Okay, it’s confession time… I ate ice cream yesterday.
I know, I know… not exactly W30 and my 2nd W30 starts again today… I had 8 days in and now I have zero days in.
If I look at it practically, it’s not really the end of the world. Everyone makes a misstep and the more important thing that the failure is how you recover from it. Whether you fall completely, laying in the dirt and flailing about, or whether you just get up, take it as a lesson and move on.
I flailed about in the dirt yesterday. I ate about four spoonfuls of the ice cream and then decided I didn’t want anymore and put it away. And then I flailed around calling myself all sorts of names and berating what a weak and useless idiot I am. Of course being a weak and useless idiot requires punishment, so to punish myself, I ate the entire rest of the pint.
The worst part was that I knew exactly what it would do to me physically… It would cause me to crave more sugar, it would set me back in my quest for another 30 days of clean living and then, it would make me tired, lethargic and chemically stoned. I slept through four alarms this morning… My stomach was hard and distended and uncomfortable and I was starving. These are all things that I have grown to not miss about poor eating habits and while I was punishing myself for my misstep, I knew these were the consequences and I did it anyway.
The guilt and self-loathing that I felt this morning was equivalent to having committed some sort of catastrophic crime and I’m afraid someone is going to find out that I’m a fraud…
I knew it, they’ll say! I knew you couldn’t do this long term! I knew that you were just putting on a show! Your ‘fringe’ (to steal my sisters word) way of eating is a sham and I knew you went home every night and ate candy and cookies and ICE CREAM!
It’s not true… it’s not true, I’d have to say back… This was just a mistake… Everyone can’t be 100% all the time… it’s not possible… I did 40 days clean! I had half a glass of wine on my vacation and then started again the next day! ON MY VACATION! Everyone deserves a break when they make a mistake, I would say…
So how come when it’s me saying those loathsome things to myself, I don’t defend myself in the same way… instead of defending myself, I agree… yes, you are weak. Yes, you are a fraud! What made you think you would be strong enough to go against society and its prescribed eating habits? Why would you do this to yourself otherwise?
Well, I know the answer… we all know the answer if we look deep inside ourselves…
My answer is that I’m terrified. I’m very happy to eat healthy and I love the results… my skin is amazing, I sleep well, my mood is stable and positive and I’m in a club of people that appreciate that kind of effort. And the physical side effects of treating my body nicely are that I’m losing weight and things are re-adjusting in my body… I’m close to having to go down another pant size and now I’m sabotaging myself because I’m terrified. The things I’m terrified of are too difficult to write here, so I won’t… I think it’s enough that I’ve opened my wounds this much today… I just know that the things I’m terrified of are real, but in order to move forward in life, I’m going to have to find a way to live in peace with them…
So today I will start new and I will get up out of the dirt and stop flailing about. I will take this as a lesson instead of a crime… I will try and quiet the voice that is calling me a bad girl in the back of my head and start reminding myself that I have abnormally beautiful skin, strong legs, a great laugh and that terrified or not, I refuse to wallow in the not so praise worthy parts of myself… and sabotaging to prevent the fear doesn’t work… I know that because less than 18 hours after the sabotage, I’m no less terrified so I’ll just have to figure out something else!
Showing posts with label journalling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label journalling. Show all posts
Monday, April 15, 2013
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Bring on the Haters!
You’re late!
I went to the gym this morning… It took me six minutes of laying in bed and debating with myself but I eventually got up and went. I dilly dallied getting my clothes on and forgot to put my gym bag together last night so I only left the house at 4:55. I sped over the bridge and careened into the parking lot at 5:03 only to find that every other 5am gymgoer was standing outside. I got out of my car thinking that maybe they were waiting for some sort of special event bus to come and pick them up and that I would just slip past them into the building. Ya, no. The girl that opens the gym ended up coming at 5:28… 28 min late! It was damn cold outside and waiting outside for 30 min to do half a workout was a bit of a slap in the face.
Now, do I wish I’d stayed in bed? No. That’s a good sign, since normally I would say yes, had I known that this would happen, I would have just slept in.
What I realized as I was doing my 28 min on the elliptical was that this has stopped being ‘kill you hard’. I ramped up the resistance and crossramp on the thing for the 2nd half of my workout so that I wasn’t just coasting along, but I wasn’t counting down every second as wanting to vomit or die… that’s a good sign… right? I recovered quicker and felt better than any other day I’ve been to the gym in the last two weeks so I was very happy. Altho I would have been happier if I could have gone and treadmilled for a few min.
Community
The one good thing about getting locked out of the gym at 5am is that because I chose to get out of bed this morning, chose to wait to get into the gym and then chose to work out as hard as I could for that measly 28 min, I felt part of a club. I chatted with the guys (cause I was the only girl there) and we commiserated about getting out of bed at that time, why we had to leave at a certain time (some of us have the science of am workouts down to the minute) and why this was ‘so stupid’. I missed being a part of a community like that. It’s a special group of people (my sister included.. of course it’s special!) who get up when everyone else is still snuggling and go put some sweat on the machines. I always liked being part of that group of people… and now I’m part of it again… It gives me a little bump up in drive and determination!
You’re no fun!
So it seems that my muscle memory for working out is coming back and with it, it’s bringing memories of other things. Like people being assholes about my personal changes. Now, I realize and learned this lesson many years ago that when YOU make changes, it’s your responsibility to help other people adapt. That seems weird to say right? Why do you have to manage other people’s reactions? Because it’s in your own best interest. When you make any sort of massive change, it rocks the boat of your world and those waves affect people around you. Normally I would say that everyone can deal with their own reactions to things outside their control but I know from experience that unless you want to just wash your life of all your friends and family that are feeling uncomfortable with the changes you’re making, you need to do a little management.
