Name My Shadows: My First Step into Success
One of the most important steps I took toward better health was taking a few weeks to observe the patterns around food, healthy eating, success, and failure in myself.
These were the truths that I observed in myself again and again. My repeated failures during that time made clear patterns I had to address in myself.
I took this planning time in November and December with the knowledge that these were my hardest months for success because of the holiday season.
At this point, I knew my mental actions were going to be as important as physical actions if I were going to succeed, to rise anew out of a lifetime of failures.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I learned that moderation was no longer a concept that I could apply to food in my life.
Mainstream messaging around food, weight, and weight loss had failed me again and again.
During my planning time, I wanted to drill into understanding my shadows, to learn more about hunger, to drill into my hunger drive: to learn to subdue it, to unravel it, and ultimately, to override it.
I recently added the word “override” to my language around this process because this named what I was doing in a much better way.
Dr. Doug Lisle used this word in our first episode of Eat When Hungry, my Transform Shadows Signature Series around telling my story.
You can find Eat When Hungry on my Transform Shadows YouTube channel.
Name My Shadows: An Important Foundation for Success
Before I started, I spent a few weeks watching myself in relation to food, seeing as objectively as possible.
Most importantly, I watched moderation fail over and over again.
I watched myself choosing the unhealthiest of foods.
I watched myself overeating.
I watched myself binge eating.
I watched myself tell myself “I’ll start tomorrow.”
And, I watched every “I’ll start tomorrow” disintegrate in failure.
Taking the time to see myself fail again and again was part of what helped me admit the hard truths of the changes I had to make.
In the deepest shadows of myself, I found one of my hardest, most important and most empowering truths: food addiction ruled my life.
My action step became: “I am going to have to treat myself like a food addict every day.”
Rising Out of the Shadows to Build Real Solutions
Over time, the idea of treating myself as a food addict transformed itself in my mind from being a hard, shameful truth to an empowering and liberating truth of myself.
At first, treating myself like a food addict every day felt like an act of failure — because it was an act of failure — around a physical reality of my body.
But, treating myself like a food addict every day started transforming my success — step-by-step, day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month.
My actions empowered and liberated me as I drilled into hunger: to understanding hunger, my hunger drive, and foods and their effects on my body, mind, and life.
Through successes and failures, I learned how deeply this was a physical issue in my life, a function of my body in relation to the foods of my life.
Seeing myself honestly allowed me to build real solutions for myself, and when these solutions worked, I started seeing the real value of centering an honest foundation for my actions.
My body truly was entrapped in the cycles of the addictive power of food, a physical reality not a mental shortcoming in me.
I needed that foundation of honesty to fight decades of personal failures around a problem that has a 97% failure rate in broader society.
Naming my shadows helped and helps me find my power to Transform Shadows.
Cheers to you, to find your power around your own shadows.
