Today was another excellent day for many reasons. Grady and I celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary, I weighed in 4 pounds lighter today at 30/10, I had an reaffirming session with my therapist, and we enjoyed a delicious home cooked anniversary meal! I also had some beautiful flowers waiting for me when I got back to the lake 🙂 I am really starting to feel like I am on the road of understanding and I guess recovery. It is still hard to use that addiction language…addict, relapse, and recovery. The longer I am on this road the more apparent it appears. Just when I start to question wether I really do have an addiction and that maybe that is not the case David brings me back to reality with a cool glass of knowledge and truth. But I am really starting to figure all this shit out and understanding how I will maintain a healthy life for the rest of my life in a way that allows for food indulgences that will not harm my health. Let me break down all this goodness for you!

4th Wedding Anniversary!

Our wedding was EPIC on so many levels. It was a weekend affair at a BEAUTIFUL hotel on Lake Washington. The Bella was there along with all our nearest and dearest. The Bella is the name of my parents boat- it is a family member…we love it an cherish it like a pet…a very spoiled pet. The rehearsal dinner featured a steel drum band, milkshake shack, and a Hawaiian style BBQ. EPIC. Our wedding was full of surprises and delights and was exactly what we had visioned. My gown was custom made just for me, the theme was “Exploration Couture”, we were married by a ships captain, and sprinkled throughout the event was an old world sailing ship carved out of ice that also doubled as a crab server and a 5 foot chocolate fountain. BEYOND EPIC. Sunday we had a Bon Voyage brunch, the Bella was blessed by the man who married us, and we departed for our 6 week cruise with my parent aboard the Bella. Honeymooning with your parents sounds crazy. But my mom is a gourmet chef who whips up the most amazing meals, the Bella is a 70 food yacht, and my dad can navigate the most treacherous passageways. Oh…and we cruised from Seattle to Sitka. So yeah…honeymooning with your parents is NOT crazy in situations like these! On this day every year I get to remember this EPIC weekend and experience for all the people who made our wedding day so extravagant and lovely. It was just something that will never happen again and I am so thankful that it was how Grady started out lives together. So today we reminisced and remembered and said our thanks for all of the people who made that day happen. And I really do have “that” marriage. It gets better and better every day in every way. 

Weight-In

I was down 4 pounds today. I told my coach before I even stepped on that I was pretty sure this was not going to be positive. I told him I had indulged and was prepared to pay the price. I couldn’t even look at the numbers and when he said I was down 4 pounds I thanked every God I knew of including Mother Earth. I was SO happy…I was ecstatic. It brings my grand total to 28.4 pounds in 6 weeks, an average a 4.7 pounds a week. That is pretty awesome. I am beginning to understand the balance that will have to exist in my life from this point forward to maintain a healthy weight/fat ration. “bad” food is just apart of life and it is never going away. I have to learn to live with it and deal with it and enjoy it on occasion and only those occasions. I am always always fearful that that one indulgence will lead to another then another…and I will be right back where I started. I know that I do not ever want to be that person…I can tell that my taste and wants and understandings of food are changing and I will just not do some things that I used to do again. But it is a slippery and scary slope. Today that was all David and I talked about…how to be aware of that slippery slope and recognize when an indulgence has triggered something. But more on that in a bit. I talked with my coach about the need sometimes to feel normal and how sometimes it is just to feasible to eat “on-plan”. We talked about how I was still able to make healthy and “on-planish” choices while out and about and how that lead to a loss regardless. I lost 3 pounds of pure fat and 1 pound of muscle. That is a great ratio for me! I was very proud of what I had done and was thankful that I was paying so much attention to those indulgences. I planned for them…I factored them in…I had them publicly and I stuck to my plan of one of this or two of those and that was it. So in some ways I feel like I am really on the road to recovery and understanding.

David

I don’t know that it is weird or not that I refer to my therapist by his first name but I have since starting with him and he has never stopped me so he shall be called David. It was a great session. He kept saying “You are really healthy!” “You are making the best decisions constantly.” That feels good. And I can write these things because it is the truth. I have made these decisions publicly and all of my decisions have been made from only truthful statements and understandings. I made a comment during our session about how I could not understand why people did not talk honestly about weight and food..that being truthful was the only answer and that people HAD to speak the truth. He simply said, “No they don’t. They dont have to say anything. They can continue to live in dear and anxiety and shame. That is their choice.” Oh snap…yep. You are right. I rephrased and said that if people wanted to become healthier and happier then they needed to start talking truthfully. He agreed with parts of that statement. Just talking to yourself truthfully is just as beneficial as talking publicly. He knows that I am blogging all of this and we often talk about the benefits of this dialogue…even if I am the only one writing and reading it. It just helps you think through things and come to realizations that you would have never had. So my wish for everyone in this struggle is to start talking honestly to at least yourself. You weight what you weigh or you feel the way you do or you look the way you look for a reason. If YOU are not happy with that then get real with yourself. There IS a reason to it. I think the only way to find that reason is to get honest…brutally honest.