Of course by managing other people’s interaction with you, that doesn’t mean stop doing something for yourself because it makes others feel uncomfortable. But it does mean that you can help them adapt by adapting your own behavior to make the change less difficult for loved ones to deal with.
For instance, let’s pretend you’re getting married and your single friends are having a hard time dealing with it. You can help yourself by managing how the change is being presented. You can book girls nights, make sure that wedding talk doesn’t monopolize every single conversation and invite them to participate in a way that is both helpful to you and fulfilling for them etc… You’re not going to NOT get married because your single friends are upset but you can manage the change to make life easier for everyone, including yourself.
You're getting married??
Now, I’m not getting married, but the changes I’m making in my own life are starting to affect the people in my circle. I’m getting a lot of negativity and pushback from people I would have expected to be some of the biggest cheerleaders. And I’ve been declared un-fun for declining to go for cake and cookies and bottles of wine and beer. I’m still a lot of fun if you ask me but the ‘club’ I used to belong to (as opposed to the sports club I now belong to) is being shaken up. The security and security blanket of my participation being removed is rocking the boat big time!
People have other people in their lives for various reasons. Oftentimes it works for both parties. When one party changes the pieces around, the other party has now had a component of their life changed and sometimes removed. Often people do get over it in time and the change takes hold and the relationship evolves to continue to reward both parties.....but in reality, if you have friends who saw you only as a junk food eating, wine drinking, lazing about participant who potentially made them feel OK about that part of their own personality, it's possible that they will go elsewhere to fill their need for that. The part about managing this is the difficult thing. I don’t want to scrub clean my small circle of friends right off the bat without allowing a chance for the change to take hold and the relationship to evolve, so I will try to help them become more comfortable with the new me. What I will not do is work diligently on myself all the while consciously helping them adapt only to continue to get beaten up for it. A time will come when decisions have to be made about how people will fit into my new life.
Sisterly Love
There are few things I count on in life more than my relationship with my sister. I sent her a portion of this post that sounded like it was written by someone for whom English is their third language. She understood what I was trying to say and was able to put it into words. It’s incredibly comforting for me to know that she’s been down this road… I’ve been down this road in the past too, but I was young then and things important then are certainly not important now. She knows the hurdles and boulders that will be in my path and even tho I know I’m equipped to deal with them, having travelled this path before, she walked it more recently. I’m incredibly thankful for having someone in the world that can make my own thoughts sound coherent and who will cheer me on for every life circumstance, regardless if it potentially makes her feel uncomfortable for a minute. And I do the same for her!
Credit goes to my beautiful sister at FittyvsFatty for writing portions of the ‘You’re No Fun!’ section!
I went to the gym this morning… It took me six minutes of laying in bed and debating with myself but I eventually got up and went. I dilly dallied getting my clothes on and forgot to put my gym bag together last night so I only left the house at 4:55. I sped over the bridge and careened into the parking lot at 5:03 only to find that every other 5am gymgoer was standing outside. I got out of my car thinking that maybe they were waiting for some sort of special event bus to come and pick them up and that I would just slip past them into the building. Ya, no. The girl that opens the gym ended up coming at 5:28… 28 min late! It was damn cold outside and waiting outside for 30 min to do half a workout was a bit of a slap in the face.
Now, do I wish I’d stayed in bed? No. That’s a good sign, since normally I would say yes, had I known that this would happen, I would have just slept in.
What I realized as I was doing my 28 min on the elliptical was that this has stopped being ‘kill you hard’. I ramped up the resistance and crossramp on the thing for the 2nd half of my workout so that I wasn’t just coasting along, but I wasn’t counting down every second as wanting to vomit or die… that’s a good sign… right? I recovered quicker and felt better than any other day I’ve been to the gym in the last two weeks so I was very happy. Altho I would have been happier if I could have gone and treadmilled for a few min.
Community
The one good thing about getting locked out of the gym at 5am is that because I chose to get out of bed this morning, chose to wait to get into the gym and then chose to work out as hard as I could for that measly 28 min, I felt part of a club. I chatted with the guys (cause I was the only girl there) and we commiserated about getting out of bed at that time, why we had to leave at a certain time (some of us have the science of am workouts down to the minute) and why this was ‘so stupid’. I missed being a part of a community like that. It’s a special group of people (my sister included.. of course it’s special!) who get up when everyone else is still snuggling and go put some sweat on the machines. I always liked being part of that group of people… and now I’m part of it again… It gives me a little bump up in drive and determination!
You’re no fun!
So it seems that my muscle memory for working out is coming back and with it, it’s bringing memories of other things. Like people being assholes about my personal changes. Now, I realize and learned this lesson many years ago that when YOU make changes, it’s your responsibility to help other people adapt. That seems weird to say right? Why do you have to manage other people’s reactions? Because it’s in your own best interest. When you make any sort of massive change, it rocks the boat of your world and those waves affect people around you. Normally I would say that everyone can deal with their own reactions to things outside their control but I know from experience that unless you want to just wash your life of all your friends and family that are feeling uncomfortable with the changes you’re making, you need to do a little management.
Of course by managing other people’s interaction with you, that doesn’t mean stop doing something for yourself because it makes others feel uncomfortable. But it does mean that you can help them adapt by adapting your own behavior to make the change less difficult for loved ones to deal with.
For instance, let’s pretend you’re getting married and your single friends are having a hard time dealing with it. You can help yourself by managing how the change is being presented. You can book girls nights, make sure that wedding talk doesn’t monopolize every single conversation and invite them to participate in a way that is both helpful to you and fulfilling for them etc… You’re not going to NOT get married because your single friends are upset but you can manage the change to make life easier for everyone, including yourself.
You're getting married??
