Second Nature, Part Two

I continue to be amazed by how second nature eating healthy has become. I continue to be amazed at the fact that I can trust myself, as it pertains to food. 

I trust myself.

I've never, ever felt that way, sad as it may sound.

A couple weeks ago, the Sunday after my period ended, I woke up feeling...off. As I was making my coffee, I noticed out of the corner of my eye homemade chocolate chip cookies sitting in a baggie at the edge of the counter. Those would go well with coffee, I thought to myself out of nowhere.

I took the cookies and my coffee into the living room and happily ate them. More chocolate please, the tiny voice urged. I went back into the kitchen and retrieved a baggie filled with dark chocolate-covered cashews and almonds that I hadn't touched in weeks. I ate a couple servings and then felt satisfied. 

I kept waiting all day for my healthy palate to kick back in, but all day long my body asked for things it hadn't wanted in months - a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, pizza for dinner. I texted Mal throughout the day, confused and frustrated:

Me:I just had a bit of a moment...with two chocolate chip cookies and some dark chocolate covered almonds. I think I’ve been slipping down the dieting rabbit hole a little bit, focusing on weight loss so intensely, and bounced back in the opposite direction. Just wanna stay honest. Logged it and will do my best to hit targets still

Mal:    A treat every so often won't hurt, I think we will be okay :)

Me:    I’m so off today it’s so frustrating. I don’t know what’s going on - not able to get in a groove with meditation, journaling, all of it

Mal:    It’s normal to have these days. You’re human. I know you have mental fortitude to get through it and not let this funk win. Feel it, acknowledge it, try to keep giving into cravings to a minimum and trust you will have a better day tomorrow. Don’t even worry about sending me food today. This doesn’t mean go crazy with your food but I want you to relax about it and just enjoy the evening. But remind yourself of the progress you’ve made. We absolutely do not want to derail and lose that. You’ve done so awesome, you’re just having a day. 

And to my pleasant surprise, the next morning, I was completely back on track.

Today was another example. Something feels off with my supplements (call has been placed into my doc, but I have to muscle through in the meantime) and I've been tired all day despite sleeping a full night each night. Today, I decided to just give in to cravings and have Starbucks for breakfast (skinny macchiato and a light breakfast sandwich) and the craving to have cereal with fruit for lunch. In the past, that kind of start to the day would have made me feel like there was no point in trying and would lead to a full on binge day (or week). Today, I decided to just log it and do my best to get good percentages overall. I removed the carbs I would usually have from dinner and opted to have a high protein peanut butter protein shake for my snack and just like that, my calories and percentages were back on track. 

I'm not weighing myself weekly anymore. My wellness team wants me to drop into deeper surrender to Divine's will for me, trusting my body, trusting myself and trusting Divine. Weighing weekly is about looking for outcomes. Having faith is about action without evidence or outcomes. I do have faith, and so I'm weighing monthly now. I still hope that I'll get on the scale and see 8 or even 10 pounds gone. But the truth is that I know I'm taking good care of myself today, one day at a time. If it takes a little longer and that's what Divine wants for me, so be it. 

I'll check back in after August 1 to let you know, either way!

Becoming Second Nature

I've admitted that I was fairly insane when it came to dieting and weight loss up until December of last year, when I realized how far from loving myself I had really ended up. And not only loving myself, but loving those around me, whom I claimed to love fully and unconditionally.

Now that I'm seeing clearly, and have regained sanity in this area, I continue to be amazed by how easy it it is to intuitively handle situations which used to baffle me. (For those of you in recovery, you'll recognize that phrase. Not a coincidence.)

Back during my crazy days, there were situations which really used to throw me completely into a carb-laden tailspin - vacations, holidays, birthdays, road trips, weekends, evenings, illness, celebrations...

I remember a trainer barking at me in frustration that if I was going to keep going off the rails every time I celebrated a birthday in my house, he was going to forbid it. (That didn't go over well with me, as you can imagine.)

The first couple months of quarantine, I didn't face much in the way of temptation. On Easter, I indulged in Easter candy (nothing was off limits, because I wasn't dieting) and was curiously disgusted at how the sugar caused me to go unconscious. I didn't like that and I didn't want it to happen anymore, so I sat down and wrote a list of the things that would comprise my new abstinence:

Safe sweeteners - maple syrup, honey, coconut sugar, raw turbinado, fruit juice

Whole grains, or Dave’s killer bread

No fast food or junk food

3 liters of water a day

5 servings of fruits and veggies a day

3 servings of protein

NO DIETING

This is when I began baking - sweet potato pecan pie, blueberry pie, cake, cookies and brownies from scratch. I noticed that when I cooked from a mix, even if it was branded "organic," I had some version of the same experience, where the food called to me from the kitchen, trying to convince me to have it at breakfast, lunch and dinner. And maybe a little more even later at night. When I cooked from scratch, that didn't happen. In fact, I could walk by the thing multiple times a day and maybe not have any of it at all. 

