The thing about being a person with an abstract random learning style is that distractions come in the form of anything and everything. Though some may say this condition is just the state of modern humanity, reacting to the deluge of information and technology inundating us, I’m not so convinced. Yes, I recognize that my smartphone is a major distraction, and it along with social media has contributed to my overall stress levels. But my smartphone is not the reason I procrastinate, or purposely find reasons NOT to do what I need to be doing. That issue has been with me since at least middle school, which was pre-internet (yikes!)–and I don’t have A.D.D.

No, I think my propensity for distraction stems from my interest and excitement over so many cool things in the world. I am passionate about so much that I find it hard to narrow my scope of preoccupations. This problem was with me in college–should I be a history teacher? an international business woman? a diplomat? a linguist? a professor of literature? a political scientist? a classics scholar? If the topic even remotely broached the humanities, I was fascinated.

For a time, these random interests served me well. I was never bored when my parents moved me to Idaho as a teenager, though there was a plentiful lack of things to do. Nearly all my college classes were engrossing, even the science and math courses. I was able to stay relatively fit in my 20s when I decided to coach intramural tennis, even though I had never read the rules or played competitively until I began to coach. It’s how I taught myself to crochet from a book, won ribbons at county fairs in sewing and baking, and it’s how I still find gardening a wonder, even when I manage to kill the majority of my plants without knowing why.

I am an interested human!

However, that interest often leads to overwhelm brought on by FOMO. I want to do “all the things.” And in wanting to do all the things, I either shut down because of that overwhelm, or I do tons of little things with either mediocre or poor execution. What then is my point, you ask? It is this: no matter your issue, there is an app for that.

As I mentioned above, I am interesting in all the things. That interest extends to food and cooking and meal prep and kitchen gadgets. I also love dining out and fast food–I’m not picky…unfortunately. See where I’m going here? This love of doing all the things has led to some pretty unhealthy habits in my adulthood. Though the focus of this blog is ostensibly on wrangling my abstract random brain, a fair chunk of that wrangling is rooted in a desire for better health, including mental, physical, and social well-being.

So what’s the app for that?

Well, I began my serious weight loss attempts with MyFitnessPal, which I still use since I have such a long history with it, and because it’s a great tracker when I’m training for running outdoors–I haven’t really done this for 3 years, though. MyFitnessPal is not new, and I have no doubt that I’m at least the nine millionth person to review it. MyFitnessPal really does attempt to meet all the requirements of a fitness app, but its main focus for me has been the food logging, exercise tracking, and weight tracking. you can put in your own recipes and create a favorite foods list for ease and speed of use. They also have a blog that attempts to help people expand their exercise horizons and get around any mental stumbling blocks to achieving your goals–I never paid for their premium features, so I suppose there is even more to review.

The problem I have found with MyFitnessPal is that it seems to come from an assumption that the user is well educated in fitness. For example, when I first began using it, I would put in that I was walking at a “moderate” speed, which was accurate relative to me and my exercise habits, but was not accurate with regard to miles per hour and heart rate. It was a few months before I realized I was allowing myself too many daily calories as a result. I also chose to complete a 60 day juice fast while using the app (the app had nothing to do with this crazy plan, and I do not recommend it for health reasons), and though it gave me warnings that I was not ingesting enough calories, the thrill of seeing the scale change rapidly and the line on the weight loss graph decrease by 40 lbs in those 60 days was too much of a boost to my self confidence. I don’t blame the app for this at all, but my point is that my crazy forays into the world of health and fitness represent an accumulation of experience and knowledge at a level the app cannot possibly predict, which is all to say that while it’s a great app, perhaps what I needed in addition to simple tracking was more of a mental shift.

In recognition of this necessary mental shift, I tried NOOM. Again, I am several years late reviewing this app, but I feel it’s important to explain my evolution in terms of the mental aspect of long term weight loss and wrangling my penchant for randomly throwing all of my efforts down in the metaphoric dirt.

NOOM was great for getting me to face issues I had with attempting to maintain a healthy lifestyle. The journaling exercises got right to the heart of my personal goals and my personal schedule, and I easily identified that my jobs were eating up all of my time, causing me stress, and disrupting any hope of true personal fitness. However, I was unwilling to make any changes to those areas of my life because I had bills to pay and career goals I thought were important. I also struggled with defining my “why.” I think I still have problems with this, as I have yet to reach a healthy weight or lifestyle, and I just think it’s kind of obvious: I want to live a long life, and I don’t want that long life to be miserable because of bad habits. But it felt like NOOM was asking me to come up with a specific task, or trip, or experience for which I would be making changes, and I don’t really have any of that. In the end, I chose a dream of mine to hike Machu Picchu…from somewhere around the middle of the mountains, not from the bottom up. I’m not into extreme sports, just some fun with a bit of a challenge, considering the altitude. And let me tell you, hiking Machu Picchu is not so tantalizing that I’m willing to base an entire lifestyle change on it. I mean, once I’ve hiked it, then what? Why continue the habits? Which is perhaps a stupid question, because the point is to change the habits in the first place, but if it’s not Machu Picchu, then what is the motivation to lead a healthy lifestyle? And we’re back to living longer and not being miserable, but where is the immediate, tangible reward for this?

Aye, there’s the rub.

