Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Embrace the Slow

OK. So the juicing is over. OVER.

Life is so crazy that I just don't have time in my day to make juice. After I make food for everyone else and take care of everything on my lists lately, I have no time or energy left to scrub up my vegetables, juice them, drink the juice, and the scrub up the juicer. Yesterday I had one juice, and the rest of the day nothing. I just had no time.

ALSO, I was talking to my friend about how I'm juicing again. She's not against juicing or anything, but she did have the guts to be honest with me--and she seems to have nailed it. She basically pointed out (in a very nice way) that I seem to try these huge changes all the time, and they always end up burning me in the end. And she notices it because she does the same stuff. Or at least she used to. She told me things I've heard before, but somehow this time I heard it differently. Somehow, instead of knowing it only in my mind, it started to really sink in. She told me that what I really need to do is just make small, teeny-tiny changes. And stick with each change for a long time before I add in another change.

As I listened to her and we talked about it, it came to me that I really need to just "embrace the slow." I think I've been so caught up in the weight I've gained, thinking that I need to lose that gain super fast to get back to where I was, and then I can be okay with going slow. So the scale goes up, and I do something really really strict so that it'll go down fast, and then when it does I am so tired of being so strict that my eating just kind of freaks out.

You know how people will go up and down the same five pounds for months and months, and then something will click and they'll start losing again or whatever. Well--the way I've been doing it, I've been going up and down like 30 pounds instead of 5. Don't ask me why I am so different than everyone else, it's all part of my weird makeup. What makes me me, I don't know. I really am trying to figure it out. Yo-yoing 30 pounds is way too crazy.

Anyway, I decided I need to embrace the slow. I only juice fasted for 1.5 days. But I found that it was a good amount of time to get a clean slate (not as much as I'd like, but I'll save a longer fast for later when I'm more stable with my habits), but to not get myself to the point where I felt the need to eat everything in sight when I was done. I have done really well today. There was a BBQ at Jared's work, and I ate very well. I still ate from what was on the table (that's the normal part) but I didn't eat a lot, and I didn't eat any of the really bad stuff (that's the more in control part).  I also had to do some pretty major grocery shopping today--Walmart, Costco, Winco--and I was gone for hours. During dinner time and everything. I had those brief thoughts of grabbing something to snack on or eat, but they were fleeting thoughts and I easily dismissed them because I was behaving like someone who is in control. By the time I was done at Costco it was almost 7:00, and I had a few dollars in my purse that I decided to use to grab something from the snack bar real quick. After all, how bad could it be after all the stuff I deliberately didn't eat today? But it only took a second for me to zip the purse back up and tell myself that was crazy thinking, and that there would be no snack bar today.

So I have had a lot of good victories lately. I bought a big container of those Winnie the Pooh cookies they have at Costco because we have family coming and we'll have 8 kids here, and I was trying to stock up on some stuff for all of them. A week ago I would have put the container on the seat next to me in the car and snacked on them while I drove. (Little kid cookies? Really? Yes, really. They taste good). But I didn't do that today. I thought about it briefly, but I didn't want them.

I know I cut the juice fast way, way short. I know you readers are probably thinking I've lost my mind going from one thing to the next and never being in the same mind about what it is I really am doing. And you're right. Just know that I really am genuinely trying to find out what I need to do right now. I do feel so much better, at this point, than I have in a really long time. So that's good.

I also bought a few new items of clothing today. Kind of my way of accepting the fact that I am not going to speed my way back down to where I was. I need clothes. Not buying the clothes was supposed to be my motivation, but now that I have embraced the slow, I need to not feel the urgency to go unrealistically strict in order to have something to wear.

I have continued to go for a good walk every day, and to get in my crunches--except today on the crunches, I was literally on my feet all day from 6 in the morning until 11 tonight. And I'm so exhausted the last thing I want to do is get on the floor and do 500 crunches. But tomorrow I will get up and do my walk again...it's starting to become a habit again!

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