Once you become in the drivers seat about one thing, once you find yourself there you begin to realize this control and confidence entering into other areas in your life. You realize yourself capable and begin walking toward other parts of your life. We all have answers that will help us just sitting in us…they just need to be compassionately approached in order to be heard. We need to know we are not going to shoot ourselves down and instead allow the door to open a little to something new without judgement.
Food is a great place to start because it is so measurable, we can follow our weight change (typing it into Fitday.com) everyday and run charts seeing what happened over the year. We can type into Fitday.com every thing we ate and run numbers on total calories, or fats, or proteins, or vitamins, etc. It is measurable. Then…gasp…we are trying on size 10 pants???!!!! No way! Yes! That happened to me last year for the first time since…I am sure I can’t remember it was so many years ago.
The point is people continually find changing eating habits is a starting point for a realization of ones ability to have some say over the way things are. Not to mention all the doors that just not being overweightt open! There should be a word for what society does to overweight people…we have names for ageism, rascism, homophobia (need a better word here), etc. and we don’t have one to represent all the negative stereotypes, assumptions, and treatment that overweight people experience. And it is bad, people lose jobs over it and get jobs just because they were a skinny little thing, it is bad. I digress.
Even more powerful is our open present awareness of how we are honestly experiencing ourselves in this moment and then getting curious about that, not judgemental just open curiosity. Realizing everything is in flux. In my case I discovered once I lost 25 pounds how important it apparently had been to me. The weight that fell off my hips was nothing compared to the weight that fell off my shoulders. Still the self judgement will just shift to a new location unless we are able to begin to notice judging’s effect on our lives. And begin to wonder if there are other options that might work better. Buddhists seem to be saying you can nudge yourself forward with a whip or with compassion, the choice is yours and one works better than the other to increase happiness. I believe I have an almost genetic inclination towards Stoicism so this is a very hard notion for me to know; I am curious. And I am quite tired of the old.