Now, I’m not getting married, but the changes I’m making in my own life are starting to affect the people in my circle. I’m getting a lot of negativity and pushback from people I would have expected to be some of the biggest cheerleaders. And I’ve been declared un-fun for declining to go for cake and cookies and bottles of wine and beer. I’m still a lot of fun if you ask me but the ‘club’ I used to belong to (as opposed to the sports club I now belong to) is being shaken up. The security and security blanket of my participation being removed is rocking the boat big time!
People have other people in their lives for various reasons. Oftentimes it works for both parties. When one party changes the pieces around, the other party has now had a component of their life changed and sometimes removed. Often people do get over it in time and the change takes hold and the relationship evolves to continue to reward both parties.....but in reality, if you have friends who saw you only as a junk food eating, wine drinking, lazing about participant who potentially made them feel OK about that part of their own personality, it's possible that they will go elsewhere to fill their need for that. The part about managing this is the difficult thing. I don’t want to scrub clean my small circle of friends right off the bat without allowing a chance for the change to take hold and the relationship to evolve, so I will try to help them become more comfortable with the new me. What I will not do is work diligently on myself all the while consciously helping them adapt only to continue to get beaten up for it. A time will come when decisions have to be made about how people will fit into my new life.
Sisterly Love
There are few things I count on in life more than my relationship with my sister. I sent her a portion of this post that sounded like it was written by someone for whom English is their third language. She understood what I was trying to say and was able to put it into words. It’s incredibly comforting for me to know that she’s been down this road… I’ve been down this road in the past too, but I was young then and things important then are certainly not important now. She knows the hurdles and boulders that will be in my path and even tho I know I’m equipped to deal with them, having travelled this path before, she walked it more recently. I’m incredibly thankful for having someone in the world that can make my own thoughts sound coherent and who will cheer me on for every life circumstance, regardless if it potentially makes her feel uncomfortable for a minute. And I do the same for her!
Credit goes to my beautiful sister at FittyvsFatty for writing portions of the ‘You’re No Fun!’ section!
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Goodbye for Now
I have a weird confession to make… I hope you don’t think any less of me when you read this and I hope you see it as the harbinger of a new chapter like I do.
I’m breaking up with knitting.
Yup… you heard it here first.
I’ve found myself not knitting very much lately and instead of letting it just gradually slide away, I thought it would be better to look at it, figure out why and then put a proper closure to it.
If you’re not a knitter and/or you don’t know me very well, it would seem kind of crazy why I feel the need to forensically identify why I’ve not been knitting lately. I get that. If you are a knitter and/or you do know me, this may make a little bit more sense to you.
You see, I’ve been knitting non stop for almost four years to the day. March 23rd, 2009 was the birth of what can only be considered an obsession. Knitting was with me and on me everywhere I went. I’ve compiled a ludacris collection of handknits that I may never see enough cold weather in this life time to wear. I have items that went directly in to my heirloom knitting box to be saved… for what I’m not sure… but they are works of art in every sense of the word. I have items I made with yarn purchased on holiday, on a whim and on a bad day. I’ve spent HOURS scouring Ravelry for patterns, projects and inspiration. I’ve knit things for a selected few other people and taken great pleasure in seeing them in action!
So what’s changed? Well me of course.
Knitting was around when my life was falling apart… when I wanted nothing more to than to run as far away as I could (which ended up being the coffee shop down the street). Knitting was around when everything came crashing down around me. It was around when I was picking up the pieces and when I thought I was ‘better’. Then it was there when I wasn’t ‘better’ at all. I spent many a lovely cozy day with my knitting… slowly building up a wool armor around myself. Every stitch was a piece of protection that kept me safe. My sister once said that she liked wearing my handknits when she was having a bad sad or difficult day because it felt like she was wrapped in my love and protection. And that’s what I was doing for myself. Knitting was a shield I used to protect me from the outside world and in part, myself. I received what can only be considered superficial attention from my finished handknits and knitting in public.
But now I feel like exposing myself a little bit… taking down the walls stitch by stitch (oh don’t get crazy, I’m not unraveling all my finished knitting!). For the first time in years I feel like I can stand up, on my own two feet without being draped/wrapped or smothered in handknits. It’s an interestingly unique feeling. Like going outside in spring without a jacket on. A bit scary but surprisingly ok.
So, because I relied on knitting as somewhat of a crutch, I need to take a purposeful break from it. I need it to sit in the background and be less important than it once was.
I can already tell you without a bit of doubt that I will miss it and that I will come back to it in time. My life is in a state of transformation and knitting has to transform too. What I want to do is come back to it when I’ve reached a goal I’ve set for myself and knit a sweater. I want knitting to be purposeful when I come back to it. The sheer volume of items that I have knit in the last four years speaks to the incredible pain I was trying to heal. When next I pick up my knitting I want it to reflect who I am transforming to become… Purposeful, driven and focussed. We can’t stay friends if we both don’t change so knitting is going to go away for a while.
It’s pretty freeing to have scrutinized this and then written it out… Tonight I’m going to put everything away… All neat and tidy like so when it’s time to reunite, it will be a calm and orderly reintroduction.
I’m breaking up with knitting.
Yup… you heard it here first.
I’ve found myself not knitting very much lately and instead of letting it just gradually slide away, I thought it would be better to look at it, figure out why and then put a proper closure to it.
If you’re not a knitter and/or you don’t know me very well, it would seem kind of crazy why I feel the need to forensically identify why I’ve not been knitting lately. I get that. If you are a knitter and/or you do know me, this may make a little bit more sense to you.
You see, I’ve been knitting non stop for almost four years to the day. March 23rd, 2009 was the birth of what can only be considered an obsession. Knitting was with me and on me everywhere I went. I’ve compiled a ludacris collection of handknits that I may never see enough cold weather in this life time to wear. I have items that went directly in to my heirloom knitting box to be saved… for what I’m not sure… but they are works of art in every sense of the word. I have items I made with yarn purchased on holiday, on a whim and on a bad day. I’ve spent HOURS scouring Ravelry for patterns, projects and inspiration. I’ve knit things for a selected few other people and taken great pleasure in seeing them in action!
