Man, I’ve been so busy! I’ve been writing for this and that, doing a ton of work on various of my web sites and blogs. I’ve done so much web work I’m starting to dream in FTP (File Transfer Protocol). I have kind of a geeky, funny analogy I use to explain as aspect of law of attraction using FTP as an example that helps people envision the contact between “source” (which is all that is) and the “host” (which is us). Maybe some day you’ll hear it in one of my workshops.
I now run a total of 4 blogs. These are my blogs:
- I have this blog, at which you’re reading now. http://cynthiaclinton.com/blog
- http://wholyone.com/blog - which is the offical weblog of my Wholy One Wellness Center.
- http://femmepreneur.info which is me reviving a “enlightened women in business” site I had years ago, but this time in blog form.
- http://bestofthesouthbay.info is my blog on California’s South Bay Area where I feature local businesses, articles about local goings on, and general local things.
All will serve their purpose, which is mostly marketing for my different businesses, charities, and interests. It’s a lot of writing, but I do a lot of writing anyway.
Another big preoccupation is my health and fitness. I’ve been struggling with an extra 25 pounds because I’ve been under stress and when that happens, my thyroid gets unstable. When this happens, I put on weight (which is normally very difficult for me to do) and then I have a difficult time getting it off. There are factors that concern me:
- I’m 45 and want the rest of my life (every last minute) to be as enjoyable as possible, which means I proactively do whatever it takes now to avoid health problems later.
- Both my father and my mother have been diagnosed with vascular issues. My father has had every kind of bypass surgery there is. Cancer is on both sides of the family as well. I need to stay lean and active, cleanse often, eat as cleanly as possible, and control my stress level.
- I want to be a good example for my eventual clients at the wellness center I’m trying to build. I’m a fitness professional and nobody believes a fat fitness trainer. Really I’m not fat enough that very many people believe I’m actually fat, but my physical condition has sucked the last few years. It can’t ever suck again.
So those are my main concerns. In my struggle for fitness with a wonky thyroid (sometimes working, sometimes not), I’ve tried just about everything. I’ve dieted, I’ve tried different kinds of exercise. I’ve tried cardio. I’ve tried what I saw with my own eyes worked for other people in my house. It didn’t work for me. I grew more and more depressed. But then, I had a mini epiphany… the only fitness style my body has ever readily responded to was weight lifting.
I was a bodybuilder for over 10 years, from about my mid-twenties to my mid-thirties. I originally got into it for personal reasons surrounding physical abuse against my person. I was your typical 99-pound weakling story. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t put on any weight without being pregnant. Even after I had a baby, my body quickly boomeranged back to 99 pounds. I was tiny and skinny and people took advantage of my person. Finally, I’d been reading bodybuilding magazines for quite awhile, but didn’t really think any of it could possibly apply to me, when I had the notion that I should take up bodybuilding.
When I walked into the gym the first time and told the owner what I wanted to do, he ignored me and said, “You’re here to tone, right?” So I told him again and this time I got specific, naming muscles I wanted to develop more. Once he realized I knew all the names of the muscles, etc., then he started taking me more seriously. He still thought it was funny, but he took me seriously and he helped me enormously. I got very immersed in the bodybuilding lifestyle: the workouts, the way of eating, etc. and my body did change. I got so muscular that my body weight was 127 pounds for the first time in my life (I weighed only 119 when I gave birth to my son).
The ‘89 earthquake happened and my gym fell - or rather parts of another building fell on my gym for the same result. There weren’t any other hardcore gyms around and I didn’t feel like finding a new “home” somewhere else. I had to work out at home now, so I bought the weights and got busy. I got bored and decided I’d do some martial arts to satisfy my Emma Peel jones. She was my hero growing up. So I bounced for a few years from this dojo to that dojo. I resented the belt system, feeling that as a woman my rank should be private. So as soon as they told me it was time to test for my belt, I was out of there.
In this process, I fell in love with the calisthenics that began each martial arts class. My body lost some of it’s bulk, but my muscles looked very cut and very awesome. I felt like a well oiled machine. However, I stopped doing martial arts because the cost became prohibitive. After awhile, my muscles shrunk down and my weight hovered around 103. I was still lifting weights at home, but just a maintenance program to stay over 100 pounds.
Then I met my second husband and weight lifting just didn’t seem to fit in my life anymore, so I stopped doing it. Apparently, he stopped running as well. So I’ve spent the last 12 years or so in varying states of fitness, but none of them as fit as I was before I met my husband and none of them had any lasting duration (and neither did the marriage).
My latest mini-epiphany was that if weight lifting helped me before when I had the opposite problem I have right now, odds are my body would respond in the same way now that I needed physical change once again. So a few weeks ago, I started lifting weights again, but gradually. First I was just training arms, then training arms and abs, and now I’m gearing up to add legs and back. The exciting thing was that I started seeing body changes even when I was just training my arms. The changes really started increase when I added in abs.
I notice I carry myself differently. I even bend over differently. I don’t really look a whole lot different to myself when I stand in front of the mirror, but when I look down, my arms are more shapely, my stomach is flatter, I look narrower in my chair.
People used to think I really loved working out. It’s not that. It’s that I easily get addicted to what weight lifting does for me. I love the strength - how it feels, how it looks, how it changes me - and I want to keep doing the activity which does that for me. The gifts from weight lifting are innumerable.
I’m happy to be back in the bodybuilding lifestyle, in those old familiar feelings - and I know too that this is where I need to be for the rest of my life. Maintaining fitness is much easier and less time consuming than rebuilding fitness. I’m glad I’ve had this experience because I think it will make me a better trainer than if I’d just been fit all my life.
Other healthy changes are that a few months ago I stopped using shampoo. About once a week I use regular liquid castille soap on my hair and scalp and the rest of the week (about every other day) I just ”wash” with a good conditioner. The results have been amazing. Not only does my hair look better than it ever has (thicker, fuller, more manageable - no more fly-away hair), but my hair is growing like crazy. Like CRAZY. It’s growing so fast that I have very visible roots in just a couple of weeks. It’s been hard to keep up.
Who knew? I was doing some research on the internet about something else and happened to stumble on information about hair and how some of the problems people associate with normal hair were actually the by-products of the harsh chemicals in shampoo. This is apparently by design so that we are always looking for the magic bullet in shampoos and conditioners that seems to make our hair look like we want it to.
My next hair adventure will be forsaking dyes (and their nasty PPD chemicals) and moving over to the henna camp. Henna does wonderful things for the hair like increasing thickness and sealing the hair shaft. I figure I’ll go back to the Auburn color I’ve worn most of my adult life, which just happens to be the more natural shade of henna, so I won’t have to deal with too many henna additives. I just have to research how long I need to wait since my last coloring to henna my hair.
I just ordered stuff for a bentonite clay and psyllium bowel cleanse, so I’ll be doing that as soon as it gets here - probably within the week. They say “death begins in the colon”, so I’m going to be proactive and do do a bowel cleanse 2x a year from here on out. This will be my first. I’ve done some minor detoxing that involved the bowel, but never have I done a full on bowel cleanse. This’ll be interesting. I’ve heard some stories!
