I’ve come to learn that to run a successful business, you really need to have a practice of “working on your stuff” because when you have your own business, you will be confronted with your issues every step of the way.

I used to make a very regular practice of what I thought was “working on my stuff: and what that meant was, facing the grief that I walked with 24/7 and surrendering to it. Spending long stretches of time crying and just getting out the pain.  I didn’t know what else to do.  I would cry for hours and then I’d feel a little better, sometimes a lot better.  I didn’t know what else to do beyond acknowledging and trying to release the pain.  I didn’t know that there was more that could be done; medicine–balm if you will–that I could put on these wounds to help them to heal permanently  not just wash them out and let the air get to them. While that helped to alleviate the surface pain, it did very little in terms of real healing.  I just didn’t have the tools then and so I cried and waited, cried and waited.
I’ve learned a few things since then and now I know that working on your stuff means interacting with it.  My dear friend Gerri has asked me ‘how do you work on your stuff?  what do you do ? what does that even mean?

For me it looks like this:
Event —Thought — Feelings — Behavior—

I know that the painful feelings that I experience around things in life come directly from the thoughts that I have about events and I have come to notice that I often have the same set of thoughts regardless of the specifics of the circumstance.  This is also known as the pattern.

For example, every time I did one of my Feed Your Soul, Feed Your Body workshops the first thought that would come into my head after putting the info out about a workshop would be:
What am I going to say to myself when nobody signs up and this class doesn’t happen?
How am I going to keep myself from feeling like a failure?

Whenever I launch something the thought “how will I console myself when this doesn’t work out” is always my go-to place. It’s even deeper really.  I realize that every time I decide there’s something that I want my first reaction is: that will never happen or it’s not going to work…

And how do I interact with that pattern?
I start by observing where my thoughts naturally go.
I realize that I have a choice.  I can go down the well-worn path or I can choose a different path.  When you look at your patterns and see them for what they are:  just an organization of the same thoughts over and over again, you can decide not to engage with them.  You can see them:  OK, here comes the part where I start contracting and feeling small, amping up for the disappointment.

What helps me is to do something drastic like going in the complete opposite direction.

Please understand this is not about “putting on a happy face” and going into denial.  I am very well aware from all of the therapeutic work that I have done over the years, what experiences have led me to have these thoughts in these circumstances.  Just knowing “why” does not necessarily help with the “how.”  And right there is the difference between therapy and coaching.  Therapy addresses the “why”, coaching teaches the “how”.  Both good, both important.  And the HOW here is how to move past the thoughts of failure and limiting behavior.

I don’t need to keep doing this if I don’t want to.  I can make a choice and do it differently.

Even if you don’t believe that how you think about things affects the outcome there’s still a reason to check your thoughts:  If I’m assuming the best and behaving from a place of success rather than failure then the time from when I launch the course to the time it takes place is a pleasant experience for me rather than me trying to console myself for the ensuing disappointment when what I fear will come true actually does.

And by the way I think that trying to “prepare yourself” emotionally in case things don’t work out is just a recipe for failure.  It keeps you from coming up with creative solutions, from putting your thing out in the world, it keeps you small, and scared.  How does trying to brace yourself for things not working out do any good whatsoever?   I believe in going for things full out and dealing with the outcome when the shit hits the fan.
Again with the Opposites
I embrace the opposite of what is natural for me to feel.  I suspend my regular thought process and see my class as full with people who are eager to learn what I have to teach.  I see all of us learning and sharing, getting so much out of the experience.  It is really a blessing for us all.  Everyone gets many tools they can use to grow their business and tools that they can use to to take care of themselves through the process.

Sometimes I visit that scenario many times a day.
It beats the alternative any day.

So many of us just assume we’re not going to get what we want so we adjust our vision and instead go after what we think we can get, what we think is possible, what we think makes sense. We’ve been given the message that it’s not OK to want, or it’s not possible to get what we want and so we’ve become terrified to let ourselves want for fear that it will just lead to heartbreak and disappointment.  We spend our time passively accepting what comes our way; bobbing up and down in the sea of life–adrift and directionless.

