THE NEUTRAL POSITION

I apologize to my .3 readers for the lack of updates. Hopefully you'll understand why. This week has unequivocally been stupid as hell, and has made it hard for me to follow The Gainitude program as strictly I had in the past month.

I look at this week as a good learning experience.

After the clinic visit on Monday, I was fully prepared to keep going full steam ahead with the diet and exercise programs as usual. But, as sometimes happens, life gets in the way.

The biggest "issue" this week was stomach related. Not sure what caused it, but Wednesday and Thursday were pretty rough on the old gut. I will not get into gory details, but I was making more bathroom pitstops than I normally do. It's hard for a CF'er to pin down exactly what could be causing GI distress because there's so many factors (bad food, medication). I took steps to try to isolate the issue, and things seem to be returning back to normal.

This episode did cause my to drop a little bit of weigh. Not a lot though. This morning I weighed in at 117. My high before was 118.4, but I did feel this was a bit inflated. In a way, the GI issue acted as a reset to any excess bloat that may have been padding my numbers. My weight didn't drop dramatically. 117 is still good. If anything, I'm happy for the reset. I've been sprinting for a month straight, and my body involuntarily got a little breather. That's fine with me. At least for a couple of days.

The thing I'm most upset about is the lack of exercise this week. The last time I got a workout in was Saturday. Every day I make plans to hit the gym, and something comes up. The first couple missed days can be blamed on some sore muscles in my feet from previous workouts. But the other days were just a myriad of various unforeseen roadblocks: Whether it's helping a friend with a project, staying super late at work, or nursing the previously mentioned stomach. They are legit excuses, but I still feel terrible falling off the bandwagon so easily this week. Luckily, my lungs don't feel like they've suffered too many ill-effects, but I need to get back to the program as soon as possible.

If anything, this week showed me how easy it is to go into neutral (and potentially reverse) on this program. The last thing I want, or need, is to revert back to my old habits. I've decided this week was a lost one in terms of progression. Now I just have to make sure next week is back to the grind.

THE PLUGITUDE

For plenty of years, I tended to avoid reading CF related websites because I found them a veritable House of Horrors when it came to medical information and stories. Yes, CF can be an ugly disease, and in no way do I think people should whitewash their experiences dealing with it, but reading quite a bit of the information out there was frequently a total bummer.

I'm really happy the site CysticLife exists, because it provides a proper social outlet for those with CF, but with a positive outlook and a ton of great people ready to answer any question or motivate you to feel better, work out more, stick to your treatments, and all the stuff that improves the life of a CF'er. Cystic Life is growing and they are currently in a membership drive to get more people onboard. This is probably the most sincere plug I can give anything ever. If you have CF, care for someone with CF, know someone with CF, or just want to join an amazing community of people, please join.

JOIN CYSTICLIFE TODAY. 

THE MOTIVATION

Setting out on a long term health goal requres one particular thing more than anything else: MOTIVATION.

If you're not motivated, you're going to fail. Simple as that. And with dealing with CF, motivation is hard to come by. There's so many downer stories and tales of horror that it's just seems like a losing battle to even try to make CF your proverbial bitch.

I've found three sites that have bucked this trend and that I'm using to motivate myself.

CF FATBOY Jesse is a guy after my own heart. Living with the low weights of CF, he decided to do something about it and has gained an incredible amount of weight over the past year. His blog is not only a journal of his quest to get healthier, but a very strong CF advocacy blog with a ton of great information.

Run Sickboy Run Ronnie Sharpe and his wife Mandi may have one of the most positive outlooks on CF I've ever seen. Ronnie has CF but that doesn't hold him down in the least. He's out there exercising constantly, pushing himself to get better. Seriously inspirational stuff.

Cystic Life  Never in a million years did I think I'd sign up for a social networking site revolving around CF. As I stated above, I didn't want to be inundated with horror stories from hospitals. But Cystic Life is different. It's about positivity and <keyword> MOTIVATION. It's about getting answers and encouraging others. Awesome site.