As the months progressed, I became more willing to look at my calories and macros, and eventually became willing to make sure the calories were coming from healthy foods.

When we realized we were going to have to take a road trip to take my 17 year old to complete a standardized test, I started to get really nervous. So many times, a vacation or road trip had completely derailed my progress. I can remember going to Disneyworld with the best of intentions, journaling about taking my healthy snacks into the park on days 1 and 2, and about eating everything in sight by day 7 - gaining the regular 8-10 pounds by the end of the trip. (Not exaggerating.)

Granted, this trip was only an overnight stay, but the drive was 6.5 hours. I could do a lot of damage in 6.5 hours with snacks bought a roadside gas station. I planned out both days, but that didn't mean anything. I'd done that before.

My day started as any other - two glasses of lemon water, a green drink and coffee. Before we left, I made my planned smoothie with an extra scoop of protein to keep me sated as long as possible. To my pleasant surprise, it kept me satisfied until we pulled into the hotel at just before 5 pm. I felt into what I wanted and ordered it, then plugged it in to LoseIt.com. You can imagine my glee when I realized that my percentages were nearly perfect and my calories too! 

I texted Mal to say:

"It was crazy because I didn’t stop for lunch - I had made myself a high protein shake before we left and then when we got here, I ordered what I wanted and plugged it in - not going crazy but not depriving myself - and voila! Is it possible this is becoming second nature??"

Her reply:

"That’s AMAZING!! You’ve come a long way and it’s so awesome. Now you KNOW you’re capable of this and I can tell it’s given you a lot of confidence."

I have come a long way. And it's not just lip service - I can and do trust myself. During this quarantine, I've enjoyed Mother's Day, my birthday, my husband's birthday, Father's Day, July 4 and a road trip, and not only have I not gained any weight, I've lost weight! And more than that, I'm sane and peaceful. 

God's got this, and so do I!

The Weight is Over

Tomorrow is weigh in day. Two weeks ago, I stepped on the scale after a period of what I thought was super clean eating and consistent exercise only to find I had gained weight. The devastation and despair this caused led me to finally (I believe) surrender and begin to have faith, not just in Divine, but in my body and myself. I began to really hold myself accountable and think through each choice I was making, consciously deciding to only take action I could be proud of. At the end of my first week following my decision to surrender, I was thrilled to step on the scale and see nearly three pounds gone.

It's now the end of week 2 following my surrender and I can confidently say that I have not only stayed consistent in my healthy habits, I've also added a killer playlist to my workouts so they've all been intense - leaving me sweaty and quivering after only 20-30 minutes of exertion. My mindset has been great, too. I've been meditating several times a day, sometimes as many as four times in one day, including consistent visualization of the body that's coming. And, I've been using great language, because I really do believe that I'm on the other side of the precipice and I've leveled up and into this new version of myself I've been becoming for so very long.

And yet, a small, quiet, tentative voice in the back of my head whispers, "But what if it's still not working?"

You see, there were so many times that I swore I was doing everything right, eating all the right foods, taking all the right supplements, saying all the right words, and still that damned scale wouldn't move. I can look back now and see that I was eating out often (and who knows what the hell they are cooking with and how many calories it has) and my workouts were low intensity at best. My portions weren't controlled and there were many days when my calories were well above 2000 and even more days when I just didn't log at all. So was I really doing everything right?

That's not what my life is like now. Now, I'm actually holding myself accountable to Mal and letting her know every day exactly what I'm eating and how intensely I'm exercising. More than that, I'm listening to my body and giving her what she needs - nothing more, nothing less. I'm loving myself today. 

So if I get on that scale tomorrow and I haven't lost weight, I will know that my body is intelligent and that it is doing exactly what it needs to do to get me to where I want to eventually go, but it will be in Divine timing, not my timing. And Divine's way of doing things is always going to be equal to or better than mine.

I'll check in tomorrow, however briefly, to let you know how it goes. 

Who Do You Think You Are?

The amazing thing about writing a blog that very few people read is the freedom it gives you to say what's really on your mind, unedited, unapologetic. The past few nights, I've felt inspired to get honest and share what's going on with me, how I'm feeling, where I'm at. I don't check my word count, and I'm not concerned with making sure I'm hitting all the right hashtags. I'm not posting on all my social media sites with clever images and a link back to this site. This blog has become for me a confessional, a chronicle, and a place to hold myself accountable. This is a one-day-at-a-time process for me, and even though I know now that God has the final say in this Recreation, I want to be sure I'm carrying out His marching orders every day.

