Name My Shadows: My First Step into Success
Name My Shadows: An Important Foundation for Success
One of the most important steps I took toward better health was taking a few weeks to observe the patterns around food, healthy eating, success, and failure in myself.
These were the truths that I observed in myself again and again. My repeated failures during that time made clear patterns I had to address in myself.
I took this planning time in November and December with the knowledge that these were my hardest months for success because of the holiday season.
Halloween: Haunted by the Shadows of Myself
I Was Not Broken, and I Am Not Fixed.
This message is important for me to remember today, a day when my former size feels palpable and when addictive foods beckon me with their wicked wiles.
Halloween has haunted me as far back as I can remember. Halloween highlights all my shadows of struggling with food addiction. And, there are many shadows in my story.
Winter Is Coming …
Fire and Ice: Contrasting Forces in Seasons of Change
Winter is getting more insistent. The birdbath in the background has ice on it, and snow decorated my car this morning. I got out my heavy winter coat.
Seasons are changing but the lifestyle changes I have put in place are not. Today's haul: kale, peppers, kohlrabi, beets, cabbage, broccoli, rutabaga, and pumpkins.
Choosing My Language Carefully: Uprooting Social Stigma
Language Matters: Choosing How to Speak about My Hunger Drive
My story centers around drilling into a deep understanding of my hunger drive, so I could lose more than half my weight – a number well into triple digits.
I frequently talk about my hunger drive and the way hunger works in me. I have deliberately chosen these to help me speak as I break my silence about transforming my shadows around weight.
Sharing My Story: Embrace The Teachings of My Hunger Drive
My social media arm has been working late with Transform Shadows to encourage you to register for the Thrive Against All Odds Summit. The whole Transform Shadows team encourages you to register. (Just to be clear, that means me, myself, and I lol.)
My story will air on October 25. I previewed my interview last night, and it truly was an honor to interview with Tim Kaufman. He and Heather Barlow Kaufman are doing great educational work. The conversation I had with Tim is authentic and real around making and sustaining significant lifestyle changes.
This is my first step into this world of online interviews for other people, and I have learned a lot in the process. My health, wellness, and weight loss journey has taught me a lot my own strengths and fallibility, and this new experience adds to that learning.
Epic Struggles, Everyday Actions: Wanting Do-Overs in Life
Do-Overs in Life: Living with Myself
To see this “promotional square” humbles me. I have no organization, no mailing list, no sponsors, no group, no affiliation, no social media arm to promote this Summit. I most certainly feel out of my league. I am a small-scale, one-woman endeavor motivated by a vision and commitment to sharing information that helped me find a better way of living.
Like so many things in life, I wish I could have a do-over for this interview. It was a sweltering hot, humid day in August, and I was literally in the middle of a decision-making process with others that was stressful (and that resolved positively shortly after the interview).
Choose Health: Fail for Success Series, 1
SHADOW BOXING
Fighting Myself for Myself: Failing Within Boundaries
I am in the middle of several back-to-back travel experiences that make it difficult to keep a health routine. And, I am in the busy season in a new job that I am still learning. This is a recipe for failing grandly.
I have a history of failing grandly in times like this. The details were different, but the feeling was the same. To stay successful, I have had to let some things go and keep my eye on the big things for long-term success. And, I have fallen off my usual game – within boundaries of short-term failures that make long-term successes possible.
I Wanted to Change the Trajectory of My Life
Finding My Golden Center
People often ask why I made the decision to lose weight. At the golden center of it was my health and wellness. For years, I knew what I should be doing, but I didn’t know how to do it and sustain it. Because this is such a hard process, people need to find a why, a golden center for making the change.
My golden center comes into focus most profoundly between 10:00 pm and 6:00 am, when I no longer live in fear about what my choices were doing to me, when I feel freedom from a lifelong conflict around food. I knew nutrition and health facts as well as anyone, if not better than most. But, I could not find a way to act on what I knew.
Eat When Hungry: My Journey into Shadows, Episode 2
Mindset is everything and nothing.
Mindset and the mental processes around my personal changes are shadows of my transformation.
Mindset plays a starring role in every change I have made. Yet, mindset alone would never be enough to succeed in losing half my weight.
Healthy Eating Royalty: Purple Cabbage
Purple Cabbage: A Quiet and Underrated Leader
In the plant-based world, leafy greens get a lot of attention for their health benefits. Most certainly, I have heard that message over the past few years. I eat leafy greens daily.
Mentally, I aways include purple cabbage as part of the leafy green family, even though neither “leafy” or “green” applies to purple cabbage. But, cabbage is used in similar ways as leafy greens, and purple cabbage embodies quiet strength in this world from a health perspective.
Self-Talk and Strategies for Work-Life Balance
Lose a Few Battles to Win the War: Navigating Life’s Busy times
Life gets crazy, and there are times when the battle to maintain a work-life balance feels impossible around my overall goal: Eat When Hungry.
For most of my life, I have thrown in the towel during times of work-life business. To be clear, I ate too many unhealthy foods in too high of quantities.