Swallowed by Holiday Foods
Holidays are times of food vulnerability for people who struggle with weight, foods, food addiction, health, and wellness.
There are a lot of people white knuckling the next couple weeks. I am one of them, even though my foods look much different than they used to.
The holiday season has always exposed the biggest gap between who I want to be and who I am around food.
Who I want to be is someone who is a moderate, someone who indulges some but not too much, someone whose willpower is as natural as her smile.
Who I have to be is someone who eats whole, unprocessed plants without salt, oil, and sugar. I am indulging more than I should, but I will recover quickly.
But, that has not always been the case.
Admit hard Truths
“I will start tomorrow” has been a complex idea in my life. At its best, the idea of starting tomorrow held optimism and hope; at its worst, the idea worked as a self-delusion, enabling moments in time to swallow me whole.
Most often, starting tomorrow worked as a self-defeating form of failure, a feeling of brokenness around my weight, a reminder of what I could not get right in this aspect of my life.
Untangling the maze of meanings of “starting tomorrow” provides a complex mental challenge. The truth is that I started on so many tomorrows that the phrase was almost rendered meaningless.
Often, I felt the emptiness of starting tomorrow even as I committed to it. Many of my tomorrows ended almost as soon as they started. The pattern was predictable, whether it lasted one day, one week, one month.
My resolve started strong. Soon, fatigue around tempting foods overpowered my resolve. I careened off course, defeated and overwhelmed by what I could not get right.
I stared at the same problem over and over again. I tried the same solutions and always got the same results. Starting tomorrow happened so many times in my life that I nearly gave up hope. But never entirely.
To succeed, there has to be a starting point – there has to be a tomorrow where that day becomes the day. Past successes provided tantalizing glimpses of what could be, optimistic peaks at a healthier future. Hope.
Begin with the End in Mind
Three years ago, Thanksgiving weekend marks the time when I started thinking about making transformative change in deep, substantive ways.
I enjoyed the family holiday gatherings, but I felt terrible from the food. Food and leftovers tormented me for days before and after the holiday. This happened every year.
I was fed up – literally and figuratively. And, being fed up went far beyond the food.
All the lifestyle diseases that stem from obesity were becoming inevitable realities in my life. I felt heavy, achy, tired, and older than my years. This was not how I wanted to live.
To live, I needed new solutions to the lifelong struggles that plagued me around weight, health, and wellness. I had to face my shadows in new ways if I wanted to transform them.
The food turbulence of that holiday season made getting successful traction less likely for myself. I gave myself a few weeks to reflect, plan, and learn before starting.
I knew I had to begin with the end in mind. I started asking myself: Why do I want to change? How do I want to live? What do I want to do?