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.
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?