So what’s changed? Well me of course.
Knitting was around when my life was falling apart… when I wanted nothing more to than to run as far away as I could (which ended up being the coffee shop down the street). Knitting was around when everything came crashing down around me. It was around when I was picking up the pieces and when I thought I was ‘better’. Then it was there when I wasn’t ‘better’ at all. I spent many a lovely cozy day with my knitting… slowly building up a wool armor around myself. Every stitch was a piece of protection that kept me safe. My sister once said that she liked wearing my handknits when she was having a bad sad or difficult day because it felt like she was wrapped in my love and protection. And that’s what I was doing for myself. Knitting was a shield I used to protect me from the outside world and in part, myself. I received what can only be considered superficial attention from my finished handknits and knitting in public.
But now I feel like exposing myself a little bit… taking down the walls stitch by stitch (oh don’t get crazy, I’m not unraveling all my finished knitting!). For the first time in years I feel like I can stand up, on my own two feet without being draped/wrapped or smothered in handknits. It’s an interestingly unique feeling. Like going outside in spring without a jacket on. A bit scary but surprisingly ok.
So, because I relied on knitting as somewhat of a crutch, I need to take a purposeful break from it. I need it to sit in the background and be less important than it once was.
I can already tell you without a bit of doubt that I will miss it and that I will come back to it in time. My life is in a state of transformation and knitting has to transform too. What I want to do is come back to it when I’ve reached a goal I’ve set for myself and knit a sweater. I want knitting to be purposeful when I come back to it. The sheer volume of items that I have knit in the last four years speaks to the incredible pain I was trying to heal. When next I pick up my knitting I want it to reflect who I am transforming to become… Purposeful, driven and focussed. We can’t stay friends if we both don’t change so knitting is going to go away for a while.
It’s pretty freeing to have scrutinized this and then written it out… Tonight I’m going to put everything away… All neat and tidy like so when it’s time to reunite, it will be a calm and orderly reintroduction.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
I’m not alone! (and neither are you)
I’m sure you know if you’ve read along over the past couple of years, or dug back through the archives that I gave up a lot of things that I enjoyed and that were good for me in the last few years… I gave up eating well, I gave up exercise, I gave up a lot of control and self esteem and I gave up my faith in God.
I’ve talked about all of them so far except for the last one.
I guess it would be good for ‘ratings’ to say that I stood in my living room one day and screamed to the Heavens ‘Why God have You abandoned me?’. ‘Why have You left me here to suffer this alone… I don’t know how to fix this!’
There’s no such story. Because, in fact it should have been God standing in my living room and asking ME ‘Why have you forgotten about Me? I can help you if only you’ll ask You don’t have to go through this alone’. I can’t say for sure that that didn’t happen… that in the years of struggle He didn’t come to me and offer to put an end to my suffering… to save me from what my life had become. I certainly was in no place to hear it, for I was so busy trying to fix everything myself.
I remember having conversations (multitudes) with my friends and saying ‘I don’t know what else to do. I’ve tried everything’ and then consistently listing off all the things I tried to do to fix the relationship, to make him respect me, to stop the manipulative and abusive behavior. I can still feel it now, the feeling I had during those conversations. It was like I was standing still in a vortex of insanity… everything I ‘tried’ swirling around me, too fast to catch… too messy to make sense out of. I don’t know what else to do… I don’t know what else to do… That thought went around and around me in a never ending spiral of grief and frustration. I can still feel the anxiety now when I recall those moments… and then the creeping thought that maybe I deserved this. Maybe I WASN’T fun… maybe I WAS a bitch… maybe I WASN’T a good housekeeper, cook, laundry doer, friend…PERSON!
I spent so many years, before that relationship and then during it thinking I had it all figured out… and then thinking I had to get it all figured out. I lied to my friends about my life at home… even my family doesn’t know the half of what went on…
I look back on it now and I can see that I COULD have saved myself… I could have just asked God for help. Those moments of desperation… of really being at the lowest low… feeling like I was going crazy and there was nothing left to try… there was always one more thing to try…
Every day is a new day and somewhere on my Christmas holidays I felt moved… things weren’t working, the year was ending and I was still seemingly stuck in a place I didn’t want to be… unhealthy, not really happy and with no prospect of massive change on the horizon…
I prayed that night. And as I prayed I felt a huge weight lift off me. It was such a feeling of renewal and peace that I wondered if I prayed again the next night would I feel the same thing… I did. Every time I spoke to God it felt as though my burden was being lifted. It all sounds so very cliché to me too… these are the things that you hear televangelists screaming into a microphone at crowds of thousands. ‘GOD WILL EASE YOUR BURDENS’. Well it’s hard to understand that as a young woman who’s never had burdens.
I’ve been a Christian all my life and I don’t recall ever feeling the weight of burden before… Back in the ‘good old days’ I prayed all the time… I thought I knew what it was supposed to feel like… But this… this was different. This commune with God was something I’d never felt before. This lightening of my load was something new… I’ve been down a long and steep road and picked up an awful lot of really ugly, dirty, unhealthy and sad burden on the way. Burden that previously in my life I’d never had to carry before. It crushed me… It filled my lungs with smoke and pulled at my muscles like hot irons. And man the moment I didn’t have to carry it alone anymore I realized just how heavy it really was… how back breaking and spirit crushing. And until that moment at Christmas I never thought that I would get the chance to stop carrying it. How amazing that I could just hand it off and be free!
I consider that time in my life a blessing now… I didn’t know just how terrible life could be… how desolate and lonely and painful… but the other thing I didn’t know was just how free and peaceful it could be. How much I didn’t have to depend only on myself to manage my life. I didn’t have to live in the pain for one more second… everything was new and clean again.