And that's where it's gotten interesting recently. See, in the past, I always got my marching orders from outside of me - a book, a trainer, a doctor, a mentor, a friend, a magazine, really anyone might have the latest plan, program or diet for me to follow that I'd hope and pray would be the golden ticket to having a healthy body. In some cases, it worked for awhile - I got within 5 pounds of my wedding day weight on Dreambodies back in late 2008 and stayed there for nearly a year and a half before getting pregnant with my fourth child in 2010. 

What's interesting this time around is that although I have guidance coming from different places - the Gabriel Method team, my trainer, my spiritual mentor, my doctor - at the end of the day, I'm relying on my inner guidance, which I choose to believe is from my Higher Power, for my final marching orders. I trust that inner voice today, and I cannot remember the last time I felt that way.

Take today's food, for instance. I have been consistently hitting my target calorie range and macro percentages for weeks now, and today I did my normal tweaking to hit my numbers, but when I bit into the fried chicken breast I'd included for myself for dinner, it just left me feeling...unsatisfied. I took a couple bites, and then realized I was just not enjoying it at all. I took it back into the kitchen and swapped it for a thigh and a wing and adjusted my numbers. At the end of the night, my calories and my fat percentage were a little high, so I texted Mal to let her know. Her response:

These days are totally okay once or twice a week and you’ve had an excellent week. This is also not the worst I’ve ever seen at all, so I can live with it!

I was really glad to get that feedback from her, but even without it, I knew that I was taking good care of myself today by getting the extra fat and flavor. What's amazing to me is that for the first time in my life that I can remember, I'm able to trust myself and what my body is telling me above everything else. And that's not just with food. I'm finding myself lighting up at certain suggestions (adding a green drink in the morning, doing HIIT cardio interval training) and shutting down at others (not yet, yoga). I'm actively co-creating with Divine this new version of myself, and I'm sovereign in my choices.

There's still a part of me that looks to someone outside of me for validation and approval; that may never change. But there are a lot of things that have changed, not the least of which being that just for today, I'm taking fantastic care of myself each day, and I'm becoming someone that I really freaking love and trust. I think that's pretty awesome.

How Do I Love Thee...

One of my friends read my last blog post and commented that although she found it inspiring, she did worry that maybe I hadn't gotten back around to the whole topic of loving myself unconditionally, not just my kids.

Good point, good friend.

I love myself with a technique I call my Cup Runneth Over technique (or CRO for short). I'll explain what that is in a minute.

First, let me confess something. Yesterday, I spent more time than I care to admit going all the way back to the beginning of this blog and reading from oldest to newest. No, I didn't get through the whole thing (and yes, I did find it embarrassingly entertaining). One thing that stuck out for me though was how frenetic my pace always seemed to be. I seemed to be doing everything I possibly could to get it right, to be perfect, to please them all, to get the gold star. But underneath it all, there was a low hum, the tension that is depicted in scary movies with cellos playing minor chords. The feeling you get when the stupid cheerleader is being slowly dragged down a hallway and then BAM! The killer pops out and she's dragged into a closet, her throat promptly slashed.

What I'm saying is, anyone reading those older posts could see what I couldn't see at the time, despite many of my loved ones (and my therapist) saying it often - if you keep going at this pace, you're going to pop.

I had a secret weapon, though, you see. I had a release valve. And it was that whenever I needed to, I would find an excuse to numb all the way out, in food. I haven't had a drink or a drug since 1995, but that doesn't mean I don't know how to make good use of a stockpile of sugar and processed carbs. And that was my MO for many, many years - be good, get it all done, do all the things, hold on, hold it in, push, push, push, push, aaaand.....RELEASE. The problem is that it not only kept me from ever getting to a healthy weight, it also fed my insecurity and my feeling of failure around that topic (because I still felt it was up to me to get it done, remember) and it also made it a thousand times harder to do all the things when I was fueling my body with toxins and sending my insulin levels on the roller coaster from hell.

In April 2018, I started working with my mentor, Nanilea Diamond, the founder of the Sacred Feminine Leadership Blueprint and the person who introduced me to the idea of giving and living from a place of "cup runneth over." The idea that if we make sure we are taking really good care of ourselves, tending to our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual needs first and completely, then what we have available to give to others is so much more and feels so much better. If I'm being honest, I was drawn to Nanilea because she was like a fairy princess, a mermaid and Aphrodite all rolled into one. I wanted what she had. I wanted to be comfortable in my own skin like her. I thought if I could learn from her, maybe I could lose this weight once and for all, and then I'd have the energy to make myself look beautiful and feel beautiful and I'd be happy.

