I'm just your average, everyday, divorced 38 year old girl -- overweight, tragically unhip,
and trying to make a life for myself. I live with two furry beasts, Dave and Abby, whose
feline mission in life is to choke me with their fur. Nothing special.
Thursday afternoon. Wow, my session last night with Gloria was so intense! I won't go into details except to say that my homework was to choose something to focus on, make a commitment to it, and then use that commitment to form the structural base to build everything else from.
Basically, I just broke down at the beginning of our session. I told her that I was tired of everything being so hard and just wanted to stop. Stop thinking. Stop wondering. Stop exploring. Stop everything. It's not just the weight loss and fitness thing, it's everything. Work. TCB. Alcott. (OK, I would never want to stop him, but I want to stop having to try to fit him in with the 5,000 other things I need to be doing.) Friends. Family. Getting out of my chair to carry the Subway bag to the trash in the kitchen makes me want to cry. No, it's not physically painful, but I just don't have the energy.
I've shifted over from constantly fleeing from the things I don't want to deal with and have been trying, instead, to fight through them. There is only so much fight in me before I collapse from the effort of fighting a 5,000 front war. And it's unnecessary. I don't need to fight, I just need to accept and move on. Sometimes I need to express my needs and carve some space out for me by saying no. When the fighting I'm doing is basically against myself, there's nothing good in that.
Anyway, I've chosen my "Othersize Fitness" aqua aerobics class at the Y for my commitment. Gloria witnessed my commitment to attend Tuesday and Thursday nights for the next year. (This cannot be a weinie commitment and a year is the minimum.) If I cannot attend one of those days, I will go to the Friday night TotalBodyWorkout AquaFit class for 85 minutes instead, no negotiations. This will mean missing Alcott's football games on those weeks, and that will have to be OK.
The commitment then provides structure, as it becomes ingrained in my head, and I can then get down to the business of examining my reactions and getting in touch with my body. The chaos and dissonance are keeping me from hearing what my body is trying to tell me. It knows why I eat when I don't need to and I can hear it if I can only clear away the other noise.
And then there's the part of me that wants to make this "easy" by restricting and punishing. If only I'm tough enough with myself, the weight will come off and I'll be "OK". This process I'm going through is so hard and I'm tired of hard. I'm right on the edge of being frustrated enough just to kick off a really wicked strict diet and exercise routine. I want to publish an elaborate plan and try to stick to it. I want to report the minutae of how I'm doing every day so that I can analyze and regroup. And while I'm doing that, I won't have to think about why I always regain or what thing that's locked away inside me is so awful that it makes me feel I'm not important enough to fight for.
Go and say hello to Metamorpheus at The Last Diet and Beyond. Please, please, pretty please go over and tell him that you love reading his posts and will wither and die if he disappears again. Oh, and while you're there, peruse his archives...good stuff!
Wednesday afternoon. I keep thinking that I ought to post something and certainly there are things going on all the time, but it just doesn't seem that interesting, so I don't. Then I received an email from someone who'd seen a post on someone else's blog (and so on and so on) about how unfair it was that I'd won the BoB for Best Weight Loss/Fitness Blog because I never talk about weight loss or fitness and just keep waffling on with excuses about why I'm not losing weight or getting fit.
I was tempted to lash out with a scathing post about how anyone who thinks that if you count your calories eaten and calories burned and make sure that the latter is greater than the former, you'll lose weight and never gain it back is fundamentally misguided. (If that were true, you'd never hear about anyone regaining weight and we'd never need another diet plan. "Just eat less and exercise.") However, that would just put me in an angry mood and I'm not interested in that.
What I do want to say for the record is that "they" (whoever they might be) have a really good point. This is not a "weight loss blog". I'm not on a diet, I don't have a set-in-stone workout regimen, and I'm not losing any significant amounts of weight. I'm also not beating myself up about any of that, either. So, for those folks hoping to get tips on low-fat cooking or the best new non-fat cheese (ewwww, nasty!), this isn't the place to come. If you're hoping to be inspired by tales of rapid weight loss, a life transformed, and happily ever after, I can't help you, either. I don't have the answer(s) and I don't pretend to. (By the way, I don't think there is an answer...I think there's just an endless series of questions and that your answers change based on who you are at that particular moment in time.)
What you see here is a woman struggling to learn how to be happy. Period. End of story. Go home because there's nothing else to see here. Well, wait, there's also the fact that the fat is just a symptom of my life-long lack of Joy. No, not the happiness that comes when the light stays green long enough for you to get through the intersection or when you get a raise at work, but the heart-stretching, beam-of-light-shining-from-every-pore kind of feeling that makes you wonder if you will burst because of how big it is. Joy. It's the reason we're here. It's what we all want and very few of us experience it on anything resembling a regular basis.
Gloria asked me last time we were together if I experienced Joy at work and I told her that I don't. She said, "Do you think you could?" and I answered that I didn't think so, at least not at my current job. She was really quiet for a second and then she said, "Wow, and we wonder why you've got an eating disorder!" I'm not unhappy, I'm just not truly happy, at least not at work. So my homework has been to try to bring Joy into places I don't normally experience it and this has been really eye-opening. I can make a conscious effort to bring the Joy that is already inside me out and that takes concentration. This is not easy.
So, I guess what I want you to know is that this isn't a weight loss blog anymore, if it ever was. I'm not focused on weight loss and am concentrating instead on making myself happy. What good would losing weight do if I was still not happy? Been there, done that, regained the weight. Have you ever seen one of those surveys about whether you'd rather be thin or happy? Well, my answer is that I would like to be both but that happy trumps thin every day and twice on Tuesday as far as I'm concerned. (Health is a different issue entirely and it's related to both weight loss and happiness as well as stress. Stress is going to kill me one day if I can't control it and the fight between what makes me happy and what pays my bills is stressing me out. When I'm stressed, I binge eat. See how it's all wrapped up?)
Man, what a disjointed entry! Bottom line is that you can strike me off of the Weight Loss Blogroll because I readily admit that I don't belong there and I'm OK with that.
