An Apple A Day

     Well my at home PT is been going pretty good.  So far she is just having me do three 1 minute sets of 4 different stretches three times a day followed up with some foam rolling.  I am trying not to let my inability to run to continue to get me down.  All I am focused on is doing everything my therapist asks me to do in hopes that I will be able to start training for the Glass City Marathon event at the end of April.  It is not what I would recommend as a proper training plan but for me it is all I got.  As far as actual running goes my therapist has only allowed me to run one to two miles at a time as long as I have no pain and though she didn't say she didn't want me running I got the impression that I should keep my running attempts to a minimum till she tells me otherwise.  My hope is by the start of February I'll be back to running regularly and can add some real mileage, but I am not holding myself to a timeline.  March and early April is when I really have to ramp up the mileage if I am to have any hope to completing the race.

     I wanted to share a small victory I had recently.  I haven't really talked much about my nutrition and I promise I will, but this was a big moment for me.  Now I am not a fruit or vegetable guy; in fact I am a self proclaimed meat-eterian, almost the complete opposite of a vegetarian.  Pretty much potatoes were the only vegetable I ate and if I was eating pizza then the tomato sauce was the closest I ever got to eating a tomato.  Yeah I know.
   
     Well maybe a year ago it was a big deal for me when I added spinach to my diet, so the other day I got the "What?" look from Mandy when I asked her to get me an apple while she was at the store.  I don't know why I wanted to try one but I did.  She ended up getting a bag of them and it took me a few days to get up the nerve to try one and when I did I only ate about a 1/4 of a 1/4 of it and that's it.  A few days later I gave it another shot and ate a whole 1/4 this time.  Both times the apple was at room temperature and I didn't really like it a whole lot.

     See I have what I believe to be some sort of a psychological block when it comes to this stuff.  Whether its the taste, consistency or the crunch it makes when eating it I start to get a little bit of an anxiety attack and feel like I want to throw up.  For example, years ago I was at a Skyline Chili in Dayton, Ohio and got a couple of chili cheese dogs.  I asked for no onions, but when they arrived on my table, hidden under the cheese was fresh diced onions.  I took a bite and heard the crunch of the onion and immediately knew what it was.  I had to spit it out and almost threw up from a severe anxiety attack.  I know a lot of this is all in my head and I don't know why I let it get to me, but it is just the way I am built.  If you wanna hear something funny, after I graduated college I was looking for a job in my field and to pay the bills I was working in a produce department at a local grocery store.  Me!  A self proclaimed meat-etarian working in a produce department.
     
     Anyway, back to the apple.  A few days later I took one to work and left it in the fridge all day and forgot to try it at lunch so I grabbed it for the drive home.  This time it was nice and cold and no cutting this one, I just bit right in.  It was so much better cold!  I got through about half of it and decided to call this try quits, but I liked it and I am gonna try it again that way. 

     I know this may sound stupid to many of you, I mean shit its just an apple, but this was a huge deal for me.  When I started this weight loss journey I made changes to my diet that I could live with and was healthier than what I was eating.  Now I feel like I am pretty much at that maintenance period of my journey and I want to explore some other foods that I have never tried or tried and didn't like previously.  Hey you never know what I might end up liking.