"I don't have any big issues, I just like food". As a person struggling with my weight, I have said this on many occasion. As a Weight Watchers leader I heard this almost daily. Part of it is true but not all of it. It wasn't until I started to peel back the layers of my weight issues that I saw the emotional ties I had to food. For me, they were not severe. They were the average: love to eat when I'm happy, stressed, anxious, bored, unsettled. Then there were the habits that were formed: something sweet at the end of the meal, friday night pizza, Sunday morning pancakes. Nothing that couldn't be fixed with a little retraining. But the emotional side was going to take longer to fix. Retraining the brain is a whole different ballgame. One I will probably talk about at some point when I understand it better.
So is this blog going to be all about weight loss and issues? No. I'm really quite tired of talking about my weight issues. What I would rather focus on is how to get to the state of Incredible Health. What does that look like, what does that feel like, can the average human get there and stay there? That is the journey I am on. That is where I want to take you, my two readers. See? Did you see the level of confidence I showed you right there? Yea, that's something else I'm working on.
So why are we addicted to food? Honestly I believe a good bit of it is pure manipulation by those selling the food as well as those making the food, employing specialists to make the foods addicting.. The marketing is spent on making their product fun, sexy, a guilty pleasure. They want you to think that eating a candy bar is going to put you in a better mood. And maybe it will until you crash off the huge dose of sugar and you are left sluggish and hungry. What your body needed was a big superfood smoothie packed with kale, frozen fruit, coconut milk and water. THAT is what is going to make your body happy. But that's not what marketing dollars are spent telling us and no one else is telling us any different, or if they are it's not loud enough. So we need to get out of our head and into our body. What is our body telling us? Who knows? We are so malnourished that some days I count the lettuce leaf and tomato slice on my burger as the only veggies I got all day! Pathetic! "But we need to focus on our carbs, fat and protein". Maybe. But more important we need to focus on the amount of nutrients we are getting per calorie, per meal, per day. That is where this journey is going to lead me and I can't wait to see what that feels like and looks like. Do you have to be a health FREAK to live like this? Maybe. Sadly people think I'm a health freak already. I guess it's time I start acting like one.
Why do people think that? I have always been interested in nutrition since I was probably in my teens. I had weight problems my entire childhood and as a teenager I could see where this could lead to an eating disorder if I didn't figure out the right way to lose weight. I started to exercise in junior high and high school. Not athlete level - I never felt I was good enough for that and frankly I didn't really want it bad enough. I started to slowly eat better in high school and kept the weight off through my first couple of years of college. I took a Nutrition course that I absolutely loved and got down to a very low fat percentage for the class assignment. I thought I would continue in school and become a Nutritionist. That was my passion but when the time came to get in, I couldn't afford it. So I went to work and took classes at night. And the roller coaster ride began.
Lunches out with the group, coffee at your desk in the mornings then the afternoons. Not to mention the afternoon ice cream runs (only in NC that is frozen custard, thank you very much..). And without my exercise classes and long work hours it got harder. But I managed to stay at around 10 pounds over where I really wanted to be. Then I got married...
Thankfully my husband cares about his weight but has struggled his whole life too. That's good in a way because we can relate to each other. Bad because we both struggle and have trouble keeping the other one up because it's so much easier to just cave in and follow the guilty one. The first year married was like the Freshman 15. I guess all couples go through it and we were no exception. We tried many a program: Body for Life, the Abs Diet (for like a weekend), The South Beach Diet, the Business plan for the body, The Best Life Diet. Grief, I've never actually listed these out before.. It wasn't until we moved to Alabama in 2007 that we found the path that would lead us to where we wanted to be. We joined a gym not long after we moved to Alabama and I told the fitness director that I always wanted to be a fitness instructor. She said they needed water aerobics instructors so I started taking classes. I fell in love with the way you could challenge yourself in the water. And I never knew you could sweat in the water! I started teaching classes and still do to this day. I started taking other classes too, most of the time leaving with beat red face, sorely out of shape. Then we did P90x and saw some real results. We learned how to challenge ourselves outside of our comfort zone and the strength I felt was addicting. For someone with low self esteem this was really powerful.
During this time I tried to manage a weight loss program at the gym, trying to fit in my passion for nutrition and weight loss but I couldn't compete with Weight Watchers. Lucky for me I had 10 pounds to lose so I joined with the goal of becoming a leader. Doing that gave me the outlet I needed to be able to help others lose weight. I was good at it too - and for me that is not easy to say. But I loved it, I poured my heart into it and I could relate to the members and they could relate to me. I still like Weight Watchers for so many aspects. I love that it addresses the mental side to weight loss and the way it helps people, who don't really want to make dramatic changes, slowly and safely lose weight and begin to change their life.
What it doesn't teach is how to find Incredible Health but there again, it never promised to. It promises to help you lose weight and eat better. What I want to know is how to find Incredible Health - the kind where you feel so in tune with your body that you know what it needs at the moment, not what your brain is telling you because you just saw the commercial. The place in health when you wouldn't even consider going on an all out Gilmore Girls junk food binge because of the damage it would do to that relationship you have. That "oneness" with your body that has nothing to do with body image disorder or a number on the scale. It's a relationship of mutual respect where you commit to feeding your body what it needs and it, in turn gives you the power to do whatever you set your mind to. A healthy mind, a healthy body in sync and committed to each other. That's what Incredible Health sounds like to me. I would like to see if I'm right.
I hope you will walk with me as I learn. Comment, challenge or make suggestions along the way so I know you are out there and it's not just my husband and mother in law reading this ;)
