This is my last post at In The Pink. I have written 890 entries through the years about my issues with weight, exercise, and emotions. It’s been fun, but time to move on. On the horizon: longer, more polished, essays for print journals. It’s the way my spirit wants to go, so I’m saying hello to new beginnings and goodbye to this lovely space. If you’re a friend checking in, you can still see what I’m up to on A Writer’s Diary!
I am hungry right now, a growling, stomach hunger. Maybe it’s because I have not eaten a real meal since I broke my tooth. It hurts to eat and I can only slurp so much yogurt and oatmeal. Yet my scale says I gained four pounds since last Friday.
I could talk about all the reasons why this might be so, but it’s not what I want to think about today. I’d rather find a way to stop the obsessive behavior I have with food and just be at peace with my body, with what I eat or don’t eat, with how I move or stay still. ”War is over, if you want it,” John Lennon said, and my war with food is over, just that easy. Just because I want it.
My hunger today is spiritual, not physical, despite the pangs in my stomach. I’m trying to figure out how to use the tools in A New Earth to put my unhealthy health obsession to rest. Don’t get me wrong. It’s good to be healthy and eat consciously and take care of my body. It’s not so good to obsess over my appearance. In the vocabulary of the book, I’m not my body.
“Only the truth of who you are, if realized, will set you free.”
I want to be set free. I’ve spent many hours here and elsewhere suffering over my weight issues. I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t want that plunging heart and sinking sense of self-worth when I read those numbers. I want to realize finally who I really am. I am not my body. I am not my mind. I am not my ego. I am, everyone is, pure energy. I can use this energy to make my physical self feel happy or miserable.
I’m choosing happy.
I have jeans in several colors and sizes. I have boot cuts and slim tapered jeans that tuck nicely into the necessary February boots. Jeans with elastic waists for those feeling so fat days, jeans in sizes 10-16. I have all of these sizes and cuts in black, dark blue, medium blue, and lightweigh summer denim. I used to have a brown pair but wore them to shreds.
And happy day, breaking my tooth ruined my appetite, so I’ve eaten very little in the past 40 hours or so. Somewhere in there I had the idea to try on my size 12s. Just one pair. Hadn’t I slipped into 14s over the weekend? A major triumph despite the fact that the minute I ate a piece of pizza I needed to switch to sweat pants.
So I did it, and reader they fit. Zipped right up. There’s always a silver lining, and in this case it’s the size of a split molar.
Yesterday I did a couple things different with regard to food. First, I made a list of how much of what food groups I should be eating daily for my activity level. Bob’s got that in the book, but I wanted an index card I could keep in my food journal. I wanted to check how well I’m doing with that, because I had a feeling I was eating too many carbs, even though they’re good carbs.
It wasn’t the carbs. According to Bob, I get five a day, and that’s about what I had, just by eating naturally. I overdid the dairy, frankly. You only get two servings and one is spent on milk in the morning. I like cheese, too, and a serving is only one ounce! So that was the parmesan on my spaghetti last night. Problem was, I had a pita with melted cheese for a snack earlier in the day. I also went over on my fruit, the other 2 portion per day requirement. And I went under on the veggies, just slightly. Who eats five servings of veggies a day? That’s gonna take some getting used to. Need to add in V8 and get some hummus for my pitas. Then the food should be all set.
As far as stopping eating at 5% hunger, that was harder. Not because I wanted to keep eating but because I put twice as much food on my plate and the unconscious impulse was to finish it all. But I stopped at 5%, or came as close as I could, and at every darn meal I had a half of plate of food left.
My weight stayed the same this past week, which means I need to move into Phase 2 for sure. I wanted to begin Level 3 exercise, but it didn’t happen. I was able to keep to Level 2…plus 5 minutes. I only did this because I walked Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (today). I couldn’t bear to slip below Level 2, so I forced myself.
I think, after finishing the chapter on Phase 2, that it’s not so much my eating that needs strengthening, but my exercise habits. That’s fine. I can do it. I want to do it. Most of the eating things Bob wants us to incorporate in Phase 2, I already do, with a couple of exceptions. The big one for me is where I stop on my hunger level. Bob’s suggestion is to stop at 5, when you are slightly satisfied but could eat more. This is where you’ll lose weight, if you learn to stop here. At 6, satisfied, you just maintain. I must have maintained last week (barely) but I often go to 7, slightly overfull. Slightly overfull is my comfort zone with food.
So I’m going to try thinking about my personal hunger scale, stopping when I’m slightly satisfied, and upping my exercise just a bit. 4 days of walking instead of 3, plus a little bit of weights. Those are my goals for the next 7 days.
Something funny happened last week when I went to the bookstore. I got my magazines and books and was at the checkout when I noticed a new book by Eckhart Tolle behind the counter. It had the “Oprah” sticker on it. And the title of the book had the words “Your Life’s Purpose” in it. That’s all I needed to know I needed that book.
“Oh,” I said to the cashier, “I didn’t see that in the store.”
“We just got those in,” he said.
“Add to the bill,” I said, as he was still in the middle of ringing up my always massive order. He did. I took the book home, started reading it that afternoon, and was immediately sucked in. But it’s one of those books you have to think about. You have to let the ideas it presents sink in. You can’t just gobble it up like a box of candy.
So since I was thinking about her, and I was sitting on my sofa, and it was almost 4 o’clock, I flipped on Oprah. Her show subjects don’t always grab me, but she was talking about Pillars of the Earth, and I love anything to do with writers or writing, so I watched her having wine with Ken Follett while they chatted about his book and writing in general. Then she said she was going to reveal her next book and a BIG surprise that went with it. I picked up Tolle’s book. It had to be her new pick.
