I have spent the last 10 years gaining weight, dieting, bingeing, restricting, rebelling, and yelling about my weight. I have read many books, gone to meetings, met with “councilors”, listened to CDs, worked out with DVDs, perused magazine articles and surfed the net for weight loss sites until there wasn’t a shred of wax left on my board. I have learned a lot through all of this and I don’t regret anything I learned from any of it. In fact, I am glad I had all those experiences because now I have a great wealth of knowledge concerning healthy living. I have all this knowledge stored in my head and yet I keep looking for more because it is so much easier to think, talk, and write about getting healthy than it is to actually do it. Alicia over at The Grumpy Chair Dieter got me started thinking – I don’t need anymore information, I don’t need another *plan*, I don’t need one more single thing to lead me down the road of health. I don’t know EVERYTHING there is to know about the subject, but I think I know enough to get moving. What I need is to jump in feet first and just do the thing that I know to do – get healthy. I know how to start running now; I know what foods to eat, and what foods to eat in moderation. I know how much sleep I need and I know when I need to get off my duff and move. I know why I binge and I know to be kind to myself when I do go crazy on the cookies. I’ve been in this body long enough to know what it needs and what it doesn’t. I’ve finally filtered through all the crap so that I can see when some tidbit of info has merit and when it is just a bunch of hooey. I am learning to trust myself to do the right thing, learning to see that I’m not a bumbling buffoon – I am actually a smart and capable woman who is starting to get her groove on, and finds that she likes it! I think this call to action was actually answered a few days ago, but I am just now realizing that yes, this is the way to go for me. I used to think that all my past attempts were just wasted time, but I realize that no experience is wasted if we can learn from it, so I’m taking what I have learned and I’m putting wheels on it and I’m cruising! I trust myself to bring out the best in myself, and whatever that looks like, I’m sure it will be okay.
For Today January 10, 2008
Today I am in a good place. Today, I am happy with things in the body/food category of my life. Running feels good and although I am repeating week 3 of c25k, I still feel good about it. For the last couple of days, I have been eating less at dinner time. Usually dinner time is when I really load up and have a gorge fest. And after the gorge-fest, I am tired and cranky and tired and don’t want to do anything. So although I didn’t really mean to, I have made small dinners the last couple of nights. And I noticed that I was able to get lots done (cleaning, laundry, getting kids to bed, etc) earlier than usual, and I wasn’t passing out from exhaustion at 9:45. I slept better and today I feel better. I just feel better!! I haven’t looked at my body in disgust the last couple of days, I’ve just looked at it and thought “wow I love this new sweater”, and that’s it ( I did notice the sweater made my rack look big, but in a good way ,tee-hee). I don’t feel chained to my bad body thoughts. I don’t feel like I have to do something! in regard to my weight. Right now I’m just doing what I do and it feels pretty good to be in my skin today. So just for today, I feel like I have gotten it right. Now, tomorrow may be a different story, but for right now today, I’m enjoying myself and it feels good. These days are few and far between so I’m going to milk it for all it’s worth!!
Hobby, Passion, Obsession October 26, 2007
This has been a hellish week. Everyone in my family has been sick with a stomach virus and I am tired. After being extremely nauseated for a couple of days and eating very little, I saw that I lost 4 pounds, and I thought, “wow, if I just continue to not eat, then I could lose more weight” – sick, isn’t it? Of course I knew that it was just water weight and would come right back when my appetite came back, but still… so I ate as little as possible for the next two days and guess what? I didn’t lose any more weight. Two things are going here: 1) I am disturbed that I wanted to even take one step down that road of not eating to lose weight, because eating is one of the things that brings me great pleasure, and 2) my body knew better than I what it needed, and when I tried to make it do something different, it rebelled against my stupidity. My appetite came back with a vengeance last night and I ate way too much, but now I feel like the pendulum is swinging a little more slowly today. I am positive that I have gained back those 4 pounds, but I didn’t weigh myself today, I just didn’t want to.
