Keeping our minds in the present is undeniably important.  But how do we do it? 

Some people do this naturally and some people, such as myself, are more “in their head”.  When it comes right down to it, I believe that keeping my thoughts on the past or future but avoiding the present is somewhat of a fear-based maneuver. 

Typically, my thoughts of the past are about trying to analyze what I did or said in certain situations, how people reacted to me, and what they might have thought of me.  My thoughts of the future (which are much more prevalent) typically focus on what events are planned and the circumstances surrounding them, how I can make them unfold easier, how I can improve situations that I might find myself in, etc.  It’s all very control-freakish. 

I think a part of me believes that if I can control the situations around me, then I will never have to feel in a way that I don’t want to feel.  My instincts are to go to great lengths to try and keep myself from feeling anything bad.  Therefore, I am rarely in the present, and it shows.

During my years in N.A. I heard some sayings that really apply to this:

If you’ve got one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, then you’re pissing all over today.   (That one makes me giggle.)

Yesterday is history and tomorrow is a mystery.  Today is a gift.  That’s why it’s called the present.

And here is the SparkPeople explanation of the quote, good as always:

Do you worry about what is going to happen in the future, or have sad regrets about the past? Take today to just concentrate on the present. It’s great to learn from the past and to plan for the future, but what is happening right now is what really matters. The past has come and gone and the future holds no guarantees. Today is the most important day. So begin each day with a plan. What do you want to accomplish today? Workout? Eat healthy? Play with your kids? Daily, small goals will help you in the long run achieve your dreams. Concentrate on the “now”.

I’ve heard lots of suggestions for staying in the present and most of them involve meditation in one form or another.  The art of quieting the mind and being still.  Being at peace with the world around us.  And just being.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

So, that is something I will be working on.  I read this FABULOUS post from zen habits the other day about the Japanese philosophy called Kaizen.  The philosophy is about making a big change seem small by breaking it up into a series of very small changes.  Sounds interesting, yes?  If you are like me, a nice example of an everyday situation this can be applied will really help break it down. The example used in the post is the following:

Let’s see how this would work in our daily life. Let’s imagine that you want to get up an hour earlier each morning in order to be more productive.

Strategy No. 1: You grit your teeth, set your clock an hour earlier, and struggle out of bed. This might work for a few days, or for longer if you’re disciplined. But chances are that you’ll be back in your old groove as soon as you begin to feel tired and stressed.

Strategy No. 2: You use the Kaizen method and get up one minute earlier each day. Two months later you would be getting out of bed one hour earlier – without even noticing the change!

You can see by this example what a powerful strategy for change Kaizen is.

Can you imagine literally tricking ourselves into that kind of change? Amazing. I was discussing this principle with a friend and we both decided to implement this technique in an attempt to save money more effectively and yet, relatively painlessly.

But I digress. Let’s bring this discussion back to the present! This Kaizen idea is what I am going to use to begin meditating. Can I keep my mind quiet for one minute? I honestly don’t know. But I know it takes practice and one minute sounds like a good place to start.

The other cool thing about the whole Kaizen thing is that it really falls in line with the moderation I am trying to live by. Small changes being made for real change rather than big splashes of change that can eventually lead to failure (perhaps another type of self-sabotage in and of itself!).

So tell me, how do you stay in the present? Is this something you have worked on before? Do you have any tips for me? What do you think of Kaizen and can you think of any ways to apply it to your life? Or are you like me and searching to learn? What do you think of meditation? As always, I love your thoughts and ideas!!

After reveling in my latest weight loss quandary, I’ve realized something.  Moderation is what I am fighting against (at least that 20% of me).  My whole life has been a series of extremes and I’ve never lived in a state of moderation.  So naturally, my comfort zone is at one extreme or the other.  I think that must be why I can go for several weeks of eating very healthy and exercising very regularly and then BOOM, I let life’s circumstances bring me to a screeching halt and send me into a frenzy of binge eating.

After reading this SparkPeople article (you know how I love them), I realized that there is a lot more to do with moderation than just being in the middle of two extremes.  Moderation in terms of weight loss represents a commitment to living a healthy life, not just temporarily, but for life.  That means that the “diet” never ends and that there will never come a time that I can simply eat whatever I want for the rest of my life.  I’ve proven to myself that I cannot handle that.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not hard to understand why this quote speaks to me.  Does it speak to you? 

As you may know, I’ve recently had some frustrating experiences with self sabotage and have done some “binge eating” in the face of success.  And it has left me feeling disappointed and with a lot of questions.  Mainly, why is it so easy for me to give up in the midst of weight loss success?  And then I can think of 15 more questions to follow.  The thing that bothers me the most is that there is a reason for it and I don’t know what it is.

I started reading up on self sabotaging types of behaviors but I didn’t find anything that really stood out as to why I do this.  So at this point, I am still looking for answers.  Perhaps it’s best to start off by saying what I want.