I notice everything now that is food related and it sometimes weirds me out. I notice when people are zoned out while eating or I can see the look in their eyes and faces when they see some food item that they “just have to have”. I see how much people eat and what they are eating. I am breaking down everything that I am observing and I catch myself often doing this and thinking “Why am I doing this? I never did it before!” It is because I am aware of these things within myself. I am constantly comparing the old and new me to the people I am observing. It is a way to gauge and understand my progress…to judge just how far I have come in the understanding of this addiction. But it makes me feel for the person I am observing. I just want to tell them there is a way out of that…you can make changes and you can become aware of what your are doing. But I never do and I never will. Not my struggle. Maybe they are happy that way. Who am I to judge someone else life and appearance.

I have also learned to distance myself from others struggle. I often have people asking me if I have talked to so and so or if they have approached me to learn more about what I am doing because ___________ has really let themselves go and they need to lose some weight. I understand where these people are coming from. They are concerned about their loved one and want to see some changes. And what they have tried before has not worked and now they see me doing this and wow it looks awesome and pretty easy- well relatively easy. My canned answer has been “That is not my struggle. I can only do me.” While my addiction is shared with millions of Americans and many of of friends and family members, it is not only my place but none of my business. People who are packing around some extra pounds know they are packing around those pounds. They do NOT need me getting all up in their shit about it. They don’t want it as much as I didn’t. They are where I was 10 weeks ago. STUCK. Frustrated, upset, annoyed, exacerbated, and clueless. 10 weeks ago I had no idea 30/10 would work…I did NOT know how to get the pounds off. I had tried everything and nothing worked. I read books and articles, watched videos and followed plans…joined gyms and tried new fangled workout routines. Overweight people are almost always in this same boat…USS Lost. But they know they are either not ready for the work that comes with actually losing that weight for good and they have just come to accept their fat fate. I have had a few conversations with friends about this. “I do everything right! Why can’t I lose it?” I get that! I thought I was doing everything right too…but I obviously wasn’t. Something was off in my world…how else could I weigh 100 pounds more than I should? Green salad was not doing that. And I am more and more surprised at how much the small stuff can jack up your life. Starbucks was a big reason I was packing those pounds around. Overeating was another. And sugar…I think I was consuming WAY more sugar than I should have been. And I am SURE I will find out more reasons I was carry around those extra LBS as I move through this process. I might not ever have all the answers to my weight equation. But my canned answer to this statement is “There IS a reason.” You are overweight or you feel like crap or even though you are doing everything right and working out constantly without seeing ANY results FOR A REASON. Want me to help you brainstorm? Awesome. Want to talk about what that could be? Lets do it! Want to better understand what I have done? Of course! Want me to talk to ______ about it? HELL NO. Not my struggle. This work is individual work. My struggle, while similar at the foundation, is not someone else’s struggle. Until they are willing and ready to do the work then I am OUT. I am not dedicating ANY brain power to them or their issues. My hope is that my friend and family DO get the help and seek out the reasons because I love them and want to to have long long long lives. So I have been saying this often instead of “Have you tried?” Maybe what I am doing would work for you. Maybe what I have learned can help you too. Maybe we can help each other! But if you don’t come to me I am NOT coming to you.

David was very happy with my progress and my shifted thinking. I am changing how I interact with people and food, I am changing my perfection of obesity and this struggle globally, I am learning to focus on me and my needs, I am learning how to “do me” around others, and I am learning how to set boundaries for myself and others along this journey. Todays session was very affirming. I am getting it and that feels good. I want to continue to get it. I am OK with never getting it completely because this addiction is never going away. That superhighway that has been carved into my brain is just not ever going away. This will be a constant struggle for me for the rest of my life. With work that superhighway will become overgrown and cracked but it will always be there. It will be my brains preferred food highway always. I have to create new highways and drive my car on these new ones every freaking day even when it is clogged with traffic because that is the only way to stay in recovery and not fall back into relapse. Now I hate traffic for two reasons…

So all in all it was a great day. Lot’s of thinking…lots of reflection…lots of love…and some beautiful flowers. If I am rich and famous one day I will have fresh flowers delivered every week for every room of my home. I just love flowers. I am not very good at keeping them alive but I do love them. They bring such light and fragrance to a room and a home. Flowers remind me to be thankful for them at their peak of beauty and appreciate their presence once they are gone…just like life. We have to appreciate our beauty and health at its peak and appreciate this beauty and health once it has gone. If we appreciate and protect these things while we have them the memories of these things will sustain us when they are gone. And if we are lucky enough, regain our beauty and health if it has left us for a bit. Some flowers bloom and bloom every season, just like out beauty and health.