We walk around in a fog, suffering from amnesia because we have wiped out our deep desires and then we wonder why we’re so unhappy and unfulfilled.  Everything is out of balance because we’re not aligned with our wants and we’re accepting substitutes in lieu of the real thing.

We don’t feel like ourselves, things don’t make sense.

Trying to fill the real want with something else is actually the seed of addiction.  It’s why we eat too much, drink too much, work too much.

There’s a brilliant quote out there that says:  “You can’t get enough of what you don’t really want.”

Sometimes our wants are just symbols for something deeper; but if you don’t follow the desire, you can’t get to what’s underneath it. For example when there’s something you want (and the bigger the better for this exercise) you can fill in the blanks to figure out if there’s a deeper thing:  When I get ____________, the sensation I’ll feel is______________.  I encourage you do to this little exercise, there’s a lot of information in it.

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.

And now I will end at the beginning, with the question I started with.  I encourage you to ask yourself in the most loving tone you can muster, as many times a day as you can remember to do it:
“What do you want, my dear?”
Be patient while waiting for the answer, even if the answer does not come.  It will come eventually.  And, there is love and power in the asking.

The second time I ran into him, I was sitting outside the farmer’s market with my dog and he walked by and said “what a cute dog”.  I just sat there on the library steps blubbering…I only managed to mutter  “thanks.”  It was morning and I couldn’t imagine having an intelligent conversation with anyone, let alone Seth Godin.  So when I run into him again–and I know I will…I’ll have a little something to say because I’ve been paying a lot more attention to his blog.  Yesterday’s post in particular gave me a little food for thought.

Not Publishing Any More Books

He announced for the second time this year that he won’t be publishing any more books.  The publishing industry, like the record industry ten years ago, is on the verge of collapse and their business model is totally outdated.

He said this:
All a long way of saying that as the methods for spreading ideas and engaging with people keep changing, I can’t think of a good reason to be on the defensive. It’s been years since I woke up in the morning saying, “I need to write a book, I wonder what it should be about.” Instead, my mission is to figure out who the audience is, and take them where they want and need to go, in whatever format works, even if it’s not a traditionally published book.

Seth spoke with many publishers about this idea–only to be met with massive resistance.

To be succinct: I’m not sure that I serve my audience (you) by worrying about how a new approach is going to help or hurt Barnes & Noble.

I totally agree.  He’s out to serve his audience, not the book business.   Letting go of the way things have been done to make space for a new innovative solution is the optimal mind set for a business person.  Doesn’t hurt to take this approach in life in general either.

Going with the flow
It’s easy for him to go with the flow–he has the freedom to let go of the traditional publishing format because he’s already an established entity.  Regardless of the platform he uses to spread ideas, people will listen.

I’ve been talking about the emotional counterpart to this for months and I refer to it as the feeling of having or being “more than enough.”
He has more than enough money, notariety, respect, and authority which enables him to take big risks.

Being/having more than enough
How would being more than enough and having more than enough translate in your business?   In your life?  What risks would having that security allow you to take? .  How would it change your day? How would it affect your interactions with every person you encounter?

What if thousands of people were waiting with baited breath for your blog posts and checking out your website?

I am fascinated by the concept of “more than enough” and I invite you to examine it for yourself.

I’m talking about embracing the emotional security that affords that luxurious feeling:  doing your thing and knowing no matter what, you couldn’t fail…or that it didn’t matter if you did.  The emotional security that allows you to go out on a limb, because as Shirley Maclaine said so many years ago…baby, that’s where the fruit is.

Maybe it’s time we started coming from “more than enough” so we can experience the freedom to access our deep creativity, instead of running our businesses in survival mode.
You just might come up with the world’s next great idea.

I want to be free to unhook from my food and body issues.

