My Engine

I read a post on one of the weight loss blogs I follow. It was a while back, and now I can't remember who posted it and I can't find it. But she talked about how the whole weight loss thing has been the engine on her train of life for so long that nothing else has had the chance to be first and foremost. The engine is the driving force of the train...the first thing you see, the big focus. And she talked about how she needed to let other things be first. After all, life goes on all around us all, and family, career, friends, church--other things in life are important, and sometimes take a back seat to weight loss (it could be other goals for other people).

I think it's really good for weight loss to be the engine. I mean, we've all heard the thing about how you can't truly take care of others until you take care of yourself. It's okay to take care of yourself, and it's okay for others to sacrifice as they support you in your weight loss efforts. (Little sacrifices, like not having cookies and candy and soda around all the time, or supporting your need to be gone at the gym sometimes, or whatever it is). There's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes the absolute only reason weight loss things work for me is that it's the engine. If I let it be one of the cars, or even the caboose, it would not happen. Sometimes weight loss absolutely has to be my number one focus.

But I think the time has come for me to get a new engine, and let weight loss be a car. There are two reasons for this.

First, I realized last night that focusing so much on what I am eating has kind of turned on me a little bit. The past couple of weeks I have been so focused on what I'm eating, that I find myself thinking about food WAY more than I want to. I spend so much time planning, counting calories, journaling, and preparing my food, that food is ALWAYS on my mind. I'm still living life and doing what I do, but thinking about food that much is, well, making me want more food.

I've done really good this week and have been more in control than I've been in a long time. But I have just realized that food has kind of taken over my life! I want to just be a normal person who does what they do, and then when it's time to eat, they eat their food, and then go back to doing what they do. I don't want to be the person who wakes up planning the right thing for breakfast, eating the breakfast, journaling the breakfast, and then immediately goes into planning the mid-morning snack, then after that the lunch, then after that the afternoon snack--you get the idea. I'm sick of food. I find that once I eat the breakfast, I want to immediately eat the mid-morning snack. And after that, I want to eat something else. What I really need to do, is stop thinking about the stinkin' food.

I do not want to just go to the cupboard and grab whatever looks good, I don't want to stop having the healthy options ready and doing what I need and want to do, I just don't want it to be in my face all the time.

Second, right now I don't have the time in my life to let weight loss be the engine. There are too many other things competing for that position. My kids, my husband, and huge to-do list I have to get done in preparation for moving. I am busy all the time working on things to get it all ready. My husband was going to get home a day before the movers were scheduled  to come. So we planned to spend that day doing everything we need to do that last day to be ready--packing up the stuff we need to keep with us, like clothes and sleeping bags and pillows, all that. He was going to get the trampoline taken down and packed up that day. Lots of things like that. But yesterday the movers called and did an over-the-phone inventory of our stuff, and decided they wanted a whole day to pack, and another day to load. Because of that, they're now coming a day earlier. Which means that about a half hour after we get home from picking Jared up from the airport, the movers will be showing up. So this has put a lot more work on my shoulders. Which is fine, I don't mind at all. But I just do not have the time or energy for weight loss to be a big focus. I'm tired of feeling guilty because I worked like crazy all day long with no break at all, went to bed super late, and then skipped my early morning workout. Right now I just can't let the workout be my number one thing, there just isn't time.

I have worked out this week, I have eaten well. I plan to continue with it, doing what I can do, but not feeling bad when it just can't happen. Yesterday I just plain didn't have time to chop vegetables and prepare my healthy menu, and I just grabbed a snack size pack of Ritz crackers with cheese. You know, sometimes you just have to grab what is there and not beat yourself up about it. I don't have time for that kind of remorse, either.

The old me would use moving as a good reason for not focusing on my health, and would take it and run with it. I'd be ordering pizza, driving through fast food to get dinner for me and the kids, and would probably de-stress every night with thousands of calories worth of comfort-food sweets. I'm not anywhere near even wanting to do that. But enough is enough. I will still weigh in and put it up on the sidebar there, but at this point, I'm not trying to lose pounds.

Maybe in a month or so I'll be ready to switch engines again--I look forward to that, because nothing feels better than to work super hard and get all the rewards that come along with it. My goal is to be out of the obese category by my birthday. For me, 175 is the dividing line between obese and overweight. My birthday is April 16. So I want to be 174 by then, which is 19 pounds. That seems really reasonable to me, with some breathing room. I hope the only breathing room I need is this time right now while we're moving. After that we'll see what happens. I have no way at all of predicting how soon life will settle down, how soon I'll be able to switch engines. Once my husband comes home next week, he doesn't have to go back to work until March 3. So we'll have a few weeks after we get to the new place, with him home all day. This is great, and I love the idea of having him around all day. But it does mean that we won't be settled into what will become the normal routine that whole time. So yeah, we'll see.