Archive for the The Journey Category

I have several friends who have recently begun journeys to better health. One is having immense success in the midst of great personal trauma. The other met with her new doctor yesterday. I watch from the sidelines giddy with hope and filled with fear. Will they succeed? What can I do to contribute to that success? How do I best encourage them when I know the stakes and the uphill battle they fight. They are at the bottom of the hill, getting ready to charge the enemy. Will they duck and cover or will they take their bayonet and go for the guts?

It leads me to question my own journey(again) and how I got to where I am today. I ask myself why I have succeeded when so many fail. What have I learned that I can share with others? Or in the words of my boss, what is it about my journey that “makes me so remarkable?”

I want to be completely honest, I don’t feel remarkable. I don’t even feel special. If anything, I feel amazed. My weight loss is amazing because managing my body never ceases to be a struggle. That is why magic pills don’t work. I am constantly adapting to my cravings and coming up with new ways to circumvent my desire to eat. Many times I lose the battle but I never stop fighting the war. Fail today, endeavor to succeed tomorrow. I suppose this is what inevitably makes me successful, the fact that I refuse to give up.

I had lunch with a co-worker yesterday, someone I respect a great deal. He asked me, “So, why are you successful?” Here’s what I said.

I have to address the reasons why I eat. This means doing the dirty work of getting to know myself intimately. Know thy enemy. For instance, I know that I love to eat for the simple pleasure of eating. Food tastes good. Also, I like to eat when I feel physically bad(I’ve gained 6 pounds being sick this week). I eat when stressed out to calm down. It relaxes me. I have known about these desires for many years but refused to do anything about them. In all honesty, I had learned to accept the fact that I would never be thin because I “knew” I could never live without the foods I loved. I made the food more important than my physical health. And the sad thing is, the more I ate, the more dead inside I felt. That is why I call food addiction a lie. It never made me happy. Knowing all of that, how did I go about fighting back?

Education.

First I read about other people who had lost weight and managed to keep it off. Not Weight Watcher people(though I am not against WW), I just wanted to know if there was a way to not go on a diet, but to learn how to still eat AND lose weight. I began to read books about nutrition and the way chemical compositions affect the body. As I learned, I had little light bulb moments. “Oh, so that’s why I can’t stop eating candy!” or “Wow, there’s that many calories in French fries?”

But I liked French fries. How do I stop eating them?

I made a choice. I liked French fries, but I really wanted to lose weight. In the beginning I allowed myself the occasional diversion to eat the things I really wanted to eat, like French fries. I even learned how to bake sweet potato fries in the oven and discovered something I like more than traditional French fries. OMG! YUM! I closed the door on many things I used to love to eat and learned there was a whole host of foods I could enjoy that didn’t have as many calories, were actually good for me(fresh spinach!), and re-learned how to make things like pizza in a healthy way. This continues to evolve today.

Portion control

This is the one thing I will always struggle with. I don’t like to stop eating. I call it my “feeding frenzy.” I have to make a very deliberate choice to put small portions on my plate and not go back for seconds if I want to lose weight. Is it difficult? Yes. Is it impossible? No. Is it my favorite thing? No. But I have to do it to keep the weight off. It is the one truly difficult part of maintaining my weight loss.

Exercise

I know now that people can lose weight without exercise but I didn’t know that in the beginning. So I just made myself do it. I didn’t want to. It felt a little bit like a root canal, necessary but not wholly enjoyable. It was not fun for a very long time. It was something I just had to get through. I looked at it like taking medicine. I’m sick and I want to feel better. So I must walk 30 minutes a day. I will be glad when it is over but I’m going to make myself do it. End of story. I still marvel at how I slowly fell in love with exercise. I remember what it felt like in the beginning. It sucked. But now, on most days, I really love moving. I love how I feel while doing it and I love how I feel when I’m done. I learned this from experience, not from a book. I think this is how we all learn best, personal experience. But you’ll never learn if you never try.

Today I am rooting for my friends. I am hoping and praying for their success. I hope they find satisfaction when they reach their destination, but also in the journey. I know that I feel better since I lost the weight and I know they will too. Not only physically, but emotionally and spiritually. Because losing weight does not fundamentally change who you are inside, but there are many wonderful blessings that grow out of that bitter, hard ground…things like self-confidence, tenacity and self-love. And those qualities are even more wonderful than fitting into your goal dress.

