So Many Thoughts

I keep starting and deleting posts. I have too much on my mind to pin down a single thought and I always feel like they are all trying to break out of me at once. I started working from home last week and it's everything I've been dreaming of; it's why I worked so hard to get certified and it's finally paid off in spades. I love my new job as a medical coder, it hardly feels like work and the days go so fast. I'm busy all day long but it's so peaceful. My home office overlooks a church with schoolyard and the kids come outside to play every noontime. I feel lucky to be in this situation in this house that I love. I can pretty much set my own hours as long as I work 8 hours sometime between 6am and 10pm. In my head that means I can make time for exercise and meditation. I haven't made it a priority yet. I have been noticing more and more negative self-talk creeping into my head in regards to my body. I haven't stepped on a scale in a long time and don't plan to before Wednesday when I have my annual physical exam. I am dreading it because I feel like I have gotten even bigger than my typical weight. I know my health has not been a priority and I feel like there's a cyclical thing going on with depression and weight and it's had me in such a funk that I didn’t start my low-carb diet like I said I was going to once I started working from home. I was feeling so disillusioned by the entire weightloss hyperfocus. In an effort to get inspired I started watching a show called Dietland on Hulu. I had never heard of it and thought it was a documentary when I saved it to my list. It's actually a fiction show and the main character is heavy. It shows her going through some really negative encounters with guys and being taken advantage of at work, the typical themes of fat girl being rejected and used. I really liked the characters and got sucked into it and binge-watched the whole first season before being disappointed to learn they never made any more episodes. At any rate, I think one of the main takeaways I got from the show is that people are going to be horrible to us just because of how we look but we are the ones that choose how much power we allow them and their opinions to have over us. I also started searching on YouTube to see some transformations to get inspired by and came across a video of Drew Manning being interviewed. I had never heard of him before. He's a personal trainer who has always been fit but he decided to gain 75 pounds in order to see what his overweight clients felt or what made them cheat on their diets. He claims to understand how overweight people feel now, the attachment to food that's not good for us and he emphasized what a mental, emotional and spiritual journey weightloss is or should be. He was talking about the need to make peace with two big emotions in our lives, guilt and shame, and said weightloss is really fighting an uphill battle until you learn to realize the damaging role those emotions have in our lives. He also said something that really hit home for me. When you are overweight and feel bad about yourself and have lack of energy and low self-esteem it can feel like you are stuck in a rut that's hard to get out of. One of the best ways to build confidence about yourself is to do something hard. It was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. That cyclical thing I mentioned earlier? It's because I don't challenge myself and my self-esteem is low and I don't feel like I have the mental energy to fight it. But maybe my hard thing is just working out; giving up that time, devoting myself to disengage from the numbing experiences in exchange for experiences that make me feel more alive. I have always clung to the idea of 'mind over matter' but maybe in my case it has to be 'action over mind' because my mind's not always in such a great place. while I'm not considering myself fully "on a program" this week, I did plan healthier food for myself, low carb stuff, omelets with lots of veggies, taco salad, cottage cheese. I have spent a long time allowing myself to get confused about which way of eating is better for me, micronutrients, life-sustaining vs weightloss and I finally decided that I just need to fall back on something I've done before to start losing weight and reverse the inflammation and then I can focus more on the details of perhaps getting off dairy, watching sodium intake and getting enough fiber, etc. It's a circus in my head when I try to control too many aspects at once. So I think after this week of cleaner eating I am planning to get back on track. I will write more when I solidify my plan.