Every night I get excited to go to bed… for altho it’s not the only place; bed is where I pray. I ask for guidance, hand off my burden and feel peaceful at bedtime. Every night is not easy… my old habits get in the way and my mind wanders… trying to figure out my problems myself… So sometimes my prayer is to be reminded that I’m not in this alone anymore and I don’t have to figure it out myself.
My whole life is changing at a breakneck speed right now… I have a strength and willpower now I didn’t know I had. I have peace and harmony within my own mind and body that I honestly thought I would never have again. (if I ever had it in the first place). I feel like I’m rebuilding my life on solid ground where once I stood in quick sand. It’s a powerful feeling and I just could not help but write about it here.
I’ve talked about all of them so far except for the last one.
I guess it would be good for ‘ratings’ to say that I stood in my living room one day and screamed to the Heavens ‘Why God have You abandoned me?’. ‘Why have You left me here to suffer this alone… I don’t know how to fix this!’
There’s no such story. Because, in fact it should have been God standing in my living room and asking ME ‘Why have you forgotten about Me? I can help you if only you’ll ask You don’t have to go through this alone’. I can’t say for sure that that didn’t happen… that in the years of struggle He didn’t come to me and offer to put an end to my suffering… to save me from what my life had become. I certainly was in no place to hear it, for I was so busy trying to fix everything myself.
I remember having conversations (multitudes) with my friends and saying ‘I don’t know what else to do. I’ve tried everything’ and then consistently listing off all the things I tried to do to fix the relationship, to make him respect me, to stop the manipulative and abusive behavior. I can still feel it now, the feeling I had during those conversations. It was like I was standing still in a vortex of insanity… everything I ‘tried’ swirling around me, too fast to catch… too messy to make sense out of. I don’t know what else to do… I don’t know what else to do… That thought went around and around me in a never ending spiral of grief and frustration. I can still feel the anxiety now when I recall those moments… and then the creeping thought that maybe I deserved this. Maybe I WASN’T fun… maybe I WAS a bitch… maybe I WASN’T a good housekeeper, cook, laundry doer, friend…PERSON!
I spent so many years, before that relationship and then during it thinking I had it all figured out… and then thinking I had to get it all figured out. I lied to my friends about my life at home… even my family doesn’t know the half of what went on…
I look back on it now and I can see that I COULD have saved myself… I could have just asked God for help. Those moments of desperation… of really being at the lowest low… feeling like I was going crazy and there was nothing left to try… there was always one more thing to try…
Every day is a new day and somewhere on my Christmas holidays I felt moved… things weren’t working, the year was ending and I was still seemingly stuck in a place I didn’t want to be… unhealthy, not really happy and with no prospect of massive change on the horizon…
I prayed that night. And as I prayed I felt a huge weight lift off me. It was such a feeling of renewal and peace that I wondered if I prayed again the next night would I feel the same thing… I did. Every time I spoke to God it felt as though my burden was being lifted. It all sounds so very cliché to me too… these are the things that you hear televangelists screaming into a microphone at crowds of thousands. ‘GOD WILL EASE YOUR BURDENS’. Well it’s hard to understand that as a young woman who’s never had burdens.
I’ve been a Christian all my life and I don’t recall ever feeling the weight of burden before… Back in the ‘good old days’ I prayed all the time… I thought I knew what it was supposed to feel like… But this… this was different. This commune with God was something I’d never felt before. This lightening of my load was something new… I’ve been down a long and steep road and picked up an awful lot of really ugly, dirty, unhealthy and sad burden on the way. Burden that previously in my life I’d never had to carry before. It crushed me… It filled my lungs with smoke and pulled at my muscles like hot irons. And man the moment I didn’t have to carry it alone anymore I realized just how heavy it really was… how back breaking and spirit crushing. And until that moment at Christmas I never thought that I would get the chance to stop carrying it. How amazing that I could just hand it off and be free!
I consider that time in my life a blessing now… I didn’t know just how terrible life could be… how desolate and lonely and painful… but the other thing I didn’t know was just how free and peaceful it could be. How much I didn’t have to depend only on myself to manage my life. I didn’t have to live in the pain for one more second… everything was new and clean again.
Every night I get excited to go to bed… for altho it’s not the only place; bed is where I pray. I ask for guidance, hand off my burden and feel peaceful at bedtime. Every night is not easy… my old habits get in the way and my mind wanders… trying to figure out my problems myself… So sometimes my prayer is to be reminded that I’m not in this alone anymore and I don’t have to figure it out myself.
My whole life is changing at a breakneck speed right now… I have a strength and willpower now I didn’t know I had. I have peace and harmony within my own mind and body that I honestly thought I would never have again. (if I ever had it in the first place). I feel like I’m rebuilding my life on solid ground where once I stood in quick sand. It’s a powerful feeling and I just could not help but write about it here.
Friday, March 1, 2013
Six Days Down
Today is my 6th day on Whole30.
I don’t really blog on the weekends so I thought I’d post today about what’s become of me so far on the first week.
1. I keep thinking I must be cheating on this because everything I’ve made so far tastes so good and doesn’t need the added dairy or sugar. As I’d already been pretty strict about grain, there hasn’t been much of a change there. I cooked last Saturday and Sunday and made my breakfasts, lunch fixings and dinners so that I didn’t have to cook at all this week. I didn’t mind eating the same thing every day altho dinner got a bit boring, but I have a plan to combat that next week.
2. I have food cravings in the evenings. I can’t even really say it’s a sugar craving… it’s more of a ‘food in my mouth’ craving. I’ve been drinking a lot of tea to stay hydrated and interested and when the craving pops up (more of a habit than a craving… it’s all mental) I ask myself if I’m hungry. The answer is predictably no, so that’s the end of that mental conversation.
