Living Under Seige: Winning the Battle
Living Under Siege: Face Failure
The battle to center my own health and wellness has been a lifelong one. For years, I failed against the pull of rich, unhealthy foods. No matter how much I wanted to live a healthy life, I was living under siege and could not find a way out of this battle.
Facing failure has meant acknowledging how deeply these foods impact me. I had to reject society's messages of moderation around these foods and had to leave them behind altogether.
Change: Just Start Someplace
I have lost half my weight and have maintained that weight loss for several years. While I now eat a fully plant-based diet, I ate some animal products for a while when I was first starting out, and I was comfortable doing so.
Entering the plant-based world does not need to be an all-or-nothing decision — especially if it is going to keep you from making healthy changes in your life.
Dates for a Sweeter Life: Living Without Processed Sugar
My Dates with Dates: An Overview
Dates are one of the ways I live a sweeter life without processed sugar.
These are medjool dates, and they are my favorite. I have dates almost every day. Dates are calorie dense, so I have to be careful how many I have in a day.
I often add dates to my smoothies and blended salads. Dates add a delicious sweetness, enough so I can get more vegetables into my mix, especially leafy greens.
I have also discovered that I love dates as part of my soups. I often blend a few dates with a few nuts to add as a paste into my tomato-based soups to help add flavor.
Defy My Own expectations: Travel Edition
Choosing Health When Traveling
Making healthy choices when I travel has always been difficult. I have failed so many times that I still expect to fail. So, this trip is about defying my own expectations.
This week, I travel for work. I have distinct struggles before, during, and after a trip. I was doing okay until I heard I was going to be traveling into Hurricane Hilary.
I am not sure what about Hurricane Hilary prompted me to run for the cashews and bananas, but she did! And, so I failed. But, I failed according to plan.
Eat When Hungry: An Overview of My Transform Shadows Framework
My Framework for Personal Change
This is an overview of my Transform Shadows Framework. The top part helps me tell my story about the mental actions that I use to be successful in losing weight and maintaining weight loss.
These mental actions may help you guide change within yourself. I use these for my self-talk in many ways. Try them and see if they work for you:
NAME Your Shadows
FACE Your Shadows
UNDERSTAND Your Shadows
FIGHT Your Shadows
REFRAME Your Shadows
TRANSCEND Your Shadows
I wish I transcended my shadows all the time, but my life does not work that way. When things are easy and effortless in my lifestyle, those moments of transcendence are glorious.
Eat When Hungry: My Launch of a Signature Series with Dr. Doug Lisle
Eat When Hungry: My Journey Through a Complex Labyrinth
Three years ago, I started working in earnest on creating educational resources that felt like what I was experiencing in my personal transformation of losing half my weight. Transform Shadows is the result of that work, and it continues to evolve. Today marks another step.
My goal has been to create a bank of free educational resources. The 3:00 am resources. The resources that you seek when you look for a different way of living, a healthier way of living, a way of living that you know is best for you. A way of living built on truth, not gimmicks. I know how this works. I lived this life. For years.
Today, my bank of resources broadens with the launch of my first video interview. A very special guest, Dr. Doug Lisle, joins me for this signature series titled Eat When Hungry: My Epic Journey Through a Complex Labyrinth. Dr. Lisle is a well-known expert in the plant-based world, and his work has helped me in my own journey.
Flipping the script for an interview like this, Dr. Lisle actually interviews me about my journey to lose half my weight and transform my shadows.
The Weight of Weight: A Journey of Epic Proportions
Many times, people think my health, wellness, and weight loss journey has been a one-and-done action. That is far from the case because this is a complex journey.
While I have lost half my weight and kept it off for more than three years, the process of maintenance is an ongoing journey, full of mental and physical actions that look and feel similar to the ones I used when losing weight.
Of course, I am thrilled to have lost half my weight. When I eat right, I have emerged from physical and psychological heaviness, which is the weight of weight.
The weight of weight is one of the most important reasons I decided to lose weight. My physical health weighed heavily on my mind, not just on my body.
I knew I was not acting in my own best interests. I knew that there were too many contradictions between healthy foods and the foods I was eating.
The unhealthy choices were having profound ramifications on my mind and my body. I wanted freedom from the mental and physical traps of my weight.
My Vacation Break-Up with Mangoes and Pecans
Inviting Failure Foods into My Life
As I said in my Facebook and Instagram post, dried mangoes and pecans caused too much drama this week. I need to cut these ties for awhile.
To be fair, this drama is caused by my own design. Of course, I have a success plan. But, an important part of my success plan is that I also have a failure plan.
Part of how I succeed is that I always have failure foods at home. These are my off-ramp foods—foods good enough to go off-track with but mild enough to make getting back on-track possible.
Keeping failure foods on-hand is counter-intuitive and may go against the advice of experts. But, this journey is an individual one, and this is my journey.
I live in a house full of food triggers that I no longer eat. And, if I did eat them, I would have skyrocketing failure — a degree of failure with which I have a lifetime of experiences. This is a way of life I no longer want.
My failure foods have kept me in check so far. Without salt, oil, and sugar in my life, I live an all-or-nothing life.
Failure foods help me avoid the all-or-nothing mindset that comes with this all-or-nothing life. This is important for my success.
The Equation of My Soup — Packing it with Plant-based Power
I recently wrote a short post for Instagram / Facebook where I referenced making a large pot of soup to freeze into individual containers. And, in this post, I mentioned that I had used more than 25 different kinds of plants in it, and I was asked for the recipe.
I do not follow recipes. There are benefits and drawbacks to my approach. But, recipes cause me stress, and adapting what I have on hand suits me. Instead, I use concepts to guide my cooking. And, I have gotten better at using the concepts over time. So, what I will focus on here is detailing the concepts.
