Unveiling the Plan

Well, you’re probably not aware of it but I don’t really enjoy following through.  I’m visionary so I like to come up with brilliant ideas, have other people do the footwork and then come up with my next brilliant idea, but I promised a follow-up post to “Time to Come Clean”  and I have committed (in my mind) to going public with my plan of how I finally, finally made peace with food and my body.

I knew that I had to come up with something “to do” as opposed to trying to get myself to stop the behaviors (dieting and “fat talk”) that have become my way of life.  I’ve learned a few things about changing patterns in the last couple of months so I was ready for something different.

Because I am first and foremost a drama queen I had to come up with a title for this plan.  I decided to employ the techniques of the brilliant Martha Beck who is one of my mentors.  Her technique is to start with the end result and work backwards.  Easy.  What do I want out of all of this?  To get off this roller coaster of dieting and being dissatisfied with my body which invariably leads to bingeing and weight gain.  And what do I think that will get me?  Peace of mind and FREEDOM.  That’s what I want, peace of mind, a relaxed relationship with food and I want to feel great about my body.  I want to feel physically and emotionally great. I want to feel awesome on every level.

Well, there it is.  The Year of Feeling Awesome.

So everything I’m doing will be in service to creating or maintaining feeling awesome–physically and emotionally.  Totally turns the concept of dieting on its head.  When you’ve lived your life depriving yourself of things the concept of giving yourself what you want and is such a gift.

This from the woman who for the last four years has eaten tuna on an arugula salad with balsamic vinaigrette every day for lunch.  Not a bad lunch but when it’s your lunch every single day you begin to dread it.  My genius way around it:  work out before lunch, don’t eat until 2 or 3pm (breakfast was at 9am) and be so hungry you’ll eat your own hand.  That’s how I got it down every day.  Not very loving if you ask me.

Here are some of the conditions that contribute to me feeling awesome physically:
Eating till satiated but not too full
Eating high protein, high vegetable meals
Eating foods I really like
No sugar*
No eating things I don’t like just to save calories
No deprivation, denial, or counting calories or measuring food.
Checking in with my body during each meal
Lots of fruit

I know that the “cleaner” the food is that I eat (unrefined, unprocessed) the better I feel.

I  stopped eating sugar on Feb. 21st in an effort to clean up a bit and ended up never going back.  My relationship with sugar is just too complicated and it seemed too much trouble to negotiate so I’m doing without it until I see the need to do otherwise or until Lindt chocolate calls begging me to come back because their company stock has dipped so low since I’ve stopped eating the stuff.

That’s the physical, now for the emotional.  About 2 years ago, I got tired of always being hungry and running my life around trying to be as thin as possible.  For me, this was a full-time job and frankly I got to a point in my life where I just couldn’t muster up the effort–besides I became interested in other things–things outside of looking perfect and diet and exercise so I started to let myself eat things that I would never have eaten before.  I stopped keeping myself hungry.  I stopped planning my day around my exercise schedule.  I started living.  And with the lack of vigilance came weight gain.  And here is the perfect arena for me to cultivate some body love by learning to feel awesome in what I consider to be a very imperfect body.  Oh the things we allow to occupy our time.

Can you relate to this?  A lot of people can’t.  A lot of people read this and think, who has time to care about every morsel you put into your mouth and to obsessively mentally tune in to the size of your thighs all day long?  But  the truth is:  WE ALL OBSESS OVER SOMETHING.  The fight to be thin is just what I obsess over.  Oh, me and probably about 50 million other women.

Here’s a quote from the Thin Is the New Happy, which was the starting point of my realizations:
“Among all oppressed peoples throughout history, we women hold the dubious distinction of being the only group to persecute ourselves.  We are out own enemies.  We chose the battle that we could never win.  Call  it the Thousand Years War.  If every woman on earth were to suddenly release her fat obsession into the wind, the world would change profoundly for the better.  The world around us, the world within.”

We do it.  But mostly we don’t talk about it.  We don’t want to seem petty.  Is it a way to not deal with the real stuff?  Oh, yes it most definitely is.  That’s its raison d’etre.  To keep me busy so that I don’t have to face what’s really wrong.  That was its function in the past and now that I have addressed those things, it’s time to get rid of the behaviors that have hung around and become reflexive.

And now back to the plan…

So not just eating to feel awesome, but watching what I put into my mind.  What I eat contributes to how I feel but what I think and tell myself has way, way more of an effect on my sense of well being.

In her memoir Thin is the New Happy, Valerie Frankel counts the times in one day that she gives herself a negative message about her body or checks herself out in the mirror (with a reflexive negative comment).  She counts 263 times.  263 times in one day she sent herself negative messages about her body.  I’m pretty sure my number is double that because what I realized is that for me it was stream of consciousness.  The negative messages were like background noise that played in my head all day and all night–keeping me removed from whatever was  happening in the moment.  Keeping me agitated and unhappy, both states that I could medicate with food. Now we’re getting somewhere.

So the overeating or acting out with food came down to it being a response to the “fat talk”.  Stopping the fat talk would change the eating behavior and allow me to feel good instead of flawed.

At first I would move to another thought when I started to “feel fat” as those of us with body issues call it.  I would just think: Next! and think about my work, or my husband or my friends.  I would derail the thought.

I came to realize that the fat talk was really destroying my work out.  I noticed that it has been much more difficult to get in a decent cardio work out because I was dragging myself through it.  Strange because for most of my life I really did enjoy exercise.  So what changed?  I was tuned into the “fat channel” while I’m at the gym.  Telling myself, “you’re never going to lose this weight; you look like a cow doesn’t really do much for my stamina so I found other things to focus on while I’m at the gym. I think about all the things that are great in my life.  I think about how much power I have to make myself feel miserable or great and that it’s my choice depending upon the thoughts I hold. I decide to be for myself instead of against myself.  I decide to give myself the benefit of the doubt; maybe I am fabulous the way I am.  Maybe there is nothing to fix, maybe I can just be.  And the next thing I know, the 30 minutes have gone by and I can get off the stairmaster.  It’s time to do some stretching.  Ask me now how do I feel… Awesome.
Tune in next week for the next installment.