As a former food addict, and someone who’s wrestled more jeans than all the supermodels around the world, Fall brings a special challenge.
Call it a test.
The jeans test.
The softer summer clothing gets packed away and the brutally honest denim emerges.
Since I rarely weigh myself, every year, I wonder if living in the stretchy fabric of summer has given me permission to regain a few pounds.
(Regarding The New York Times article “The Mental Strain of Making Do With Less.”)
I spoke on NBC15 news last week about persistent problems that threaten our daily intelligence – the inspiration for this segment was an article published in The New York Times, entitled “The Mental Strain of Making Do With Less.”
What happens when we have an issue, problem or condition that constantly takes up a good deal of our available “bandwidth” – the energy, attention, focus, emotionality, and thought processes that go on beneath the surface?
We actually have less capacity to handle the important things in life: Career, relationships, environment, meaningful connection, pleasurable pursuits, and personal fulfillment.
These often unexplored topics are where we feel scarcity in our lives, or where we feel ourselves lacking, like esteem, intelligence, money, weight. And what do we create when we run the energy of scarcity in our lives?
Someone just asked me what I thought about the Rachael Ray ads for the miracle weight loss product that burns fat.
My response: “It’s always nice to see rich people making millions off water loss.” @@ (rolling my eyes).
Haven’t we had enough of celebrity dieters and supplement hawkers?
I’ve seen this same ad for over forty years. Just a new name and a new audience of suckers.
Products like this can’t address why you overeat, binge or food addictions. Products can’t address that overwhelming need for food you feel in your body, that compulsion that drives eating behavior.
Nothing can cause your body to burn fat without exercise or change in food intake. In fact, if you were burning fat at the rate they claim you’ll see weight loss, your body would shut right down to protect itself.
If you want to learn the facts about how permanent weight loss occurs, and how to support yourself mentally, emotionally and spiritually, check out my new class starting in October: enLIGHTen Your Life!
Because knowledge is empowering!
Making celebrity dieters rich is not.
So much of my journey through food addiction and back to my true self has involved four letter words. At first, they described my dilemma:
Hard
Diet
Food
Then, as I faced myself, they grew profane:
Damn
Shit
Junk (food)
F*ck
Piss
Bolt
F*ck
I got down on myself:
I grew up in a cranky Southern female family that emphasized looks over achievement, the perfect body over brains, style over substance. I was ninja trained in the black arts of judgment, comparison and self-hatred by a mother who could eviscerate the toughest-skinned cowgirl with an evil look or a few words. In the face of unbearable beauty, her final clawing words were:
“Yeah, she’s pretty, but she knows it, so that cancels it right out.”
It wasn’t easy knowing you’d never be good enough, and, if you did have the luck to grow up pretty, you couldn’t even enjoy that knowledge without the dreaded cancellation effect occurring.
Talk about a lose-lose situation!
I was only ten when she put me on my first diet. Even though I wasn’t fat, there was fear I would be… because she was fat. Mama taught me to closet eat and to use food for every possible doubt, fear, delay or frustration. She also taught me to diet with a vengeance after days, weeks or months of channeling the power of food into bodyfat. (more…)
