Today: I maintained the integrity of my maintenance calorie budget, I remained refined sugar-free, I met my daily water goal, and I stayed well connected with exceptional support.
Avoiding emotions, rejecting feelings, and retreating into food in the process of fleeing is a big part of being a first-class emotional/stress eater. Addiction comes into play because the food becomes the solution for everything. It's easy to get addicted to solutions, right? There's a major problem with that because the dive into the food isn't a solution at all. Even though time and time again we're capable of convincing ourselves this time will be different...and when it isn't, it's "that's the last time," until the next time, of course, then that becomes the last time.
I'm convinced that my emotional development has been stunted my entire life. Whenever I started avoiding emotions/feelings--and escaping into the food, is when I stopped learning how to properly handle emotions and feelings. Granted, I've learned a lot in the last ten years and my daily practice makes it very hard to avoid emotions and feelings, so I feel 'em without the food--and sometimes the feelings or emotions are processed in irrational ways. Sometimes the processing of emotions and feelings can come out sideways because they're either turned up way too high or too low. Why? Because I have more than three decades of experience in avoiding feelings and emotions and only one decade worth of experience in practicing actually allowing them to process.
When I write about this "daily practice" it isn't just about the food. The practice includes so much more than food plan boundaries, believe me. For those like me, we're learning about so much more than creating a food plan that keeps us well. We're learning how to live. We're learning how to develop our spiritual lives. We're learning how to accept. We're learning how to love. We're learning how to forgive. We're learning how we can survive and move through turbulent emotions and uncomfortable feelings. We're learning how not every crisis is the end of the world. We're learning how some things we didn't consider before, do need considering--nurturing, and loving.
I've said it a thousand times: "I don't diet." And I don't. Diets don't go deep. Diets, for someone like me, at best, become a cartoon character band-aid on a chronic and deadly disease.
We can survive. We can thrive. We can live, love, feel pain, feel joy, forgive, do things differently--and we can make it---and we can reach a healthy body weight along the way--but it comes, ultimately, in my opinion, because we're willing to broaden our perspective beyond a diet mentality and into something deeper and more powerful.
I don't have good willpower. I'm not the best at impulse control. On the surface, you might think those are two things needed for long-term weight loss and maintenance. Good thing they are not because if so, I'd be 500 pounds right now. I do have a daily practice. It isn't perfect and it doesn't have to be perfect--it simply must be practiced. Some days are better than others. But isn't that life?
Someone much wiser than me once said, "Life is 10% what happens and 90% how you react to it." In life, attitude and perspective is everything.
In this journey, attitude, perspective, and acceptance--all tempered with a code of self-honesty and an open mind, becomes the difference between having a consistent measure of peace and calm or having consistent chaos and insanity.
I went back into the archives to exactly one year ago and started reading--that's what inspired tonight's post.
From 1 year Ago Today, August 31st, 2017:
Today was challenging in several ways. My production load and responsibilities at work are super high at the moment and that makes for long days, plus I've decided to stop avoiding a couple of hard decisions I must make very soon. Sorry to be vague--but the issue isn't important to discuss.
What is important is the fact that sometimes things and people need to be dealt with head-on---and if you're like me, avoiding these confrontations can eventually lead to a breach in a recovery plan. Pure and simple-- if important things are avoided, they don't just go away--their presence becomes heavy as they grow and it becomes more difficult to hold them down. I do not want to stuff it down with food. That's what I did for years. Instead, I'll deal directly; releasing the weight of avoidance.
Today's Featured Tweets:
#breakfast Pause. It's a very important word to me. More importantly, it's an action I must practice daily. Thank you, coffee cup, for reminding me! #foodplan #dailypractice pic.twitter.com/4TTFLjLwe6— Sean Anderson (@SeanAAnderson) August 31, 2018
#whatsfordinner Big 9oz 96% lean burger atop 234g shredded potatoes pan prepared w/approx.5sec olive oil cooking spray, 4oz mushrooms & 122g red bell pepper. 28g shredded mild cheddar melted on top. Oh my- love it! #foodplan #foodscale #dailypractice #foodlogging #accountability pic.twitter.com/I0IQSVxKmy— Sean Anderson (@SeanAAnderson) September 1, 2018
Thank you for reading and your continued support,
Strength,
Sean
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