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.
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.