I’ve entered this weird state of limbo. I’m having a hard time defining my self-image because I don’t have my usual reference points. I’ve been through the South Beach program, I’m cycling more than ever, clothes are hanging off of me, yet my scale doesn’t yield. I seem to be hovering at the same weight even though by every indication, I appear to be losing weight. Couple that with other changes in my life and it’s become more and more difficult for me to “size myself up”.

3M Corporation, the company that makes Post-It Notes, is building the World’s Largest Pink Ribbon, which will be on display in Times Square, NYC for breast cancer awareness month in October. As nice of a gesture as that is, they are also donating $1 to the City of Hope Cancer Center for every person that enters their information on their web site.

Normally, I would stop right there and chaulk this gesture up as yet another method of gathering up user data. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case!

Last Thursday I was sitting at a keyboard typing away and when I went to adjust in my chair, I noticed my back was a little stiff and sore. Still focusing my my typing, I dismissed my pain as a side effect of all the yard work I did the Saturday before. As I continued typing, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been sore the day before, so why was I sore now? Last weekend I built two raised flower beds set into a hill and as you might imagine, there was a LOT of digging. On Monday I was a little stiff, but that was it. By Tuesday morning my stiffness had subsided and I was my old self. So when I stopped typing and began to think long and hard about what I had done to cause my back to feel so sore. I knew I hadn’t been sore the day before, so I retraced my steps through the day and lo and behold, I found the cause of my pain and discomfort – yoga.

I was real close to skipping working out yesterday. I wasn’t as productive as I would have liked to have been and the temptation was to keep working and just blow off working out. It was a strong temptation, but in the end I opted to go workout.

Since I started doing the South Beach Diet, I’ve begun going getting back into the gym. This may be the first time I’ve written about it here in the workout log, but I’ve been fairly consistent. The first week I went to the gym three times, but then it fell off to two times a week, then one and there were a few weeks where I didn’t go at all. At this stage of the diet, I would say that I average two times a week now.

I just finished reading Mike Rohde’s entry on his weblog about The Vital Luxury of Rest and Solitude and it dawned on me as I read it that I too have been focusing on slowing down and relaxing more. I didn’t have a succinct knowledge of what I was doing, it was more of a compulsion really, but I too was going after the same goal. I was looking to make better use of my time, but I was looking to make a transition to a calmer way of doing it.