Wednesday, August 21, 2013

This Balancing Act is Harder than it Looks

It is tough to remember to celebrate small victories as you retrain yourself to think and be healthier. Its much easier to get bogged down in how you have been a failure, in paranoia, in self doubt. Its easy to send yourself down a spiral where you dig your hole deeper because your goal seems impossible.  Yesterday I did... Okay. I did great for breakfast and lunch, that part of the day is easy. I'm at work. I'm focused. I am a machine. I should celebrate that for the last 3 days I have eaten 75% clean. .. If only I could maintain focus once the whistle blows at 5:00pm.

Somehow all the stress I refuse to allow myself to feel ends up condensing when I get home. I am completely exhausted. More so when the office is slow versus when it is busy. All I want when I get out of there is comfort it whatever form that may come. Usually it comes in the form of junk TV and junk food. This is how I have conditioned myself to de-stress. I recently purchased a wii-u in order to redefine my stress response activities in a way I won't feel is punishment, especially at these early stages when buying time to focus on changing my life can feel a touch overwhelming. I found that if I can believe that work is a game, I am more likely to make it a part of daily routine. Yes, this probably means that I am undisciplined, but I am working on it.

I have not yet weighed myself. This is a sign of how ashamed I must be about where I am at. I have uploaded a ton of trackers to my phone to help me stay on track but have not yet brought myself to step on a scale. I remember having weight shame way back when I was in junior high. I wasn't even over weight then. I am 5'6.5" and weighed 132 and I was so paralyzed with shame because my girlfriends all weighed less than 115. I remember a baby-sitter we had when I was younger staying at my aunt and uncles shaming me because I weighed 110 and she weighed less than 100 lbs. It didn't register at 12 that my 5'4 inches SHOULD weigh more than her 4'11". But she was older and I believed that weight is something to be feared. These feelings of being less than perfect were what set me up on the yo-yo dieting self fulfilling prophesy that has landed me where I am today.

I kept my weight down through most of high school and college by a cycle of binging and purging and never weighing myself. I was never skinny but not big either. But that fear of a scales was so pervasive in my life that the only time I weighed myself was when I was at the doctor's office.

Part of being able to change is being willing to admit to yourself who you are and embrace it. If the 198 days I have left are going to be successful, I will need to take a good hard look at myself and accept where I am and that I can change that for the better. Perhaps tomorrow I will brave the scale. Perhaps not. But, I know my journey cannot really begin until I do.

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