3. My sleep has improved. I’ve always been a good sleeper but often would be dog tired when I finally went to bed and wake up tired and a bit crabby. Now at 9pm I turn the tv off and get started on my bedtime routine that includes face washing, teeth brushing, cat duties, sometimes a bath and then into bed. I find that I’m still alert and cognitively functioning when I crawl into bed but sleep comes easily and is deep and lasting. I wake up at 7am in the morning and feel alert and ready for the day (except this morning but I think I over did it on Valarian tea last night).
4. My digestion has gotten better. I haven’t had a stomach ache or bloating or gas in days.
5. My skin condition on my hands has cleared up. It’s not a full win in the skin category as it’s winter and dry and harsh for skin but I have no more itchy red bumps on my hands and my legs don’t itch at night.
6. I’m a lot calmer. I think this can be attributed in large part to having my food planned and prepped for the week so I don’t’ have to spend valuable week night time on cooking, but I also feel more calm and peaceful. Every day right after work I put my pajamas on and sit on the living room floor to play with the kitty. Because I don't have to do much in the way of cooking or cleaning because it’s taken care of on the weekend, I really look forward to and enjoy the time that I get to spend with the little fuzz ball. It’s probably about 20 min of playing and he makes me laugh. He seems happier because of the extra focused play time and we’ve invented two new games this week that he really seems to enjoy.
Those are all the things that I’ve noticed thus far. I know it seems weird to attribute a happier cat and a better kitty/human relationship to W30 but as they say all over the website and in the book, W30 is about changing your lifestyle. The planning and prep time that I invest on the weekends is something I never did before and now I’m realizing the benefits of it. It’s also given me cause to think that my easy wake up at 7 could probably be pushed to a bit earlier and some excerise could be scheduled in to the am. I’ve always been an AM workout person and I used to really enjoy it so I’m going to expect to start that soon and see if I can make AM workouts fit in my life again.
All in all, a fantastic and successful first week on the Whole 30.
I don’t really blog on the weekends so I thought I’d post today about what’s become of me so far on the first week.
1. I keep thinking I must be cheating on this because everything I’ve made so far tastes so good and doesn’t need the added dairy or sugar. As I’d already been pretty strict about grain, there hasn’t been much of a change there. I cooked last Saturday and Sunday and made my breakfasts, lunch fixings and dinners so that I didn’t have to cook at all this week. I didn’t mind eating the same thing every day altho dinner got a bit boring, but I have a plan to combat that next week.
2. I have food cravings in the evenings. I can’t even really say it’s a sugar craving… it’s more of a ‘food in my mouth’ craving. I’ve been drinking a lot of tea to stay hydrated and interested and when the craving pops up (more of a habit than a craving… it’s all mental) I ask myself if I’m hungry. The answer is predictably no, so that’s the end of that mental conversation.
3. My sleep has improved. I’ve always been a good sleeper but often would be dog tired when I finally went to bed and wake up tired and a bit crabby. Now at 9pm I turn the tv off and get started on my bedtime routine that includes face washing, teeth brushing, cat duties, sometimes a bath and then into bed. I find that I’m still alert and cognitively functioning when I crawl into bed but sleep comes easily and is deep and lasting. I wake up at 7am in the morning and feel alert and ready for the day (except this morning but I think I over did it on Valarian tea last night).
4. My digestion has gotten better. I haven’t had a stomach ache or bloating or gas in days.
5. My skin condition on my hands has cleared up. It’s not a full win in the skin category as it’s winter and dry and harsh for skin but I have no more itchy red bumps on my hands and my legs don’t itch at night.
6. I’m a lot calmer. I think this can be attributed in large part to having my food planned and prepped for the week so I don’t’ have to spend valuable week night time on cooking, but I also feel more calm and peaceful. Every day right after work I put my pajamas on and sit on the living room floor to play with the kitty. Because I don't have to do much in the way of cooking or cleaning because it’s taken care of on the weekend, I really look forward to and enjoy the time that I get to spend with the little fuzz ball. It’s probably about 20 min of playing and he makes me laugh. He seems happier because of the extra focused play time and we’ve invented two new games this week that he really seems to enjoy.
Those are all the things that I’ve noticed thus far. I know it seems weird to attribute a happier cat and a better kitty/human relationship to W30 but as they say all over the website and in the book, W30 is about changing your lifestyle. The planning and prep time that I invest on the weekends is something I never did before and now I’m realizing the benefits of it. It’s also given me cause to think that my easy wake up at 7 could probably be pushed to a bit earlier and some excerise could be scheduled in to the am. I’ve always been an AM workout person and I used to really enjoy it so I’m going to expect to start that soon and see if I can make AM workouts fit in my life again.
All in all, a fantastic and successful first week on the Whole 30.
Monday, January 7, 2013
All over the place
I have an incredible urge to throw things away!
In fact, as I’m thinking about it right now, I already know which drawer I’m going to start with and I know I will be doing it almost the second I get home.
I squandered the last bit of my holidays away playing with Mr. Fluffypants and watching television. I was trying to keep a cold at bay so on Friday I took the day off and slept most of it. Saturday and Sunday were both uneventful (except getting evacuated from Costco on Sunday afternoon… but that was barely an event!).
I’ve been doing very well in the past little while with ensuring that I cook and prepare all my own meals. I ate grain twice over the Christmas Holiday. Once on December 21 when I ate a piece of custom made birthday cake. It was a chocolate lazy dazy cake in which you use coffee for the liquid and it was covered in whipped peanut butter icing and garnish of more chocolate and peanut butter.
And then I ate two bites of stuffing on Christmas day because Janet makes the Canaday/Janzen stuffing recipe and it’s kind of kryptonite. I will say that I suffered IMMENSELY after both those indulgences… which relegated them right outside the indulgence category…
ANYWAY… One of my Journey Plan items is to continue to not eat grains of any sort, no legumes, no really starchy veg and a meagre amount of dairy. So far it’s working out great! I’ve been filling my freezer (soon to be deep freeze if I can figure out a way to get the effer home from Costco!) with home cooked grain free meals so that when I start into my 99 hours of training next Tuesday I’ll have good things to eat.
