Changes are Happening

Affirmation: I go to bed at 10; I wake up at 6 rested and renewed

Slowly changes are happening. I am beginning to see them. In the way that I am not thinking about food so much. In the way that I am feeling satisfied with eating less. In the way that I choose for something fast and nutritious rather than sweet and salty for meals. In the way that there is more plate than food these days. Small changes, almost unnoticable to me muchless those around me. But they are hallmarks for permanent changes I think. Slowly these changes are becoming habit, a part of my daily, unthinking lifestyle. Something I can live with without fear of falling off the band wagon. (or diet wagon)

I am really seeing the benefit, for me at least to taking one small unhealthy habit and taking a whole month to work on replacing it with a healthy positive habit. Taking the whole 30 days to create a new habit. Not trying to make sweeping changes all at once. As I have looked back on my life, even though I gained almost 75 lbs inside the first 3 or 4 months of moving back home, I have also realized that many of these habits were solidly in place for years. I had been lucky that a relative busy and active job helped keep the lbs at bay; or rather on a slow increase. Moving home and being unemployed and underactive for a year just allowed those unhealthy habits to allow the weight to come on at an alarming accelerated rate. So the habits are really longstanding. War must be waged to change them. But separating them out one by one, looking at them individually, and giving myself a whole month (30 days to create a habit?) to incorporate them into my life. It is manageable. It also has helped me to see the truth in "it is not about food" in this journey. It is about a whole lifestyle.

It also breaks it down into manageable bits that are not overwhelming. I can commit to getting to bed at 10 and getting up at 6 for 30 days. By the end of that time, I am accustomed to it, it is not an effort, in fact I am all but falling asleep on my feet by 10 now-days. But what is overwhelming and what I have repeatedly been unable to do over my adult lifetime is make sweeping changes all at once; change eating choices, habits, portion sizes; add 1-2 hours of exercise a day; silence the internal negative talk; work on the emotional issues surrounding eating; cut out all "illegal" foods for the rest of my life; and hundreds of other life changing things.

I think that this thought process began to float to the top for me when I read the book "Portion Savvy" by Carrie Latt Wiatt. While this is not like most other diets, it still runs along the diet mentality for me, although I think she would disagree. But the light bulb for me was that she took a whole month to create change in your eating habits. The first week you concentrated on changing your breakfast and adding a bit of exercise, the second week lunch, more exercise, etc until the 4th week you put it all together. She concentrated on portion size rather than counting calories/carbs/fat, although she encouraged you to be aware of these in the foods you ate. So again it was more diet than what I ultimately know will work for me, but she was the first that I had read that stressed lifestyle change, taking time to create that change, and that it is something that has to permeate the rest of your life. What I took away from this was that you have to change habits, not just food choices.

And of course underlying all of this is the soul work of understanding how I use food to meet emotional needs. That is the toughest and most elusive for me. Many times I eat because I just plain like the taste of the food in my mouth. But as I call myself on it, I am also seeing that there is also an emotional element. But lately I have been realizing that it is also a deep seated habit. I'm bored; eat. I'm happy; eat. I'm successful; celebrate by eating. I'm tired; eat. It is autonomic, like the beating of my heart, the breathing of my lungs, the circulation of my blood. I don't think about it; I do it.

Habit:
1. A recurrent, often unconscious pattern of behavior that is acquired through frequent repetition.
2. An established disposition of the mind or character.
3. Customary manner or practice: a person of ascetic habits.
4. An addiction, especially to a narcotic drug.

It is habit, pure and simple. What started as a response of coping has now been transferred into habit as well. As I learn new coping techniques, I must also change the habits or they will continue even though I am no longer using them as coping mechanism's.

How do you break a habit? If it is unconscious, has become unconscious through frequent repetition, then the only way to break it is to become conscious. To become conscious. Isn't that why we eat, use drugs, escape? To become unconscious? Time to wake up. Become conscious. Change the habits. Become alive again

I am so tired of being locked inside all this weight. I do not want to live another moment of my life unconscious. You know it hurts all the same; using food to cope or just plain facing the stresses, pain, or what ever else is driving me to use food to cope. So just cope with life to begin with eh? Easier said than done. Easier, but not impossible. I am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel...or the possibility that there really are numbers below 100 on the scale! Hope! Faith! They seem intertwined and dependent on each other.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. Proverbs 13:12

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1

HOPE: To wish for something with expectation of its fulfillment.

FAITH: 1. Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.
2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence

I have hope that this is not a live sentence for me; being fat. Somedays I have faith also, other days I am not so sure. But I do know that years of hoping and not seeing it happen has made my heart sick (actually both physically and metaphorically). I have faith that this is something that can change. But I am not sure that this has been true before. I am not sure that I really believed that I could ever loose weight. I still struggle with it even now. I know that I gave up on loosing weight. I even know the time that I did. It was after reading "Fat is a Feminist Issue" by Suzie Orbach. I gave up, I lost hope that dieting would ever work. I still believe that dieting; diets will not work. But I also gave up on the whole thing, now I know that working on the underlying issues brings hope and change. Diets don't. They only deal with the symptom of overeating, not the underlying motivations and emotional issues.

Slow but sure; change is a fact of life. It is my choice to make that change a positive one. I have to be willing to do the work though. Finally I am.