It was and not just that, for the first time, Oprah, along with Tolle, will be teaching a class live online to go with A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. It’s free and anybody can sign up. The class starts in March. I of course registered while the credits were still rolling!
It’s been a week and I finished the book yesterday. I have lots of questions, which is good, because we get to ask Oprah and Eckhart anything. That’s what the class is about, to more deeply explore the stuff in the book. I also got a lot out of it as far as my life’s purpose right now. Things started changing for me almost immediately. I made decisions I knew were right, based on the teachings in the book. I am happy! I am pleased!
And I learned something new. I already knew about the breath, and meditation, and how who I really am is bigger than the ego “me” that walks around upset or whatever. What I didn’t know is that I don’t have to do anything to access the larger consciousness, what Martha Beck calls “The Watcher” inside, except be present in the moment and feel the life in my body. That’s it. And it changes everything, as I’m already finding out.
Can’t wait to be a student again! Tired of being the teacher all the time;-)
I look forward to the Astrology Zone every month. I also check in for Madeline’s views at Skylight Astrology. She posts several times a week. I also have the astrological forecase at Tarot.com set on my Goggle homepage, so I get their daily updates as well. Sometimes, if I need a more mellow reading, I’ll go to the Daily Om. And I have a couple of books I consult, and this year, a daily calendar. I like to get all opinions. I am frequently helped by the heads-up type stuff, for example: “Somebody is going to get on your nerves later. Take some deep breathes and blow it off.” I just made that up, but I have a feeling it’s going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At the end of Phase One, Bob asks a series of questions designed to access progress. One of the things you do after 30 days is weigh yourself. This morning, I weighed in and found to my suprise that I’d lost 7 pounds since January 1. Yay!
Now the weigh-ins come once a week. Going into Phase Two is an option for me now, but because I lost a decent amount of weight in P1, I can stay here until the scale stops moving downward. What surprises me is that I wasn’t even focused on losing weight. I was focused on getting my exercise up. And that really did the trick.
In P2, I would move my walking up from 90 minutes a week to 150, but gradually, by adding two minutes per day, or 8 minutes a week. 25 minutes 4 times a week will be my first add one. That and 2 days of very minimal free weight training. Am I ready for the next level?
Foodwise, I think I’m already almost there. Thanks to Sara, the only food I need to give up is my occassional Vernors. Bob has a list of six foods, but since Sara hypnotized me, I don’t eat the others anyway. There’s also portion control, but I don’t need to worry about that until the scale shows I’ve stopped losing. As for adding on more exercise, it would be easier to do that than get picky on portions.
So looks like I am on to Level 3 Fitness.
It’s a little late in the day for me to be doing anything new…but what the heck. It’s also the last day of January and I wanted to reflect on my progress with Phase 1 of Bob’s plan. I successfully accomplished walking three days a week for 30 minutes. I added a yoga day in, too. Also did perfect on having the three meals and a “Bob Breakfast.” I am not one to skip meals, so that one was sorta easy.
As for the alcohol, or in my case just go ahead and call it wine, I only had a few glasses two times this month, and both times were for planned social events. If a beautiful filet migon and splitting a bottle of Pinot Noir with your husband is a social event. The other was my friend Jan’s retirement and that was a party. She taught middle school for 30 something years. What a saint. So of course I had to toast her with a little Chardonnay. I actually wanted wine a few more times, like every Tuesday after work and some Thursdays, too. Had tea instead. Decaf. Or when Al has a few beers watching golf the other day, I wanted to have a glass of wine. Had Vernos instead (ginger ale made in Detroit). And I was fine.
My jeans are slightly less snug, but it doesn’t seem by much. Tomorrow is the big weigh in.
In Happiness is an Inside Job, Sylvia Boorstein writes about the “Antidotes to Hindrances.” I liked this idea of antidotes so much I copied out the problems and their opposites onto an index card. Through meditation, or concentration, anyone can go from a hindrance to its opposite, for example from doubt to confidence, in very little time. I did it while reading the book. Just seeing problems and being able to look at their flip side has some power for me. It affirms that there’s always another side to any issue, however dire.
From that, I started thinking about the opposite of self-sabotage: self-care. I needed to get from self-sabotage to self-care. I wasn’t sure I could do it without first figuring out WHY I have a pattern of self-sabotage with health.
So I went to my bookshelf and pulled out Everything Happens For A Reason by Mira Kirshenbaum. Kirshenbaum, a Boston psychotherapist, gives the most sensible advice on figuring out why any event in a life has happened, and using that “why” as a foundation to build significant positve change.
After rereading a portion of the book that resonanted strongly for me with this issue of diet sabotage, I realized just this morning that I have been unable to incorporate lasting health into my life because I needed the extra weight and the problems it caused to force me grow stronger, to insure that I would continue to absorb the knowledge I needed for true self-care.
All the diets I’ve been on, all the weight I’ve gained and lost, has helped me build this foundation of knowledge about what is right for me. It’s been a long process because it’s been a complex journey with physical, mental, emotional and spiritual components.
Now I finally understand that vigilance against overeating IS a relaxed stance, because it helps me be automatic with self-care. As vigilance becomes a habit (Thank you Martha Beck and The Four Day Win!) it takes the work out of maintaining a proper diet. What could be more relaxing than that? All the years spent failing at diets were not in vain. Through those years, I added experience and knowledge with books and approaches until I was finally able to see clearly that what I deep-down believed (overeating was a way to relax) was really the opposite.
And that has given me the confidence I need to deep-down believe that I am finally ready to live my Best Life.