They’re what my identity has been wrapped around personally–for my entire life and professionally–for the last seven years.  I think what happened is that I had a stunning realization that I’m just not that person anymore.   It’s been a long time since I’ve constructed my day around my exercise routine (a regular practice in the past) and I’ve found more compelling things to focus on than the size of my thighs and figuring out how I can lose three more pounds.  There’s definitely a part of me that feels as though the central axis of who I knew myself to be was removed but I think the operative there is the phrase “who I knew myself to be.”  It was only one part of who I was and yet I chose to make that my defining feature.  There’s always that part of me that can’t bear the thought of being too happy or too successful so when things were going well I could always count on my food and body issues to bring me back to earth.  Going public with this stuff was my way of telling the world: I may be successful but look, I’m still a mess deep down inside.  And doing workshops for women who are struggling with the same issues was just living in the wound…it was exhausting and kept me from having the time and space that I needed to heal.

Moving into the future

So deciding to let go of the Feed Your Soul, Feed Your Body workshops was a total relief.  Having two separate focuses was really diffusing my marketing messages and all of my work.  It’s so interesting to me because all of my life I’ve had one main goal and that is:  integration.  I wanted everything in my life to be connected to everything else, which is actually the organic and natural state of things.  I wanted to stop having a passion and a survival job, I wanted the work I did to reflect my values and use my existing talents, I wanted to stop running all over the place, getting this thing here and that thing there;  I wanted all of it to work together like pieces of a puzzle.  Making the decision to let go of what wasn’t working in my life and in my work allowed that to happen.

So finally what I have is what I want and what I’m doing with my work is a conglomeration of all of my experience along with my natural talents.  Feels integrated to me.

As a lot of you know, the work I’ve been doing since I started my business has focused on helping women make peace with food and their bodies.  I work privately with clients and  through my Feed Your Soul, Feed Your Body workshops. I was on a mission to help women who were suffering as I had suffered–hating their bodies, spending all of their mental and emotional energy obsessing about what they should or shouldn’t eat and being constantly dissatisfied with they how they looked.

I put all of my energy and resources into building up these workshops and trying to help as many women as possible get off the diet/binge roller coaster and–to take a line from the marketing materials from my show– get out of the mirror and into their lives.

Keeping a Secret

What most people don’t know is that the entire time I was giving these workshops I was straddling the wall between self-acceptance and continuing to diet and trying to change my body. The fact that I was still so deep into my own struggle made me often feel like a fraud.

There’s nothing more difficult than trying and teach what you have not yet learned.

Doing the workshops and my work with clients helped me to heal a lot of my issues, but it’s all still very tenuous and I no longer want my livelihood to depend on how far along I am on the continuum of making peace with food and my body.  I haven’t lived the solution long enough to teach the solution.

It also hit me that building a career from the broken and wounded places is maybe not the best way to go.  It was a difficult decision to make; I have based my creative and working identity around my food and body issues for the past 7 years, but at the same time doing this kind of work was a constant reminder of the place in my life where none of it makes any sense, so why would I try to run a business from there?

Kind of crazy if you ask me.

At the same time, there was something else vying for my attention.  As part of the services I offer I was doing a lot of work with people who were looking to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives.  I had great success leading people to their true calling and helping them make a living at it.

It makes perfect sense since I had so much life experience in this area.  In 1996 I quit my full time job to start a personal training business.  In 2002 my husband Larry ended his 20 year career in the insurance industry to pursue his dreams of being a TV producer and in 2008 I started my coaching business.  All of these things were extremely successful.  I loved reinventing myself and I love helping others do the same thing.

Through my life experience and my work I’ve come to understand that having fulfilling work that you find meaningful is really the bedrock for happiness.

Now On to the Next Chapter

So I’m saying goodbye to Feed Your Soul, Feed Your Body in all of its forms and focusing solely on helping people figure out what kind of work they want to do, how to transition into it (without going into financial ruin or having a breakdown) and make a living at it.

My strong background in marketing has enabled me to also coach self-employed practitioners who want to make a difference in the world be successful financially.  I do this privately but I also have a group program called The Yoga of Marketing.  You can find out more about it here and I’ll be updating you about a free teleclass that you can be part of to learn about this program.  If you are in the self-improvement or healing business this can help you take your practice to the next level or get it on track if that’s what you’re needing to do.

And lastly, to all of you reading who have been part of the Feed Your Soul, Feed Your Body journey, I hope that I was able to help you think differently about the struggle and I wish you continued healing and peace around these painful issues.