What happened instead was that I was taken on a ride that never ended. It was a ride that would take me to see and heal the deepest wounds I'd been carrying, some of them ancestral, and would fling me up to my highest heights to get a taste of what my full glory on this planet would look like, and I even got to experience it for a moment, here and there. And let me tell you, there's no drug in the world like the high of feeling like you're doing, being and experiencing exactly what your soul came to this planet for.

Today, loving myself unconditionally doesn't have to do with just accepting my body. The truth is, I am so happy for my body and what it can do and the luscious curves that I was able to keep relatively smooth with years of strength training. There are things about it I don't like - the pain I still feel when I walk up the stairs and the way I can feel what's between my chin and my chest when I'm sitting and typing up this post. But the things I like and don't like are just a small part of why I love myself so absolutely and completely. I love my consistency. I love my determination. I love my spunk. I love my optimism and my faith in everything, even the things I don't like. My faith in Divine, even when She's not giving me everything I want. I love my ability to see the possibility for miracles and magic in the midst of tears.

And even beyond that, I've learned that loving myself is an action, not a feeling. So every day, I make a list of the ways I will love myself, knowing that if I commit to these things, I will feel loved at the end of the day. I will feel satisfied. I call this my Cup Runneth Over list, because when I do these things, my cup is full and I can give from a place of Cup Runneth Over.

Today, these were the things on my CRO list:

- Walk with my friend (done)

- Drink at least 2 liters of water (done)

- Meditate (done)

- Journal (done)

- Take supplements (done)

- Eat healthy food in the proper amounts and percentages (done)

And just like that, I loved myself today.

Enough is enough. (Copied from BTS Blog)

This morning, after a weekend of binge-eating cereal and pepperoni pizza, cheesesteak (hey, I'm from Philly, yo) and fries, I was not surprised to see the scale register that I had gained three pounds. What I had not anticipated were the words that popped out of my mouth:

"you deserve that."

I leaped off the scale, surprised by the anger I heard in the small voice that broke the early morning silence of my downstairs bathroom. What the hell was that about? Was I really eating so that I'd see that number go up, because in some way I felt I deserved to see the number go up? Was I sabotaging myself, and if so, why?

I thought back to the previous weekend I'd spent with all my sisters flitting around me like beautiful butterflies, tending to each other, their children, their needs, while I sat in their midst waiting for them to touch down on my flower and suck from my stamen. My petals were wilted, my stem laying on the ground from all the activity. I hadn't realized I'd felt so drained until this morning, when I realized that I'd fallen completely to the wayside during that day. Not only that, but I'd gone to them with my petals fully opened, every color exposed, waiting for them to say how sweet I smelled, how beautiful my hues, how much I brightened the room. As much as I told myself I was happy to serve them, the truth is, the experience left me feeling less than, feeling like my beauty paled in comparison, my successes nothing when placed against the backdrop of my sister's glamorous invitations to the inaugural balls and high-powered clients.

This morning, when I realized that I had fallen into my old trap of eating and regretting it, it was the first time I realized that it was tied into this feeling of being less than. Like no matter how much I succeed, I will never fully measure up. No matter how hard I work on my body, someone else will always be the beautiful one in the family. No matter how successful I am, someone else will always be the business mogul. No matter how my creative exploits take off, someone else will always be the intense creative one. This is why I drank, people. Because I felt like the only role that was left in my family was the role of the royal screw up. If I was going to be the best at something in my family, the only thing left was to be the biggest disappointment.

Now, I know today that is CRAP. I know that left to my own musings, I am pretty damned amazing, and getting more amazing with each passing day. I know this venture of Beyond the Stuff is on its way to impacting people positively on a global scale - to bring hope and encouragement to millions, that is what I have the power to do if I cast the negative thoughts aside like an annoying gnat buzzing through my field of vision. I know that I am no longer on a path of self-destruction. I'm on a path of enlightenment and beauty.

So, to those of you out there who have people in your life who make you feel small or cause you to question your own value (even if they don't say anything, sometimes old dynamics run deep), I say BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. You always have the power to create your own internal script, you can be your own cheerleader. And when the voices that are making you feel small are your own, I offer you advice I got from one of my first sponsors: Say to the Committee in your head:

"Thank you for sharing. We're not gonna go there today. Maybe tomorrow. I'll get back to you."

And then go on about your business, the business of being FABULOUS.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a date with a six year old, who happens to think I'm the most amazing woman who ever walked on this Earth.