Feeling Lost Today
I’ve been feeling a bit lost today. And I’ve been eating. I thought at first that the two were connected, that it was emotional eating that I was doing. I thought I was eating simply because I was longing for some human contact. I was playing on the internet, hanging out at my favorite social network. No one was there, in real time. I’d check my email, and there were no new messages. My mother was supposed to call, but I hadn’t heard from her yet. My husband has been out of town on a business trip all week and won’t be home until much later this evening. I just felt lonely, so I assumed that’s why I was eating every hour, on the hour. I had BBQ chicken, boiled shrimp, cereal. Then finally, I had a fruit cup. The combination of the sweetness and the cold just hit the spot and I haven’t had anything else to eat. Could it just be that I wasn’t hearing what I was hungry for? I was asking myself what I wanted to eat, but could it be as simple as the fact that I wasn’t tuned in and listening? That’s very frustrating.
That’s frustrating, because I’m not new at this and this whole system is about being tuned in. It’s not, thank God, about counting calories or carbs, or weighing food or measuring portions. It’s not a diet, and won’t work if I approach it with a diet mentality. The only thing that works is really tuning in and developing a relationship with my body and listening to it. That’s why Paul recommends that you ditch the scales (or at least, weigh yourself every two weeks instead of daily or weekly). That’s external validation, and this is an internal process. The joy comes in getting to know my body and listening to its signals, its needs, its voice. My internal voice; developing a relationship with myself.
I have to wonder if the fact that I’ve fallen off the CDs has anything to do with this setback. For some reason I just keep forgetting to turn on my iPod at night, or when I lay down for a nap. It’s a mental block. It’s the same way I get with my meds some times; I can pick them up to clean the counter underneath them and not remember to take them! I’ve never understood it, but it happens from time-to-time. And now the iPod thing. Is it some perverse form of self-sabotage?
Has It Been So Long?
Has It really been so long since I’ve blogged?
I’ve just been going along, having my days, doing McKenna as best as I can. I still struggle with how fast I eat. I try to slow down, but find myself eating faster than I intend. I am, however, eating more slowly than I used to.
The past few days have been good McKenna days. I’ve been eating just when I was hungry, stopping when I was full. Oh, if every day could be like these have been! Oh, if it could always be this easy! For some reason, some days are very easy and some are very difficult. I don’t have much problem with emotional eating these days — except for boredom eating, once-in-awhile — but I do have a problem sometimes stopping when I’m full. I don’t always know when I’m full. Some days I just don’t feel it and some days it comes to me quite naturally. It’s kind of confusing to me.
For about two weeks, I’d been falling asleep to McKenna CDs that had been transferred to my iPod. I couldn’t tell that it did much good as far as my eating was concerned, but oddly enough, I seemed to be standing taller. Noticeably taller. For a few days, I forgot — yep, just forgot! — to turn on my iPod as I went to sleep, and it’s been hard to get back in the habit. The CDs ask that I count down, with my conscious mind, from 300 to 0. But McKenna also asks me to imagine things. It’s hard to imagine myself slimmer while I’m counting backwards!
Actually, I just have a hard time imagining myself slimmer. I can imagine my face; I remember a picture of myself from a slimmer time. But I have a hard time imagining a body. By the time I get a body pictured in my mind, I’ve lost the face. It’s been so long since I’ve been thin (somewhere between 30 years and never!) that I don’t have a mental picture of myself. It’s hard to find a picture in a magazine that I can use as a role model, because so many of them are near-anorexic. I don’t want a body with bones showing. I want a round, curvy, healthy body. I just don’t see many images of bodies that I can use as examples for myself.
But it’s not just that I can’t find a picture of a role model. It’s more that I have trouble imagining. I have trouble developing and keeping pictures in my mind. Does anyone else have trouble with that? Any ideas how to improve that skill? I assume by practicing, so I’m going to make that a priority.
One more note … my favorite jeans seem to be a little more comfortable. I haven’t been to the doctor’s office for quite some time, so I haven’t been weighed. I’m not sure if I’ve actually lost weight or imagined it.