Here are the two books that found me when I was ready to stop dieting and start doing the real work of loving and accepting myself right where I was.  I recommend  them very highly: Women, Food, and God by Geneen Roth and Thin Is the New Happy by Valerie Frankel.  Pure salvation, both.

There’s a Buddhist saying that I love:  There is no there, only here.

I’ve been thinking about striving, and “Being Enough” and how we’re all working so hard to get “somewhere,” yet when we arrive there’s always someplace further to go, something more to do, something else to prove.

It’s not that ambition is a bad thing.  Not at all.  But, there’s a difference between wanting to expand and grow and relentlessly chasing a dream.  There’s a difference between having a goal and working toward it and thinking you can’t really live life fully until you achieve it.

Making the Journey as Enjoyable As the Destination

It’s a delicate balance; a balance that has eluded me until now.  I’ve had a terrible habit of withholding love, approval, and validation from myself because I was not where I thought I should be in life. I allowed my state of mind to be determined by how close or far away I was from whatever goal I had at the time.
Whether it was in the area of career, relationship or dissatisfaction with my body there was always something I had to achieve before I could be happy, before I could fully inhabit my life, before I could exhale.

Arrival takes one second.  The journey is where we spend our time.

Why do we think that the road to the dream is less important than the dream itself?

I’ve made a radical decision; I’ve decided to live my life so that the journey is as enjoyable as the destination.

I will not withhold love, approval and validation from myself regardless of how far away I am from what I want.

And when I say “withhold love and approval” here’s what I’m referring to:

• Missing out on the good things in front of me because I’m so caught up in feeling bad about what I don’t have in life.  In other words, not being present in the moment.

• Being so obsessed with productivity and getting somewhere that I forget to take some time every day to slow down and just breathe and feel grateful for everything I do have.

• Focusing on what’s not working instead of what is.

• Losing sight of everything that you’ve done in favor of focusing on what still needs to be done.

• Overlooking all of the nice things that you do for others.

• Forgetting to acknowledge mysel for just “showing up” in the myriad of situations that I don’t want to deal with; that are uncomfortable or painful in some way.

What I want NOW

I want the here and now to be joyful and not just a vehicle to some destination in the future that I may or may not get to.  I want to be happy now.  I’m tired of waiting for X, Y, or Z.
I want to end the suffering that I inflict on myself because I’m not “there”– wherever “there” is at the moment.

Dreams Change

The ironic thing about goals is that as you go through life, the dream changes.  Is what you dreamt for yourself ten or twenty years ago the same as the dream you have for yourself today?

I doubt it.

I found an old wish list from 1994 of things that I wanted to have or accomplish.  Some of them I got, some of them I didn’t get, but most of them are no longer important to me.  My dreams have changed.  And so if the dreams are the variable then what remains constant is the journey.

So how about it?  How about refusing to withhold love, validation, and approval from yourself just because you aren’t where you think you should be.

How about allowing yourself to be happy whether you’ve gotten “there” or not?

I can promise you, it will make the journey so much better.
I’ll leave you with lyrics from RENT by Jonathan Larson who got “there” but whose journey was tragically cut short and never knew he had arrived.
There’s only us
There’s only this
Forget regret
Or life is yours to miss
No other road
No other way
NO DAY BUT TODAY.

Today’s Medicine:  “Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.”

Outcome: Shift gears from overwhelmed and powerless to relaxed and competent.

Last week was nothing but me getting deeper and deeper in the drowning pool until I completely exploded on Sunday night.  Big overwhelm, losing my center, and just feeling lost and scared shitless.  I started five different blog posts and they’re all still unfinished. I left one of the applications for a course in continuing ed that I’ve been asked to teach unfinished for the 3rd week in a row.
I still haven’t made the phone calls to find out about my vision plan so that I can get new glasses.  My closets are a mess and I can’t face pulling everything out and doing the much needed organizing so I’m just leaving the warehouse pack of toilet paper and paper towels on the floor of the living room and feeling like a total loser every time I have to walk past it.

I can’t even see the top of my bedroom dresser.
There’s nothing to eat in the house because I haven’t gone food shopping.

