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.
Transforming My Shadows: My Framework for Making and Sustaining Personal Changes
Personal changes are hard to make – especially the changes that run counter to our human tendencies. Making these changes and sustaining them in my life are challenging processes.
When I decided to embark on a serious journey to improve my overall health, I knew I faced a 97% failure and 3% success rate for sustaining long-term weight loss.
I wanted to understand the roots of my failures. I wanted to learn from these failures in ways that led to the long-term successes that had eluded me all my life.
I am still learning to try to maintain long-term success. Doing that means understanding the blurry line between failures and successes where one is always part of the other.
Real-time Failure: Taking Action to Move Back into Success
Speaking about my hunger drive is a new world to me, and so is blogging. I am learning about both as I do these simultaneously.
I have learned that I should never title my blog posts in multiple parts.
Last week, I thought there would be nothing that I would like more than to write Part 2 about discovering my trigger foods. This week, the moment is all wrong.
Writing about my trigger foods from a place of understanding and confidence is not currently where my mind lives right now.
What I need to do today, at this moment, is refocus myself. To that end, I center one of my favorite truths.
There are no magic answers, but the answers feel like magic.
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
Satiation: Discovering a New Sensuality
Satiation. I love this word and have only recently started to understand its meaning around my hunger drive.
Satiation is the pinnacle of what it means to fulfill the hunger drive, to eat when hungry. Satiation is the linchpin of my long-term success.
Discovering satiation was a confusing, complex process. I had lost half my weight and had maintained that weight loss for more than a year.
Yet, I was flailing and careening all over a razor blade even though the numbers on the scale held steady.
I was desperately trying not to fall into the abysses where one of my shadow selves ruled — either through the excesses of food addiction and binge eating, or the deprivations of anorexic restriction.
I had no idea how to maintain my success.