This is the thought that has been banging around in my brain lately – “I am so sick of thinking about my weight and everything related to it.” I think about my weight CONSTANTLY. Every time I see myself in the mirror, every time I want to go shopping, every time I see someone I know, I think about how I need to lose weight. Obsessing about my weight is my hobby, it’s my passion. It’s the thing that consumes my thoughts for about 80% of the day. Why? Why does this have to be the thing that guides me? Why can’t I be as concerned with the real tragedies in the world, like Darfur, or AIDS, or any one of a million serious problems in the world? Why do I wrap myself up in my own petty concerns? You want to know the irony to this? The only time I’m not thinking about my weight: when I’m eating. WTF? When I’m eating, I’m oblivious to everything going on around me. So what do I do about my weight obsession? Nothing. I don’t exercise, I don’t meditate, I don’t do anything but read more diet books. I intend to do something, yet I can’t seem to ever do anything. WHY IS MY BRAIN FUNCTIONING LIKE THIS??? Can anyone tell me if this is normal thinking or am I really kinda crazy like I think I am? I feel like I have covered this before in this blog, but it keeps coming up for me. Any insight would be really appreciated because I don’t know what the hell is going on.
Ulterior Motives October 10, 2007
I ran across this while doing a web search for “body acceptance”. I’m not sure how I feel about this article. On the one hand, it promotes body acceptance and explains that loving our bodies unconditionally is beneficial to a happier existence. But all of that is wrapped up with in the confines of losing weight. It is written by Jorge Cruise, who has several diet and exercise books on the market, so of course I expect someone like him to write about weight loss. But my problem with this article is why does it have to even mention weight loss? Why can’t it just be about accepting ourselves, as we are, today? The article gives lots of good reasons and tips on doing things to help you take care of your body, but what really bugs me is that it also represents the exact thing I am fighting myself with lately: I don’t want to lose weight under the guise of body acceptance. I don’t want losing weight to be the reason for wanting to love my body. I want to love my body and IF I happen to lose a few pounds along the way, fine, great, but if I don’t, am I suddenly going to turn against myself and start the hating all over again? I know how well that has worked in the past (that was sarcasm there) and I’m sorry, but I don’t want to go there again. I guess what I am really trying to say is that if you are loving body in the hopes that it will lead to lost inches, that isn’t really loving your body, because you WANT it to change, because if you really loved and accepted your body for all the wonderful things it can do for you, you wouldn’t care one way or the other if you lost or gained weight, right? It’s like someone telling you “don’t think of a tree”, then all you can think about it the tree! If someone says, you must first love your body before you can lose weight, all I am going to think about is losing weight, as in, “I haven’t lost any weight, therefore I must not love myself enough”. Sounds a lot like, “if I just had more willpower I wouldn’t eat a chocolate chip cookie,” doesn’t it? It starts leading me down a scary crazy road named Points Place. Am I reading too much into it? I don’t know, but I am going to be very careful in how I use IE and body acceptance from now on. Hmm, I guess I do know how I feel about this article after all.
Flip Flop October 8, 2007
I started this blog because in reading other blogs, I wanted to leave comments that were a page long, so I decided I need someplace to think out loud – and voila, Sassy Pear was born. My intent was to make it a place where I could talk about intuitive eating and body acceptance, because I believe these are pathways to a happier existence for me. I believe that diets do not work, that exercise for weight loss is torturous, and that a woman’s beauty is reflective of what is going on inside of her. I really do believe all this – however, one day I suddenly panicked and decided I needed “A Plan” because I could not tolerate this fat any longer. I don’t know what set if off, but to be quite honest, I was scared and didn’t really believe that I was strong enough to live a life outside of the plan. So I found a plan, and was excited and felt safe again within the guidelines of a plan (notice how I carefully avoid the word “diet”. Sniff Sniff, what’s that smell? Oh yeah, that’s DENIAL). But then the old frustrations started to sneak up again – I don’t know how many calories this is, how am I going to track it? I know this cookie is going to send me over my calorie limit. I didn’t do any cardio today, or yesterday… sigh… I’m such a loser. Well, today the blogging forces are once again at work in my life, and I’m taking the hint. Thank God for these women and their phenomenal resolve to get the truth out there and run with it. I soak in the words of these messages and hope that I can actually live them. I want to be steely in my stance and not be so cowardly and run at the first sign of struggle. I am still not convinced that I am strong enough to do this, but when I think about it, I successfully tackle difficult tasks every day, so maybe there is something inside me that I can pull out to conquer this as well. So I am issuing a challenge to myself: for the rest of October, I am going to immerse myself in all the body acceptance blogs and resources I can find. I am going to find one thing that gets me in touch with the strength of my body (I’m thinking yoga, maybe?) and I am going to go shopping and buy nice clothes that fit me NOW, because I like shopping – it makes me happy. And I am really going to make the decision to work hard at IE and not backtrack into Dietland. I will learn to love this pear shape even if it kills me!