For all of the domestic neglect, I have nothing (work wise or creatively) to show for it.  NOTHING!!!!!!!

Now that just pisses me off.

I know it’s very dangerous for me to go down this road.

Growing up, when I had an idea to do something, I was taught to first look at the obstacles and all the reasons why it can’t be done.  That’s the way to protect yourself from inevitable failure and the ensuing disappointment because there’s definitely someone already doing what you want to do only they’re doing it it faster, better, and being more original than you.  And what makes you think you can get anywhere in this life?  So in order to avoid those painful feelings, rather than going after what I wanted, I spent much of my mental energy focused on what I didn’t want (most of my circumstances at the time) and how far I was from what I did want that I completely paralyzed myself in the process.

I spent a lot of time feeling envious of people who went for what they wanted.  Their ideas weren’t nearly as good as mine but because they pursued them and didn’t talk themselves out of it, they got somewhere. That used to make me really mad.
Not mad that they got somewhere, mad that I didn’t.

I didn’t get anywhere with my stuff because I was busy telling myself painful stories about the situation.
This isn’t going to work
No one will care
I’ll look stupid
No one will pay for this
and on and on.
Painful stories that hardened into resistance.  Resistance that made doing the stuff I wanted to do much harder than it actually was.  Most of the time the fear and the resistance beat me down before life had a chance to. And so, I gave up on things that I wanted to achieve.

So much of what I am going to tell you is startlingly simple.

It’s not the circumstances in life that cause us pain, it’s our thoughts about them – Eckhart Tolle

I finally learned that they way that you think about things before you do them has a tremendous amount of impact on how they turn out.  There is tons of research regarding the plasticity of the brain and any professional athlete will tell you that they mentally rehearse their game over and over again, seeing themselves make the shot, hit the ball, sink the basket each time.  This mental practice is a big part of their training.

Setting intentions or getting “intentional” as we call it is a very powerful way to create what you want in your life.  What we put our attention on increases.  There’s no magic in this and here’s why–when your focusing on what’s not working you don’t have the mental energy to go after what you want. When you’re filled with negativity there’s no room for creativity or possibility.

The only way I see myself getting through this overwhelm is to get intentional.
I’m taking the medicine.
You can take it also if you need to.

Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.

Inhabit that fully for one day.

See how it changes things.

Not just medicine, but magic.

This wanting to step away from daily life, comes up every couple of years for me.  But it’s more than just a wanting–it’s a deep craving.  A craving that I know is important to answer.  The last time I had it was when I was still working at my marketing job.  I needed desperately to tune into myself and get away from all the outer noise so that I could tune in to the still, small, voice inside.  I wanted to get away to a place where I could move so slowly that I felt myself come to a stop. I had been craving that sort of thing for years and in 2009 I was finally able to take such a trip.  It was glorious and it changed my life.

Now that I am working from home and setting my own schedule, it has a different feeling.  This time it’s about consciously choosing to expand my inner life.  To go inside, to really retreat.  An inner retreat if you will.

I want to go on a retreat with myself by myself to myself.

I want to meet myself where I am, to explore the emotional terrain of where it is I want to go with my life.  I want to know what resistance is there and I want to find out what parts of me that resistance is protecting.  I want to meet the raw, under developed parts of myself, the parts that are stuck in dysfunctional childhood patterns.  I want to get even closer to my impulses and instincts, my rhythms, and my deep needs.  But most of all I want to find out what can make the journey to my chosen destination even better than the destination itself.

In the past, I would have just kept talking about how much I wanted and needed to do something like this but I would allowed my lack of resources to discourage me from making it happen.

Because I’m putting everything I have financially into the creation of a coaching product and the launch of my new website, there are $0 available for something like this, so I’m not sure how I it’s going to work.  What I am sure about is that this retreat will do me a world of good and it will improve my life and my work.  I am trusting that putting out the intention, asking for help, and being open to whatever form that help may take will be enough to make this a reality.  Also I’m giving thanks for the perfect scenario showing up and letting go.

