Note: Yes this title is a take on one of the best short stories of all time, Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried." 

The day after I broke the school record for wins by a softball pitcher, I asked my teammate and good friend Aimee, who did the school tv news in the morning, if she would please not make a big deal about my achievement the next morning on the announcements.

I was proud, don’t get me wrong, but I absolutely melted in the face of attention.

She promised. 

The next morning, when her piece of the news was complete, I was relieved that she had mentioned the highlights of the game without making a big deal about the record. 

Then the camera panned to Andrew, a theatre major who was made for tv. Aimee hadn’t mentioned the record, but she gave Andrew full license to go on and on and on and on about it. He had a giant sign, maybe some streamers, and was shouting at the top of his lungs, Howard Cosell style. 

I was mortified.

Actual photo from my 1995 yearbook, with apologies to all of my classmates who maybe didn't want their 1990's hairstyles on the interwebz. 

(Aimee is now a sports psychologist and director of player and team development for the New Jersey Devils, so presumably, she was doing her early work in exposure therapy). 

As my classmates trained their attention on me, I opened up my book bag and stuck my head inside.

Yes, I really did this. 

My reaction to attention, positive or negative, is visceral - my face turns crimson, I tug at my red hot ears; I can't make eye contact.

People get awkward just watching my awkwardness. 

But hey, the good news with being 41 years old is that I'm past that stuff, right?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah!

No.

Two months ago, my coworker Judy brought in her microphone headset for me to try out during a team training class. My voice doesn’t carry well and as our classes have gotten bigger, even my best outside voice loses the battle to the blaring music and hum of conversations. 

I knew I needed to at least try a microphone, but took one look at the headset in Judy's hands and was a teenager all over again, frantically looking for a book bag in which I could stick my head. 

Judy turned the headset on and talked into the microphone.

“See?” she said, talking into it. “No big deal.”

Right, I thought. Right. Totally. I’m an adult. No big deal. Nope, this is fine, totally fine. I’m basically on stage everyday when I coach. Yup, totally got this.

She put the headset on me and I walked over to the class of 20 people waiting for me.

It's like I'd been dropped into a Wonder Years' episode. 

I looked around for a moment before shaking my head and ripping off the microphone. 

“Sorry,” I said to everyone as I tried to pull my ear off of my head. “You’ll just have to listen closer.”

I’m 41-years old and comfortable in my skin.

But in that moment, I was 17. And the experience was completely unnerving. 

In retrospect, I'm grateful I was so completely triggered. 

Because I work in a field that is ripe for that kind of reaction. 

Middle school and high school are tough years for many of us. We're figuring ourselves out, finding what we like, who our friends are, what we're good at. And many of the people, women and men alike, who walk through our doors have had some sort of traumatic experience in a gym or fitness setting. 

I actually don't know how to swim. In high school when it was time to swim for gym class I would stay in the shallow end of the pool and tell Mrs. Pompa that a person could drown in as little as two inches of water and that it was abuse to make me wear a bathing suit.

But really I was humiliated that all of my friends were swimming laps and I was hanging out in the shallow end. 

We are hard wired to remember those feelings.

We don't forget what it felt like to be picked last for kickball, to sit on the bench during soccer or finish last in a relay race. We don't forget what it felt like to wear those horrific polyester gym uniform shorts that were only three inches long while Mrs. Pompa made us square dance (promenade!). 

Sometimes it's easy to forget what people carry when they come through our doors. Not just what they carry now, but what they carry from 30 years ago. The white hot scars that never go away. 

It's easy to look around, as coaches and fellow clients, and make assumptions about the people we see. We all carry our experiences, both old and new, and those experiences inform who we are and what we've become. 

I guess that's why my go-to saying and sign off is to be strong and be kind. 

Be kind. Be gentle. You never know what someone else carries.

I promise to do the same. 

Did you know I have a newsletter? It's true. I do. I send out weekly emails with tips and tricks in fitness and nutrition. Did you also know that I'm releasing my first fitness product in April? And that I'll be giving away a free copy to someone on my newsletter list? No, you didn't know that? Well, now you do. Sign up here.  No, I won't share you email. That's just not cool. 

Thanksgiving is four days away. But I want to tell you today, right now, that if you have a piece of pumpkin pie, you didn’t blow it. 

If you lick the batter of the pumpkin pie while you’re making the pumpkin pie, you didn’t blow it. 

If you have mashed potatoes and gravy and stuffing and several helpings of each, you didn’t blow it.

In PA, we call these gobs. But in Maine they are whoopie pies. Whatever you call them, if you eat one, it doesn't mean you blew it. 

I often have clients who don't even want to meet to talk about nutrition this time of year because "I've been bad. I've been awful."

No. You haven't been bad. And you haven't been awful. 

You've been human. Human, okay? 

What you may have done though, is decided that after one or two cheat meals and a few missed days at the gym, you've completely screwed up all of your goals. 

No. No you haven't. 

The only way you blow up your nutrition or exercise routine is when you give it away. When I coached softball a few years back, our team struggled for wins and had plenty of games where the score was out of hand. And the only thing I asked of my players in those games was to give nothing away. 

You know what the hardest thing to do is in moments like those? 

Give a shit. (Sorry mom, I said shit. Again.)

It is so tough to drag the bat up to the plate and swing like you care because when you’re losing 18-0 in the third inning, even a home run is just a drop in the bucket. So what does your at-bat and your effort even mean in those situations?

Everything. 