That said, I’m feeling in a very purgey way right now. I want to throw everything in my house away! Obviously I’m not going to but there are some areas that won’t be spared. The impetus for it was really a purchase I made on Etsy. Another one of my Journey Plan items is to continue to try and make as little impact on the planet as I can, while still remaining sane and not wasting spending all my time on worrying about it. One of the ways to do that is cloth napkins. Now, I’m sure you can go to the store and purchase some really heinous cloth napkins at Winners or Canadian Tire. But, always one for wanting something interesting and unique, I bought myself a set of four screen printed napkins from THIS ETSY VENDOR
In fact, the ACTUAL ones I bought are pictured below.
The other thing that I’m really itching to do is figure something out for my dining room. I love my dining room. When I first moved I repurposed a small loveseat to function as banquette seating on one side and two antique chairs on the other side. It looks great! The problem is that the sofa is far too low and you can literally scoop food from off the table into your mouth… no lifting necessary. It’s funny at first but it makes your stomach hurt, and it’s hard to get in and out of with the table so close. Cat toys go under there to die on a very frequent basis, which means I have to pull the two chairs, table and sofa out to rescue them for the whining machine!
So I’d like to do either two nice chairs that I can refinish and recover, or, ideally, because I like the banquette idea, I’d like to do this.
Thanks for the great idea pinterest! And if that doesn’t work, I’m considering trying to find some legs and making just the bench portion. In the scheme of things, that would work best with the way the room is designed and where the drapes are anyway!
So I went looking online just now for dining benches… and then it hit me! I have a 4’ wide incredibly sturdy coffee table that is currently the holder of stuff in my bedroom until I get a dresser! When I first got it I had them cut quite a few inches off of it, which I’m sorely regretting now, but if it’s pretty close to 18”, I should be able to shore it up with some layers of mdf or plywood and then make the bench cushion for it! The stain on the coffee table matches the chairs and I have plenty of the sofa fabric left to cover the bench!
I’m pretty happy right now because it means that my lost creative mojo (which I lost about three weeks before Christmas) seems to be coming back. Maybe I’ll even knit a little tonight, once I’ve thrown out a bunch of stuff and measured my bench (and let’s be realistic, moved the bench to the dining room, moved the sofa to the bedroom, rearranged the bedroom because the sofa won’t fit otherwise and then cleaned the whole place! Good thing dinner is in the crockpot as we speak!
In fact, as I’m thinking about it right now, I already know which drawer I’m going to start with and I know I will be doing it almost the second I get home.
I squandered the last bit of my holidays away playing with Mr. Fluffypants and watching television. I was trying to keep a cold at bay so on Friday I took the day off and slept most of it. Saturday and Sunday were both uneventful (except getting evacuated from Costco on Sunday afternoon… but that was barely an event!).
I’ve been doing very well in the past little while with ensuring that I cook and prepare all my own meals. I ate grain twice over the Christmas Holiday. Once on December 21 when I ate a piece of custom made birthday cake. It was a chocolate lazy dazy cake in which you use coffee for the liquid and it was covered in whipped peanut butter icing and garnish of more chocolate and peanut butter.
And then I ate two bites of stuffing on Christmas day because Janet makes the Canaday/Janzen stuffing recipe and it’s kind of kryptonite. I will say that I suffered IMMENSELY after both those indulgences… which relegated them right outside the indulgence category…
ANYWAY… One of my Journey Plan items is to continue to not eat grains of any sort, no legumes, no really starchy veg and a meagre amount of dairy. So far it’s working out great! I’ve been filling my freezer (soon to be deep freeze if I can figure out a way to get the effer home from Costco!) with home cooked grain free meals so that when I start into my 99 hours of training next Tuesday I’ll have good things to eat.
That said, I’m feeling in a very purgey way right now. I want to throw everything in my house away! Obviously I’m not going to but there are some areas that won’t be spared. The impetus for it was really a purchase I made on Etsy. Another one of my Journey Plan items is to continue to try and make as little impact on the planet as I can, while still remaining sane and not
In fact, the ACTUAL ones I bought are pictured below.
The other thing that I’m really itching to do is figure something out for my dining room. I love my dining room. When I first moved I repurposed a small loveseat to function as banquette seating on one side and two antique chairs on the other side. It looks great! The problem is that the sofa is far too low and you can literally scoop food from off the table into your mouth… no lifting necessary. It’s funny at first but it makes your stomach hurt, and it’s hard to get in and out of with the table so close. Cat toys go under there to die on a very frequent basis, which means I have to pull the two chairs, table and sofa out to rescue them for the whining machine!
So I’d like to do either two nice chairs that I can refinish and recover, or, ideally, because I like the banquette idea, I’d like to do this.
Thanks for the great idea pinterest! And if that doesn’t work, I’m considering trying to find some legs and making just the bench portion. In the scheme of things, that would work best with the way the room is designed and where the drapes are anyway!
So I went looking online just now for dining benches… and then it hit me! I have a 4’ wide incredibly sturdy coffee table that is currently the holder of stuff in my bedroom until I get a dresser! When I first got it I had them cut quite a few inches off of it, which I’m sorely regretting now, but if it’s pretty close to 18”, I should be able to shore it up with some layers of mdf or plywood and then make the bench cushion for it! The stain on the coffee table matches the chairs and I have plenty of the sofa fabric left to cover the bench!