Maybe you know someone who has a house or cabin that is drivable distance to NYC that they’re not using during the week ( I’m just looking for 4- 5 weekdays) and would like to barter for a month’s worth of life or career coaching.  Maybe you know a place that fits these criteria that is dirt cheap.

Maybe you have a place that you would like to lend me and we could barter???

So dear readers, I’d love to hear from you.  If you have suggestions regarding my retreat please post them here.  If you have a story about one of your own getaways to a deeper place in yourself, you can also post it here.  I’ll have you know that a trip like this would have been my version of hell just four years ago.  At that time all I wanted to do was escape from myself.  Boy how things have changed.

Synchronicity is definitely at work here because right now the biggest obstacle for my business is that I’m not building a following for my blog because I don’t show up on the page enough.

My blog is just out there flappping in the wind and it’s really getting me down.

Writing is like anything: the more you do it the easier it gets but I’ve been mostly getting intimate with writer’s block and starting to really resent the whole situation.

But for now, here’s the problem:

I want to attract and keep readers coming to my blog.
The catch:  I feel that no one is reading this blog (OK, well no one is commenting so it looks like no one is reading it- but a few people are reading)  After all I do compulsively check my site stats!.

The obstacle: In my head I feel as though I’m just writing for myself.  Talking to an empty room.  Not feeling supported or validated.  Totally ignored.  Just like childhood!

The result is that because I feel that I’m just talking to myself,  I’m not very motivated to write and the less new content I have, the less likely that the readers that I do have will stay engaged with me.

Also the infrequent blogging is not helping me develop the voice for this blog at all which so far has been all over the place.

So what is my motivation to write if I feel no one is reading and I know for sure that no one is participating in the conversation?  Well what was my motivation to work my butt off in dance classes so that I would become a better dancer all those years?  Was I really doing it for anyone but myself?  It was about transcending my own limitations, improvement, and the pursuit of excellence–all for myself.  So maybe that’s how I have to think about blogging.  Wow, a paradigm shift right here in cyberspace.

I just love when I remember to use coaching techniques on myself.

We write because we have something to say, not because we want to say something.

And…

90% of life is showing up – Woody Allen

So here I am “approaching the horse”.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

So I’ll keep writing because I have something to say regardless of who is or isn’t reading or commenting.  I’m going to keep focusing on what I have to say, crafting content that is helpful, and being transparent.

But in the meantime, the little kid in me just keeps singing this song…

I knew that I had to come up with something “to do” as opposed to trying to get myself to stop the behaviors (dieting and “fat talk”) that have become my way of life.  I’ve learned a few things about changing patterns in the last couple of months so I was ready for something different.

Because I am first and foremost a drama queen I had to come up with a title for this plan.  I decided to employ the techniques of the brilliant Martha Beck who is one of my mentors.  Her technique is to start with the end result and work backwards.  Easy.  What do I want out of all of this?  To get off this roller coaster of dieting and being dissatisfied with my body which invariably leads to bingeing and weight gain.  And what do I think that will get me?  Peace of mind and FREEDOM.  That’s what I want, peace of mind, a relaxed relationship with food and I want to feel great about my body.  I want to feel physically and emotionally great. I want to feel awesome on every level.

Well, there it is.  The Year of Feeling Awesome.

So everything I’m doing will be in service to creating or maintaining feeling awesome–physically and emotionally.  Totally turns the concept of dieting on its head.  When you’ve lived your life depriving yourself of things the concept of giving yourself what you want and is such a gift.

This from the woman who for the last four years has eaten tuna on an arugula salad with balsamic vinaigrette every day for lunch.  Not a bad lunch but when it’s your lunch every single day you begin to dread it.  My genius way around it:  work out before lunch, don’t eat until 2 or 3pm (breakfast was at 9am) and be so hungry you’ll eat your own hand.  That’s how I got it down every day.  Not very loving if you ask me.

Here are some of the conditions that contribute to me feeling awesome physically:
Eating till satiated but not too full
Eating high protein, high vegetable meals
Eating foods I really like
No sugar*
No eating things I don’t like just to save calories
No deprivation, denial, or counting calories or measuring food.
Checking in with my body during each meal
Lots of fruit

I know that the “cleaner” the food is that I eat (unrefined, unprocessed) the better I feel.

