Tomboy Tools

So here I am sporting the COOLEST fashion for women--a toolbelt! I love this stuff. If any of you are like me, it is the woman of the house who uses the tools in the garage to fix stuff around the house, hang pictures, and paint. Well, Tomboy Tools makes all of the stuff you need to fit your smaller female hands and shoulders. This toolbelt also just looks cool.

I have small hands, even for a woman, and my husband has big hands, even for a guy. I have always manned up and used my husband's gargantuan drill with the big huge battery hanging off the bottom to hang all of my household decorations (because sometimes, even though he means well, he just doesn't do it right) and I like to paint because color is always better than white.

I had a party, sort of like the tupperware thing but we made a hobo golf game that I got to keep and my kids play all of the time. Jen Guzel and Emma Taylor came out and showed me and my lady friends, who also do most of the stuff around their houses, how to use several of the tools and we built the game right there on the spot. If you want to find them for an awesome tool party and make a hobo golf game or a recycling sorter for your garage, email Jen at www.tomboytools.info/utahjen or Emma Taylor at www.tomboytools.info/emmataylor. They love to do this!

I also have lost four more pounds off of my badonkadonk! Down to 171 and holding steady for now. I have really taken to the elliptical in my livng room and that seems to be a good way for me to get a workout every day no matter how crazy. My husband has also lost fifteen pounds working out and watching what he eats. Yeah for us!!! Slow and steady--that's the way to go!

Accessorizing

I have a new piece of living room furniture. It's called an elliptical training machine, otherwise known as a 'badonkadonk torture device.' No, really I like the elliptical, not necessarily as a piece of living room furniture, but if Ihave to choose a workout machine, I will always choose the elliptical. Ellipticals are boring, bikes are boringer, and treadmills are boringest, so I went with the elliptical.

We moved it into the house last Wednesday and so far I've worked out on it twice. Really I prefer karate or a nice long walk, but after trying to count on those for the past couple of months, I decided to get real. I teach karate, which means I don't usually work out, and as for walks--have you seen the wind here? It turns walking into a competitive sport.

I've decided to commit to actually working out, no excuses, at least three days each week. That includes strength training and cardio. Now I get to watch The Tudors while I do it (with the volume up to 40 because the machine squeaks). I get to sweat, and I really do hit that endorphine high about fifteen minutes into it. We'll do a real check-in with the badonkadonk and the scale mid-June--with pics and everything!

Positive Sentiment Override

Self-affirmations are hard for some people. I will admit that my ability to do it has been something I have probably taken for granted most of my life. Thanks to a comment on my previous blog, I realize I might have made it sound as if it should be easy for everybody. I wasn't thinking that, I was just trying to give you a place to start if you thought it might work for you.

Another aspect of this is that I tend to have a positive collection of thoughts about others and their physical make up. When I look at another person, it is similar to when I look at myself; I usually think of four or five positives about their appearance to maybe a negative, and the negative tends to be the last on my list.

For example, when I'm with Michelle, I think about how much I like her eyes and that she has nice lips. This is not a compliment in comparison to myself--I don't have to think that I don't have nice eyes in order to think that she has nice eyes, I just think that she has nice eyes. Same with the lips. Jenn has great hair and nice lips (no, I am not into kissing girls, these are just examples from people I see often). I think my sister-in-law Andrea has great hair, eyes, style, and movement. My cousin Ragan is pretty all over. I think these things when I see them.

Maybe it would be easier to be positive about the appearance of others, but you have to be careful that their positives do not result in thinking negatively about yourself in comparison. It's just things about them you find pleasant to look at, not things that you think are better about them than you.

Now, I can say that I have a positive sentiment override when it comes to thinking of someone's appearance, but I'm no saint. I go apenuts about people's habits. I don't even want to go there because I can be mentally downright cruel about a pet peeve. Some things I easily let go when I realize I have no control over it, but I really get in a fit over things that I think I should control and try to control. Ouch.

So, your butt and your thighs are safe with me, but you better be sure to put the toilet seat down!

Body Image

I'm up late printing and working on my computer for the magazine deadline, and I was scrolling through some of the links of the day on fitness and health. One of the little articles I read talked about learning to love yourself in the mirror and phrase things positively when looking at your parts.

I worked with teenagers (still teach them karate) and I went on many trips. Five or six girls would end up piled on one of the queen size hotel beds in their pajamas talking about wearing this or eating that and snippets of what they thought of their bodies would drop all throughout the conversation. Always curious about how the female mind works, even mine, I prompted an open discussion about body image--specifically what each of them experience when they look in the mirror.

What I discovered was that on average, when one of these girls looked in the mirror, she gave herself four or five negative criticisms to a single self-compliment. What! Maybe I'm positively warped from the attitude my parents had toward their bodies, but when I look in the mirror, even now, I give myself four or five compliments to a single negative. Sometimes I leave out the negative, but there are quite a few days right now when I'm not really happy with my hair.

I've never had too much of a problem with my weight. Even now I'm comfortable with what I lost the first year after my baby was born. I would like to be more focused on working out, but I would like to be more focused on a lot of things. I'm losing the weight steadily by maintaining the habits I had before I got pregnant for the last time and they are paying off. My day would be miserable if I always started it out by telling myself how much I suck. Yikes.

I suggest for anybody out there to get started on a more uplifting influence to tape five affirmations to their mirror and read them OUT LOUD every day at least once, and definitely before your mind has a chance to get too far down the list of negatives it usually recites. Try it. It's actually kind of fun. Well, mine are mostly in my head, but my husband does write notes to me on our bathroom mirror that either tell me I'm cool or that he wants to go see a particular movie. I talk to myself in the mirror as if my reflection is another person (don't worry--I've never answered myself back) and do my affirmations that way. I also vent that way, sometimes, too. It's hard to be negative for too long when I see how twisted my face gets when I'm mad.

(I also used to talk to myself in the mirror when I had to write an essay or paper for school, but that's something else entirely.)

Pay it Forward

I've been thinking today about the legacy my parents gave me about body image and relationships with food. I think I got pretty lucky.

Children develop their ideas about food from their parents' relationship with food. Emotional eaters, for example, learned that food would somehow make things better, or something like that. When I got hurt as a kid, my mom would give me a glass of water. She told me, now that I'm grown and she can confess all of her parenting 'wisdom' (and sins), that she gave us water because it's impossible to drink and cry at the same time. So I guess I look at water as the substance that is meant to cure ills. If you have a bad day, drink water.

My husband got a different message. When he was hurt or had a bad day, his stepdad gave him.....OREOS. So guess what he craves when he's having a really bad day? That's right, sweets. (Oreos are now saved for a crisis, so I know there's something big going on when they come home in the grocery bags.) But he'll go for things such as cookies, pudding, M&Ms, etc. when he's stressed getting his school done.

My grandma started the water-when-you're-hurt thing because her mother used to give her cake, and she caught on as an overweight adult that she looked to cake to fix her problems. She wanted to change that for her children. Smart woman. I didn't give her nearly enough credit when she was alive

My parents also passed on a fitness ethic. To live, it's essential to eat, sleep, and work out. Also, women are better when they have curves than when they are skinny and flat-chested like a boy. Well, they passed on that women are women and it's not the weight that makes the person. The whole time I was pregnant and blowing up like a balloon, my family just told me it wasn't a big deal because I'd for sure lose the weight because I'm an active person and they'd seen me do it before. It's how they support me--that and giving me bowflexes and a job teaching karate.

I think of this often with my own kids. What kind of relationship with food am I teaching them to have? What kind of workout ethic am I passing on? What kind of relationship with my body am I modeling for them?