You caring means everything. You caring enough to try matters. In that situation, your effort matters to your teammates, to your coach, and to you. That at-bat matters because you matter. Because we don't play sports and love sports for championships and play-off wins. We play and love sports for the moments. 

And your fitness and nutrition journey is no different.

What matters is you giving up. When you decide that because you ate something that was not on your plan, you should chuck the entire plan. When you judge yourself so hard because you “slipped up.” 

When you decide that you can’t stick to anything, that nothing will ever work, that you might as well not even try because you ate something that wasn’t on your nutrition plan. Or because you missed one workout. 

Researchers actually named this the what the hell effect. You got up and had a cookie for breakfast and decided that the day was lost. So you might as well do fast food for lunch and pizza for dinner and start again tomorrow.

 So today I challenge you. 

That eating a donut for breakfast when your in-laws brought donuts doesn’t mean your day is blown. 

That missing the gym for the past three weeks in November doesn't mean you have to wait until December. Or January. Or even Monday. 

And eating a piece of pie - even eating a whole pie - does not make you a bad person. 

Let me say that again. 

You are not a bad person if you have a meal that doesn't meet the nutrition goals you outlined with your coach. Or in your head. 

Please hear me when I tell you that you are not a bad person.  

This is my favorite quote:

"It is never too late to become what you might have been." - George Elliot

It's not too late. You're not a bad person. You can do this. 

But what you can't do is throw in the towel. (In Pittsburgh we wave our towels, we don't throw them.) Don't give up on you. A donut for breakfast does not mean you start again tomorrow. It means that you had a donut for breakfast.

Believe in yourself. And believe that one or two or five decisions doesn't define you. Ok? 

Do you want help not throwing in the towel? Do you need help believing in yourself? Do you want some guidance and a judgement-free zone to make a plan? Email me. Message me. Comment below. I'd love to hear from you. Do you have a topic you'd like to see addressed? Let me know that too. Be strong. Be kind. To others, but especially to yourself.  

The running joke in my family is that my little brother’s First Holy Communion and high school graduation pictures were on the same roll of film.

And that she didn’t develop those pictures until he was in college.

Yes, this is the actual camera my mom used when we were kids. There was this thing called a flash bulb that didn't come out of your phone, but actually went on top.

He was 21 before he knew what he looked like as a baby..

Take a photo of any kid today and her first impulse is to reach for the camera to see the picture on the back.  

We live in an instant gratification world. Put a status on Facebook and get instant feedback. News alerts show up on our watches, phones, and iPads. Hear a song you like and instantly own it. 

Remember sitting by the radio with your blank tape waiting for your favorite song to come on the radio?

And the DJ always talked through the intro. Always. It’s like he knew I was waiting for Richard Marx to come on.

We don’t have to wait for anything. Heck, I don't even have to wait in line at Starbucks anymore. I order my drink on my app and pick it up at the store.

So it should come as no shock that we've run out of patience with the journey to fat loss. Intellectually we know that results don’t come over night. One woman said it best that she didn’t put the weight on over night, so it wasn’t going to come off over night. 

But we rarely have to practice patience anymore. (I'm speaking as someone who has no children. I imagine those of you with kids practice patience on an hourly basis...)

Unfortunately, the intellectual knowledge that the process takes time does little to soothe us. And especially with health and fitness, it becomes very easy to question whether you're taking the right approach.

You cut down on carbs for a week, hop on the scale, and the number hasn't moved. (Which is one of many reasons that getting on the scale frequently isn't helpful). So you throw in the towel.

Your friend lost 20 pounds doing P90X so you try it for 10 days and haven't seen any results. It must be time to switch to Insanity. As coaches, many of us are also guilty of program hopping. We try one program for a month until we see a new one that looks cool and we jump on to that one. 

We hop around from one approach to the next looking for faster results. Not better. Faster. 

Despite the advent of all things digital - despite never having to wait for another REO Speedwagon song ever again in your life - there are some things that we can’t rush.

Regardless of your choice of exercise program, the process of body recomposition and fat loss takes time.  

So how do you learn patience?

Start here:

I kid. But it is a great song. And I'm sure I taped it off the radio at some point.

1. Delay instant gratification

This might be the most challenging and I would argue even more challenging for those of us who grew up without cell phones and digital music and books. We don't have to wait any more so why bother?

Try this: post a Facebook status and refrain from checking every five minutes to see how many likes you got. I'm going to do that after I post this blog to Facebook. Because I'm more guilty of checking for those happy little red notifications than any of you.

There is actually a famous study called the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment that focused on delayed gratification and is very much worth the read. A group of children were given a marshmallow and told that if they waited 15 minutes to eat the marshmallow, they would get two marshmallows. Some waited, and some didn't. 

It's also helpful to make a plan and commit to sticking with it. If you are on a new nutrition program, give yourself four months. Stay the course. 

2. Take five slow deep breaths.

In meditation, everything returns to the breath. Focusing on your breathing can help bring you back into the now, into the moment, and doing so can shift your attention from what you want to where you are right now.

Slow down.

Are you Tigger? There's nothing wrong with Tigger, but you might want to tap into your inner Eyore for a few hours. Slow down. Breathe. A great way to slow down is the name five blue things in your surroundings. And then five red things. And then five white things.

3. Make peace with discomfort

When I first started running, I'd get a stitch in my side less than five minutes into a run. In the beginning, all I could think about was the stitch in my side, which seemed to grow worse with every passing step. Once I learned to embrace the discomfort I could get past the stitch, but it took a lot of focus and willingness to embrace the suck. 

With discomfort comes growth. 

Change takes time. Be patient with yourself and the process.