I’m pretty happy right now because it means that my lost creative mojo (which I lost about three weeks before Christmas) seems to be coming back. Maybe I’ll even knit a little tonight, once I’ve thrown out a bunch of stuff and measured my bench (and let’s be realistic, moved the bench to the dining room, moved the sofa to the bedroom, rearranged the bedroom because the sofa won’t fit otherwise and then cleaned the whole place! Good thing dinner is in the crockpot as we speak!
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Who I really am
I can feel a change coming… I can feel it scratching just inside my consciousness… just inside my soul… scratching to get out… twisting things in and out and up and down in an effort to alert my conscious self to its existence…
It seems like an odd time to be having this feeling of metamorphosis… it’s not Back to School, it’s not yet New Year’s… it’s certainly not spring… all the times that are generally the seasons of change… and yet here I am… feeling the itch to move along down the road of life.
I’ve been listening to the voice… to the scratching… to the incessant rubbing on my psyche like a burr under a saddle…. And it’s got a message.
“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”
Is it weird that the scratching is a Dr. Seuss quote? Maybe. I’m okay with that.
I feel as tho I am moving into the next incarnation of who I am meant to be. And the scratching is telling me to embrace it.
The voice in my heart is telling me that who I am is okay.
It’s okay to be an introvert. So the world thinks I’m an extrovert…outgoing, social and brave. I’m not. I prefer my alone time to a group of people. I don’t like loud noises or overwhelming sounds. I’m habitual to a fault and I’d rather have a scant handful of close friends than a gymnasium full of people that I only sort of know… And it’s okay to be honest with myself that I’m am a more reserved person… and I don’t necessarily always have to be a pretend extrovert… sure it’s helpful in certain situations but the more situations in which I am honest with myself, the better.
It’s okay to love yourself regardless of body shape. This is not to say that it’s not a positive endeavor to do what I can to be the most healthy I can be. What it does say is that it’s not okay to withhold self-love until I reach a goal. My grandparents have shown in the past that they value us more as people when we are housed in a thin frame. If it’s not okay for someone else to treat me like that, then it can’t be okay to treat myself like that. Maybe that’s the missing piece… maybe that’s the thought that I will finally derive success from… I am me… Can I be a better me? Sure! In all aspects… life is about self improvement and moving forward no matter what. But waiting until I am a ‘better’ me to like myself is just not okay.
It’s okay to want change. It’s okay to honor who I have been in years past and yet not want to be that person anymore. It’s okay to want to take my life in an alternate direction… even if I don’t know what that direction is exactly… It brings to mind a quote that was sent to me last year…
‘It doesn’t’ matter if the path you start down and the path you end on are the same, as long as you start down a path’.
I’ve committed my time, energy and talents to something new starting in January. I’m both nervous and excited and I’m looking so forward to putting myself out there… using my mind and my self to help others. I think to do this, I need to be an honest version of myself and while that is ever a work in progress, I need to at least be on the road there…
So I’m going to end this year… all seven weeks of it listening to the voice in my soul that is saying that I can embrace the new and better me that is itching to get out….
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Nesting and how there's more to life than food
When I went home last night I realized that I hadn't taken anything out of the fridge for dinner, I didn't care about dinner and I wanted to go shopping. I watched a pvr'd version of Dr. Phil while laying on the sofa feeling sorry for myself and then I put some clothes on and headed out to Costco.
On the way out the door I ran into the neighbor that lives across the hall and has actually seen my cat because one of the days that the kitty was really sick, he escaped out into the hallway. On that day, neighbor told me that he had a kitty that looked JUST like Charlie Fluffypants but that his Tigger had passed in March. So sad! So when I saw him in the laundry room on my way out the door I took a deep breath and asked him if he was going to be around for Christmas because Mr. Fluffypants needed a babysitter. He was fantastic and said that yes he was probably going to be around but that if he wasn't for a day, Don, our upstairs neighbor and Neil (across the hall neighbor)'s best friend would be home and between them, they'd make sure my furbaby was taken care of! He also exclaimed how cute he thought Charlie was and I was sold that it was the best plan to keep Charlie at home and let the neighbors fuss over him for a few days.
Anyway, once I was done my Costco trip in which I bought Shrimp Cocktail, ground beef to make curried meatballs and Mexican Pasta Sauce and chicken wings to make... well, chicken wings (which I think should be a food group unto itself and one of my FAVORITE things to eat ever!), I came home.
I sat on the sofa for the remainder of the evening and worked through my Goals book. If you don't know, every year I write down my goals in categories of Family, Friends, Relationships, Financial, Education, Health and Beauty, Home and Outrageous. Usually I go through the list quarterly to see how I'm doing but I was a bit busy this year and until last night had completely forgotten that I'd even done it.
I crossed off a LOT of things... Things like 'spend a week with Dad'... I crossed that off because even tho it hasn't happened yet, the plane ticket is booked. Things like 'Pay Tax Arrears by end of year', 'move to a 2 bedroom apartment', ... There are obviously a lot of things still left on the list and some which it is clear won't be completed by the end of the year. And that is OK. Some will be carried forward to next year, some will be evaluated for usefullness based on what I feel is going on next year and some will be ditched because they're either no longer a priority or they've changed, or they don't count now because something has changed (like buy a new bbq for bunker... no more bunker, no need for bbq).
The second thing I did with that Goal book was to make a second section at the end of every category labelled Oct-Dec. I took the goals I thought I could complete or the ones I wanted to focus on in the last quarter of the year and re-wrote them under that heading. I also added new ones or modified existing ones. That's the nice thing about goals... you can change them as your life changes.
When I was done I put my pen down and my book down and went to bed... and as I was getting comfy and cozy I realized that not a single one of those goals and thoughts had to do with food.
Food has gotten the better of me in the past and it was well on it's way to getting the better of me just recently. Food, in my opinion, is to nourish your body. People and goals and sunshine and kittens and puppies nourish your soul. That's the way it is for me... and from now until December, my one and only food related goal will be to remember this.
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