Healing

Last week was one of the toughest ones I've gotten through in some time, a lot of things got turned on their heads, a torrent of maddening emotions flooded me, broke me, then lifted me.  I have come through something that's made me question and doubt why losing weight means so much to me.  When it came to the weekend and I was sharing time with my husband, connecting over shared time and experience I was able to put some things into clearer perspective.  

I have agreed with Geneen Roth that dieting and obsessing over weight is a distraction to keep us from thinking about the areas of our life that feel unsatisfactory or out of our control.  My mistake was that I was attributing everything that I was trying not to think about to my past, my childhood, and completely ignoring my present. I would make passing comments about how I felt disconnected in my marriage and how I knew I had to work harder to close the gap between us, but I never really attributed my comfort-eating to that.  But I am suddenly aware that it is a huge part of it, and a bunch of the other nonsense I've been thinking about in the past few months has been just the same thing as diet-obsession; a distraction from the fact that I wanted to feel closer to my husband.  This past weekend I didn't stress about carbs or calories or any of that crap, I simply enjoyed being in the moment with my husband.  His attention and warmth made me feel so loved and suddenly the thought of being restrictive about certain foods and needing to get a workout in no matter if it's 90 degrees and humid seemed so arbitrary to me.  I enjoyed the weekend more than any I've had in a long time. 

The fact that I let all weekend remain lax was OK with me, but I was feeling some familiar aches this morning when I woke up, the knee, the tailbone.  I definitely think it's worth keeping my diet sane in order to keep those issues at bay, so I got back on track with my plan today, and did my 30-day Shred workout too.  It has been nearly a week since I did it, so it still kicks my butt, in a good way.  I got really run-down feeling last week after doing it two days in a row, which could have been due to a whole plethora of things, but I think from now on I'm going to keep things simple and aim for an every-other-day switch between the DVD and straight cardio until I figure out what my body can handle without having negative repercussions.  

So that's where I'm at, still working at the physical stuff, the food stuff and the mental stuff.  I'm grateful to have the time to focus on these things while I'm young enough to make some changes.  Those aches I woke up with went away after I got my sweat on, I want to keep making that happen.  That's why I started all this in the first place, things just got over complicated along the way.  Sometimes you have to face the complications on a deeper level in order to break them down to their elemental form, but sometimes you have to live in the moment, appreciating all you have.