In the end, I dropped NOOM for several reasons: the end goal, its seemingly slow connection to counseling, and an inappropriate age gap. I already explained the end goal issue, so I won’t waste more time on it here, but the second factor in dropping the app was that it took what felt like a really long time for the service to place me into a counseling group, and when they did, I was placed in an age bracket with women all older than me by 5-10 years. I was irritated by both the time factor and gap in age–I admit I was impatient and have been about weight loss from the beginning. I am continuing to work on this. As for the age issue, I don’t think it would be an issue for me now, but three and half years ago, I was sensitive about just having turned forty, and NOOM placing me with 50-year-olds, who all seemed to be complaining about menopause weight, was too much for me to handle. To top it off, that particular counseling group was being led by someone whose name, “Kendall,” seemed to place her in a much younger age bracket. (This was all simply my perception and may well have been erroneous, as I was obviously struggling with my age.) All I can say about this experience is that it’s hard to take virtual health and fitness advice from a 20-something behind a screen when you’re a recently turned 40-year-old with hang ups about age and body image.

Looking back, I think the problem with taking nearly 2 weeks to place me into a cohort of women was probably based on the age demographic of app users. I think I was using a new app that had been targeted at a much younger audience, and it probably took just that long to find anyone near my age with mindsets similar to my own. As I paid for the subscription to NOOM for an entire year, I continued to receive message from “Kendall,” encouraging me to get back on the fitness and self-reflection horse for over a month, but I just couldn’t do it. I imagined well-meaning “Kendall” sitting in a tidy office back east somewhere with exactly two long stemmed, fresh tulips in a crystal vase on her desk, looking like Keri Russell, as she was in her “Felicity” days, relating to me and my life in exactly zero ways, and my ego and obvious self esteem issues got the better of me, and I deleted the app.

Fast forward a couple of years full of sporadic attempts to wrangle my health and fitness into submission, and the pandemic of 2020 hit. Reeling from all of the changes to the teaching profession that spring, I simply focused on managing my job from the not so comfortable confines of my house, and let any thought of fitness drop from my brain. By January of 2021, though, I knew I had to make a change.

Normally, I sit down at my desk at school for a combined total of about 40 minutes a day. I am walking around my classroom continually to keep momentum and engagement up. Additionally, I am an Activities Director, so I am often running (quite literally) across campus to help kids set up for and take down events. All of my events in 2020 were virtual, which meant I was glued to my home office chair for 8 hours a day, plus lesson planning and paper grading time, as well as after school activities. It was no surprise to see my scale showing a 20 lb. gain at the beginning of 2021.

Something had to give.

That was when I tried BodyFX, a great program for literally any age, as it focuses on nutrition, water intake, and movement through a series of aerobic dance moves that really work the abdomen. They have all levels of fitness represented in various styles of videos, from Latin dancing to gym rat style with JNL Fusion, to urban dance, to 6 minute total body workouts, and a new featured series focusing on yoga. I am still part of their Facebook community, and I still pay the $11.99 monthly fee for access to the entire suite of exercise videos and monthly challenges. It is inspiring to see pictures of real women losing real amounts of weight on their own time schedules. I have tried BodyFX exercises on and off sporadically for the past year and half. The longest I stuck with it was one week, and I was feeling immediate results in terms of the tightening up of muscles in my back, which I was not expecting.

The reasons I have not been more successful at building a continuous routine with BodyFX are several fold. First, I don’t ever drink enough water, and this program gives a true workout, which means I’m usually pouring sweat when I’m done. However, I have vertigo as a result of dehydration, and I often use that as an excuse not to get up and dance. Second, the arches of my feet kill me while I’m dancing, which will be solved once I lose a fair amount of weight–and I’ve tried dancing with my regular athletic shoes, barefoot, and with actual dance shoes my sister gave me for Christmas last year. When I first lost 60 lbs, about 10 years ago, I ran into trouble with plantar fasciitis, and I don’t want to go back to that pain. Third, meal prepping for 5 to 6 hours at a time on Sundays is a killer in terms of my other personal goals. I am usually so tired at the end of cooking that I don’t clean up until the next day, which takes up my time to work out, which makes me feel like a loser, which…I think you get the idea.

This feeling has made me realize that I have bigger mental issues to tackle before I dive into the deep end of fitness, which leads me to my latest iteration of fitness: the Fabulous app. Fabulous is an app that attempts to help a person become, well, fabulous by building habits over time. I actually had the Fabulous app before I had NOOM, but as usual with me, I loaded too many goals and habits onto my daily schedule, got overwhelmed, and gave up. Since July, though, I went back into the app and removed the excessive goals and have simply been working on building three routines with minimal new habits in order to see improvement on SOMETHING over time. So far, I am doing well with it. I am also learning to build patience with myself, to view myself with a kinder lens, and to recognize that change takes time. I am proud to report that I am down 10.5 lbs. since June as a result of my use of the Fabulous app and because of being back on campus, where I am not sitting at a desk alone for 8+ hours a day.

Finally, one of the factors that has allowed me to focus on the Fabulous app and build consistent routines in my abstract random world has been the gift of time. I may not have loved the NOOM app, but it did leave me with the nagging realization that I needed to get rid of one of my jobs, as well as the sneaking suspicion that my health and fitness goals will be easier reached when I deal with my mental health. Making the decision to ditch the extra junior college course I was teaching each semester has made me better at my day job, made my house a bit cleaner, helped me get in touch with old friends, and allowed for the creation of this blog, which is helping me to ultimately reach my writing goals. Oh, and last week, I actually completed three 30-minute workouts on the treadmill.

Baby steps, folks. Baby steps.