It’s Not Really A Transformation Challenge Fail (or Trying To Be Less Competitive With Myself)

I wrote previously about how I had signed up for the Transformation Challenge at Orangetheory but how I was debating about continuing it. I was at a pretty low point with my weight loss journey where I had been taking on lots of water weight and my body was puffing up. I was thinking about going to get some blood work done to see if it was my thyroid, but many of the symptoms I experienced (feeling cold, more hair loss than normal, the water weight gain) finally started to go away so I’ve postponed going to the doctor.

But because I was dealing with those medical issues, I pretty much gave up on the transformation challenge. I was feeling a bit depressed about how high the number on the scale was even though I knew that it wasn’t all “real” weight. But when you are a part of a transformation challenge that is based on weight loss, there’s no way to determine what weight I might have lost when the scale is actually higher than where I started.

I’m so competitive with myself and I thought it would be difficult to give up on this challenge. But the timing worked out well for me because the last part of the challenge was when I already started working out at the Culver City studio. And that studio wasn’t doing the challenge (new studios don’t do challenges right away) so I wasn’t facing it all the time and that helped keep it out of my mind. In fact, when the final weigh-ins happened for this challenge, I wasn’t at the Brentwood studio any of those days. I could have gone in just to weigh in, but I didn’t worry about it. And the staff there understood my reason and nobody there made me feel bad about it.

Of course, even though others didn’t make me feel bad about it, I still did. I know that I didn’t do anything wrong necessarily, but I still blame myself a little bit. And I would have loved to have won or placed in the challenge because I could always use that boost of confidence. But this time just wasn’t my time and I am working on understanding that. My stubbornness and competitiveness can be good things, but they can also cause me to be upset when there is no reason for me to feel that way.

So while I am feeling a bit down about not completing (or kicking butt in) a challenge, I am trying to think about what various therapists have said to me and focus on the positives. I knew that I wasn’t in the best place mentally or physically and made the smart decision to not continue the challenge. I think that if I did continue the stress may have made a lot of the symptoms I was experiencing worse. I also didn’t use the setback as an excuse to not work as hard. In fact, I think I was working harder to prove to myself that I wasn’t giving up in general but just giving up on this temporary challenge.

Being kind and gentle to myself isn’t something that comes naturally to me. It’s a skill that I’ve been working on for so long and it may be a struggle the rest of my life. Whenever something doesn’t go my way or the way I hoped, I automatically assume it is my fault or I was not worthy of something. It’s rarely the case that it is and I want to try to work on not having the negative reaction as my default. I’ve had enough good stuff happen to me that I should believe that I deserve good and I don’t deserve the bad, but as I’ve said before I think some of the things I heard as a child are just stuck in my mind and will always be demons I need to fight.

But for now, I’m not mad at myself for not completing the challenge. And for me, not being mad is a pretty big victory. And I am choosing to focus on that victory as the big win I had for this transformation challenge.

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