I  stopped eating sugar on Feb. 21st in an effort to clean up a bit and ended up never going back.  My relationship with sugar is just too complicated and it seemed too much trouble to negotiate so I’m doing without it until I see the need to do otherwise or until Lindt chocolate calls begging me to come back because their company stock has dipped so low since I’ve stopped eating the stuff.

That’s the physical, now for the emotional.  About 2 years ago, I got tired of always being hungry and running my life around trying to be as thin as possible.  For me, this was a full-time job and frankly I got to a point in my life where I just couldn’t muster up the effort–besides I became interested in other things–things outside of looking perfect and diet and exercise so I started to let myself eat things that I would never have eaten before.  I stopped keeping myself hungry.  I stopped planning my day around my exercise schedule.  I started living.  And with the lack of vigilance came weight gain.  And here is the perfect arena for me to cultivate some body love by learning to feel awesome in what I consider to be a very imperfect body.  Oh the things we allow to occupy our time.

Can you relate to this?  A lot of people can’t.  A lot of people read this and think, who has time to care about every morsel you put into your mouth and to obsessively mentally tune in to the size of your thighs all day long?  But  the truth is:  WE ALL OBSESS OVER SOMETHING.  The fight to be thin is just what I obsess over.  Oh, me and probably about 50 million other women.

Here’s a quote from the Thin Is the New Happy, which was the starting point of my realizations:
“Among all oppressed peoples throughout history, we women hold the dubious distinction of being the only group to persecute ourselves.  We are out own enemies.  We chose the battle that we could never win.  Call  it the Thousand Years War.  If every woman on earth were to suddenly release her fat obsession into the wind, the world would change profoundly for the better.  The world around us, the world within.”

We do it.  But mostly we don’t talk about it.  We don’t want to seem petty.  Is it a way to not deal with the real stuff?  Oh, yes it most definitely is.  That’s its raison d’etre.  To keep me busy so that I don’t have to face what’s really wrong.  That was its function in the past and now that I have addressed those things, it’s time to get rid of the behaviors that have hung around and become reflexive.

And now back to the plan…

So not just eating to feel awesome, but watching what I put into my mind.  What I eat contributes to how I feel but what I think and tell myself has way, way more of an effect on my sense of well being.

In her memoir Thin is the New Happy, Valerie Frankel counts the times in one day that she gives herself a negative message about her body or checks herself out in the mirror (with a reflexive negative comment).  She counts 263 times.  263 times in one day she sent herself negative messages about her body.  I’m pretty sure my number is double that because what I realized is that for me it was stream of consciousness.  The negative messages were like background noise that played in my head all day and all night–keeping me removed from whatever was  happening in the moment.  Keeping me agitated and unhappy, both states that I could medicate with food. Now we’re getting somewhere.

So the overeating or acting out with food came down to it being a response to the “fat talk”.  Stopping the fat talk would change the eating behavior and allow me to feel good instead of flawed.

At first I would move to another thought when I started to “feel fat” as those of us with body issues call it.  I would just think: Next! and think about my work, or my husband or my friends.  I would derail the thought.

I came to realize that the fat talk was really destroying my work out.  I noticed that it has been much more difficult to get in a decent cardio work out because I was dragging myself through it.  Strange because for most of my life I really did enjoy exercise.  So what changed?  I was tuned into the “fat channel” while I’m at the gym.  Telling myself, “you’re never going to lose this weight; you look like a cow doesn’t really do much for my stamina so I found other things to focus on while I’m at the gym. I think about all the things that are great in my life.  I think about how much power I have to make myself feel miserable or great and that it’s my choice depending upon the thoughts I hold. I decide to be for myself instead of against myself.  I decide to give myself the benefit of the doubt; maybe I am fabulous the way I am.  Maybe there is nothing to fix, maybe I can just be.  And the next thing I know, the 30 minutes have gone by and I can get off the stairmaster.  It’s time to do some stretching.  Ask me now how do I feel… Awesome.
Tune in next week for the next installment.