Overall, I find plant-based cooking to be a forgiving form of cooking. And, keep in mind that I am several years into this lifestyle. So, if you are just getting going, you may want to consider taking a concept and experimenting with it in small steps rather than trying to do too much at once.
A significant part of my journey has been a deep dive into understanding my hunger drive and how I feel my best. Eating a soup like this is not something I would have done early into my transition – for a variety of reasons.
But, seeing what others do has helped me find my way, and seeing what I do may help you find your way as well.
Big Rocks and LIttle Rocks: Navigating Terrain Shifts
Since I last wrote, a lot has changed in my life – as I anticipated it would. The changes are good, and I am grateful for that.
I have now started my new job, which has come with a lot of apprehensive excitement. A steep learning curve usurped my capacities for routine and for writing.
But, I am finding my way back, learning how to live my new life, facing myself over and over again in a whole new world.
I am starting to sleep just a little better as I am adjusting to everything. Sleep helps everything.
I am now pausing, taking stock in what it means to navigate my health and wellness through a major turning point in my life.
Keeping My Footing in the Seas of Change
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
I am in the midst of change right now. A lot of it.
Since I last blogged, I retired from one career, traveled several places, and am on the edge of starting a new career. All of this is good.
Changes, even good ones, can be unsettling and upset the balance in my routines, in my life. These changes turned my foundation into a slippery slope – more than I expected.
To keep my footing, I have had to catch my balance several times in the past weeks. Catching my balance always means failure in some way.
I enjoy the beach much more at half my size. I feel younger, better, and more energetic than I ever have in my life, even though my age now gets me some senior discounts.
And, I have failed. More I than planned, and more than I would like to admit. Failure works that way.
But, failures are a natural part of the self-improvement process, the ongoing process of being me, of facing myself, of understanding the shadows that shape my life.
Eat When Hungry: Discovering My Golden Circle
Discovering My Trigger Foods, Part II
A couple years into my weight loss, all looked well from the outside. I had lost half my weight; I stabilized at a healthy weight; and I radiated improved wellness.
On paper, my numbers looked comfortable, controlled, and predictable. The patterns looked like successful maintenance.
I had even started to get a few comments about my success in maintaining my weight loss. These unsettled me. I felt like a fraud.
Inwardly, I was flailing on the razor’s edge, about to tumble off into a chasm all too eager to devour me back into the 97% failure rate.
I knew this space intimately. Looming failure always won. I clung to the sharp edge of success, barely making it day-by-day. I was missing something, but I did not know what.
Then, I came into a direct standoff with what I did not yet understand: Eat When Hungry.
Discovering My Trigger Foods, Part I
Someone asked me recently how I discovered my food triggers. This is an insightful question. I will answer it in two parts.
At the end of 2019, I knew enough about food addiction to name it in myself. I knew, too, that the processed foods of the standard American diet caused problems for me.
At the time, I thought my understanding of food addiction was the capstone of what I needed to lose weight. In some ways, that was true. In other ways, that was just the beginning.
I know this is true: food addiction plays out in my body in the simplest, most predictable ways and in the most complex, challenging ways in today’s food environment.
Discovering My Trigger Foods Was a Process
Meet My Hunger Drive: A Fact of My Life, Not a Self-Made Stigma
Since I first shared my story a few weeks ago, I have received a lot of comments about the stigma around food addiction and disordered eating patterns.
This stigma runs deep, and I am learning how people of all sizes, shapes, and genetics feel that stigma in different ways.
Even though I have lost half my weight, I spent most of my life experiencing this stigma silently in an isolated state of obesity or morbid obesity.
I never envisioned breaking my silence to speak about my food addiction – especially as publicly as I am doing now. But, life is full of surprises, and here I am.
I am speaking out because my self-understanding has profoundly shifted.
Let’s Get to the Good Stuff
With New Year’s coming this weekend, the collective commitment to self-improvement provides a great moment to talk about the power of plants.
Moving to a whole, unprocessed plant-based diet is the most important action that I have taken for all aspects of my health, including weight loss and maintenance.
Most information around health and weight loss encourages eating plants in some way, so knowing the benefits of plants certainly was not news to me.
Still, I am stunned by the depth of what I have learned from delving into nutritional science. And, I am even more stunned by the differences in how I feel – once I got through the withdrawal from addictive foods.
Eating plants has transformed all aspects of my life.
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
My First Public Interview
Yesterday, I had the privilege of talking to co-anchors Lisa Cownie and Kelsey Barchenger at our local news station KEYC. I learned much watching these wonderful women in action as they handle all aspects of their content. I love the title they gave the segment: Lyon’s share: Bringing health & wellness to the internet. Check it out!
Treat Myself like a Food Addict Every Day
I love my smile in this video clip. More specifically, I love the fact that I can say “I treat myself as a food addict every day” with a matter-of-fact, pleasant smile on face.
Being a food addict is who I am and how I live my life. I can deny that truth, but I live with food addiction at this weight, at twice my size, or at any other weight.
My addiction will be in the center of my life one way or another. I will be in control of my addiction, or my addiction will control me.
There is no middle ground for me. I wish there was. But, goodness and hope in my life have emerged from knowing this about myself, and I feel incredible — better than ever.
To name myself as a food addict conveys a newfound self-acceptance around my lifelong shadows of weight. This self-acceptance started with silently speaking and believing that reality.
At first, the admission was harder than it needed to be. I gave too much importance to addiction as a personal shortcoming of willpower and mind and not enough to my genetic realities.
Most importantly, I did not understand my hunger drive. I would lose half my weight before I felt my hunger drive. It took even longer to understand.
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.