I picked up a free ebook on Amazon the other day. It is titled, “It’s Not All About Me – The top ten techniques for Building Quick Rapport with Anyone”, by Robin Dreeke. I thought it looked like an interesting read. I’m all about self improvement and can be fairly neurotic. I thought I could probably glean a few things that would at the very least help me at work. Robin Dreeke is the head of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Program within the Counterintelligence Division. I thought, I bet this guy is pretty smart. He is!

I read the first two chapters with interest yesterday at lunch. His first piece of advice is to smile. In fact, the whole first chapter is about how disarming a smile can be and how to engage people simply by showing happiness. For some of us this is difficult and takes a little practice. For instance, have you ever seen a person who looks as if they have never smiled a day in their life?

Their face seems to be stuck in a permanent state of misery. I always wonder what that person would look like if they were happier.

To smile seems fairly intuitive in the building of relationships. All that is required is to maneuver a few facial muscles and viola! Win friends and influence people. Except that it’s not always that easy. At least not for me.

I have mentioned before that I’m a little like Eyeore. I can be a gloomy Gus. Pouting’s my name and frowning’s my game. Okay. Enough word games. You get the picture. I have a terrible habit of walking around wearing my emotions on my face. A common reaction to this look of doom is, “Margaret, are you okay?” to which I respond, “No.” To which they say, “What’s wrong with you?” To which I reply, “The sky is falling.” It’s really rather pathetic. But I’m very good at self pity. One could say I’ve earned my gold star in self pity.

A few years ago someone pulled me aside and said, “Margaret, I know you have a hard life, but you have to be more positive at work. Everyone thinks you’re grumpy. Even if you don’t feel like it, you need to smile more.” I walked away and cried for a week. Then I began to learn the art of painting on a fake smile. When anyone would ask how I was I would say, “Fine.” Just like a normal person. For a long time it felt really unnatural but eventually I got used to it. And truth be told, I’m glad that person told me to cheer up. They said a hard truth that made me reevaluate my facial expressions. And that is powerful.

As I read Robin’s book the true power behind a smile dawned on me. Even though I generally am very good at my fake smile now, I have learned how to genuinely smile and put the real emotion behind it, even if I feel like garbage inside.

Today started out really rough. I dragged my tired body out of bed, depressed and sick at heart. I had a familiar feeling of gloomy Gus syndrome and longed to stay at home in bed. But I couldn’t. I have to go to work whether I feel like it or not. But I cannot stress enough how very much I did not want to and how difficult it was to make myself do it.

Once I walked in the door to work I adjusted my facial muscles and forced myself to look carefree. Within minutes I was engaged in a conversation with a woman I don’t know very well. I complimented her hair and told her “I like your personal style.” After she gushed about her hair dresser for a few minutes she stopped and said, “You know Margaret, you are always so cheerful.” I smiled and thought, “If only you knew.”

But I walked away from the conversation with a glimmer of hope in my heart. If making myself smile and pretend to be happy makes other people happy which in turn makes me happy, why did I ever expend so much energy moping about?

And that, my friends, is why we should all smile as much as we can when we are sad and having a hard time. A smile is like a boomerang. When you throw it at someone, it comes right back at you. Which does kind of make it all about me, but not really.

For many years I didn’t know who I was. Sure, I knew my name and general proclivities but I wasn’t cognizant of my real identity. Every day my emotions led me around by the nose while I smiled or whimpered at their whim. One could say I was a bit of a trainwreck. And I didn’t let people help me. I didn’t want to acknowledge there was a problem.

I burned through several important relationships because every time something happened(bad or good) I would dump all of my feelings onto that person, using them as a sounding board and all around safety net. I would not only yack their ear off, I would then ask for their advice. I refused to make a decision about anything until I asked everyone I came into contact with what they thought I should do.

