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.
Shadow Boxing: Fighting Myself for Myself
Last weekend, I had a failure around food. Failures around food always expose my shadow selves. This time, it was a trigger food for overeating.
But, this post is more about failure than food. Failures happen, and I have gotten used to them. I have also gotten used to getting out of them, which I did.
But, sharing these failures in a public way is new ground for me, and I haven’t known how to talk about my failures in meaningful ways.
My failures around food feel epic and so do the struggles to turn them around. But, the solutions themselves are unremarkably boring.
Talking about the solutions may be more boring than the solutions. I ate clean unprocessed plants. I worked out. I shopped for groceries. I prepared food for the next day.
Transforming my shadows occurs in the boring routines of daily life. But, there is tremendous value in talking about these mundane details to learn and grow.
Still, I had been asking myself: How will I talk about my failures in ways that go beyond summarizing meaningless details?
The answer materialized out of nowhere.
SHADOW BOXING