactly what sort of freaky four-year-old needs an exercise ensemble at the crack of dawn (or ever, for that matter)? Well, in an effort to avoid my mother’s fate with The Agitator, this freaky four-year-old had an exercise regimen. Unlike my fellow kinder who kick-started their days with Captain Crunch, Shari Lewis and Lambchop, I began my mornings with Special K, a kitchen chair and a superhero named Jack LaLanne. There in my living room, I stood waiting for the little man in the belted Lycra jumpsuit and ballet slippers to appear. Together we would take a big inhale, blow it out through our noses, and grasp our chair backs to perform all manner of leg lifts, arm circles, and Jumping Jacks. 

The guy invented his own move!

Perhaps noting that I was a mover and a shaker with an affinity for leg lifts, my mother soon enrolled me in ballet lessons. Each Saturday morning, I stood before the mirror and practiced my plies, noticing that when the other girls stood up, there was still space between their thighs. Mine, however, were all but hermetically sealed together. Plies were routinely followed by a segment of Personal Humiliation otherwise known as “floor work”, in which I was to leap by my lonesome from one corner of the room to the other. Oh, the awful sound I made every time I landed! Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk; like a cumbersome bison amidst graceful gazelles. One day, one of the gazelles pointed out that I had Thunder Thighs. And right about then, I landed my last leap. 

In some ways, I've been grounded ever since, convinced that I’m not good enough, that I'll never shake what’s wrong with me, and that someone is bound to point this out. 

I want to leap... BUT I just know I'll ka-thunk. 

So...it appears I wrote a rather bleak story about myself when I was four, and I’ve been sticking to it for 46 years. 
My bad.

End. Of. Story. 

With a half century under my belt, I am putting on my big girl pants and LEAPING all over the place. Frankly, it's about time I moved my big BUT out of the way. 

Do you have an obstacle that stops you from reaching your health and fitness goals or playing full out in your life? If so, I invite you to join me as I take on the following exercise this week: 

    I will do something I have been stuck saying I can’t do, every day


       Email me and we can kick our BUTS together! 

       fitnessbyloren@gmail.com