Even worse, I would then neglect their advice, do what I wanted to do and then apologize. I still have a habit of apologizing for anything and everything. Almost as if I’m apologizing for my existence. I have been so worried about what everyone thought of me that I didn’t take the time to understand who I was. My identity was centered around what I thought people wanted me to be. Trying to please everyone and in essence pleasing no one.

Someone close to me hurt my feelings recently. They only said a few words but those choise words cut deep. The old song about sticks and stones breaking bones, but words would never hurt me is so untrue. I have been thinking about that person and what they said for a month now. Wondering why they said what they did and if they could possibly know how deep it went. As usual, I am too much of a coward to call them out on it. I’m worried I’ll make it worse, to be frank, and that I should just forgive and move on. I could talk about forgiveness and reconciliation here and but that’s not the topic of this blog. What I want to discuss here is loving myself and knowing who I am outside of what other people think of me. This person fundamentally attacked my lifestyle and in a very personal way. I think I know their motives, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less.

The point I want to make is this, I have determined that I no longer need to apologize for myself. Who I am is good. That is not to say I am perfect, but in general, I have honest intentions. I am living a healthy lifestyle. I am aware that I was once enslaved to food and have been set free. I have done much research on how food negatively impacts the lives of people I care deeply for. And in fact, I see that many people I care deeply for are hurting because they have many of the same struggles I have with food. I am also angry. I am angry at companies that make food addictive and promote ill health. I am angry at our culture when it promotes laziness, gluttony and greed. And I honestly want to change the world. I want to change it by speaking truth about the foods we consume and our attitudes about them. When I see an ad for mega stuff Oreo cookies, I want to tell people how many chemicals are in them in the hopes that educating that person will help set them free from eating a whole bag but not understanding why. It is not because I am trying to make that person feel bad about their food choices. To the contrary, I only want to help.

I look at it this way, if I were walking through the woods and came across a person who had fallen into a ditch and broken their ankle and couldn’t get up, I would offer assistance. That person might tell me, “I don’t need your help.” Then I would walk on. If that person cried and said, “I do need help.” I would do everything in my power to do just that.

My husband acuses me quite frequently of lecturing. Truth be told, I am frequently lecturing myself out of eating something I really want to eat but know it is bad for me. My oldest son and I were at Sam’s on Sunday and I saw a 3.6 pound bag of Skittles. The package was bright red with rainbows on it. I love rainbows. They make me happy. I wanted to buy it and eat every single last Skittle. So I picked up the bag and showed it to my son and said, “How many calories do you think are in this bag?” He rolled his eyes. He knew what was coming. Another lecture. But this time, a nice older gentleman interrupted when he stopped and tried(in his strange senile way) to help me figure out how many calories were in the bag. He did not understand that I was lecturing myself out of buying them. It was actually rather comical. The thing is, I don’t even know I’m doing it most of the time. It’s just who I am now. I have devised all of these internal protection devices to save myself from the lies of the world that try to tempt me. And I want to throw this out there….I’m tired of apologizing for it.

I am that crazy health freak people complain about. I get it. I’m weird. But you know what? I’ve been weird since the third grade when they put me in the class for slow kids. And maybe even before that. I don’t know how to be normal. I don’t even know what normal is. My friends will attest to this. I am coming out of the closet to everyone else. I’m not going to apologize for being who I am any longer.

The thing is, I have been liberated from a lifetime of unhealthy living. I don’t have it all figured out. I’m on the journey, learning every day how to care for my body. And I have so many foibles and a trillion regrets. But I’m doing my darnedest to make my life better one choice at a time. I honestly don’t judge people on how they live their life(at least I try really hard not to). I’ve lived it. I have been the guy with the broken ankle refusing help. But today, I want to help other people get their lives on track. You might think I’m lecturing. I want to be forthright with you, I’m just being who I am. I know who I am and where I have been. I even know where I’m going. You may not agree with my lifestyle and I may not agree with yours, but I do promise one thing, to share with you what I’ve learned in an effort to help improve your quality of life. Do you know why? Because I care. I wouldn’t tell you there is too much sodium in soda if I didn’t think it was important. And, you might not care. I get it. If you don’t want to hear it, just tell me and I’ll shut up. But it you do…

Maybe

Just maybe

I can help you out of that ditch.