I want to live a healthy lifestyle.  I want to like eating fruit, vegetables, other healthy foods, exercising, and be motivated to live healthfully.  I would say that 80% of me totally wants all that.  But for some reason there is this 20% of me that is afraid of it and has HUGE reservations about letting go.  That part of me is scared crap-less of being successful at this weight loss thing.  I mean, I’m not an emotional eater for nothing.  It only makes sense that my emotions are the key to this problem and are the foundation for the fear in my 20%.

Maybe rather than focusing on converting the full 20% to the other 80%, I should focus on a little at a time.  Rather than constantly thinking 130 pounds is my goal… 130, 130, 130, 130, 130…. 20 more pounds to go.  So close. So close. SO CLOSE.  And yet, the closer I get, the farther I feel. 

I might be more successful if I focus on 5 pounds.  And only 5 pounds.  That’s a good place to start.

But does that solve my real problem?  What is so scary about reaching my goal weight?  Why is it SO easy to give up?  I always seem to get back up and keep going but it seems to get harder each time this happens.  The internal struggle is a force to be reckoned with. 

I am nowhere near giving up though.  I’m a fighter and my defeat is only temporary.  Just at a loss for answers right now.  Looking for guidance.

SparkPeople likes to give a little explanation of each quote they have.  I find these to be very insightful.  Here is the translation they have for today’s quote:

When you fail do you find it hard to get back up? If you do, you are completely normal. Many people use failure as an excuse to give up. It is important to understand that failure is a part of the growth process. Think about this example. How many times does a small child fall over before they finally stand and eventually walk? It is countless, but somewhere along the way, most of us lose that ambition to keep trying until you succeed. The next time you are defeated, think about it as part of a process. Get up and try again and again until you move forward.

I also found this blurb of information about self sabotage from a website that actually sells guided workshops dealing with the issue. They are selfsabotagebehavior.com if you are interested. I just found this blurb to be somewhat relative to how I am feeling (although not quite to this extreme):

Self-sabotage behavior is when there is no logical or rational explanation for why you can’t do the things you want to do or why you can’t have the things you want to have.

It’s not a lack of desire, skills, knowledge or effort that hold you back. Rather, there’s something inside you that’s stronger than your desire and it sabotages your efforts to do the things you want to do and have the things you want to have.

Self-sabotage behavior can destroy your motivation to do the things you really want to do by creating an internal tug-of-war. Everyone sabotages himself or herself from time to time. Unfortunately, sometimes we sabotage ourselves to the point of not being able to live the successful, happy life we really want to live.

Self-sabotage behavior can leave you feeling frustrated, discouraged, and trapped in a situation you desperately want to change.

And lastly, I submit my problem to you.  Do you have any insight into self sabotage?  Have you experienced it and overcome it before?  Are you plagued by it as well and searching for answers?  Do you have any advice?  I’d love to hear it, even if you think it’s silly.

Okay, don’t let the word “journal” scare you.  You can call it a food log if that helps.  SparkPeople calls it a “Nutrition Tracker”, but no matter how you slice it up, the key to effective weight loss is keeping an account of everything that goes into your body. 

An article I read on Yahoo today, discusses a recent study done by researchers in the U.S. that included 1,685 middle-aged men and women.  The study found that over a span of 6 months, those who kept a food journal almost everyday lost about twice as much weight as those who did not.  Can we say, wow?  Those aren’t small numbers.  That’s a huge difference.  And I think I know why.

I can say that for myself, keeping a food journal has made all the difference in the world with my weight loss.  When I originally lost my first 30 pounds in 2007, I kept a food journal.  Then my diet went on hiatus for 6 months during our move to NC.  Once I finally jumped back into diet and exercise, I figured I already had the “knowledge” of what foods I could and could not eat.  I had already kept a food journal for 6 months and I was not going to do it again.  I was being lazy because I didn’t want to deal with it and I thought I already knew what I was doing. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Happy 4th of July/Independence Day to my fellow Americans!!  I hope you all have a wonderful day celebrating our awesome country!!

And to think it all started with a simple challenge. 

Well, the challenge ended yesterday with some surprising twists and turns.  As it turns out, on Saturday our daughter went to stay with her grandparents for a week, leaving Hubby and I with some much needed free/alone time!  We decided to take advantage of this time by heading out to the beach.  WOOHOO!  Talk about relaxing… it was wonderful!

So, as I’ve documented in the past, I have a very hard time maintaining my diet while I am out of my routine here at home.  There is this part of me that begins justifying poor eating and making all kinds of excuses for blowing up my healthy lifestyle.  In a word, Self-sabotage.  This is something I am going to be looking into over the next few weeks/months as it seems to be something that I really need to address.  As you can guess, I began to eat poorly just as soon as we were out the door.  And so did Hubby. 

This changed things for the Weight War because we both let our defenses down and allowed the chips to fall where they may.  Self-sabotage.  We ate hamburgers at the beach, homemade ice cream walking around near our hotel, chocolate turtle chex mix was the snack of choice on the beach, and of course Mellow Mushroom pizza to top it all off.  Self-sabotage.  My excuse was that I was already going to lose the challenge so hey, why not?  Self-sabotage. 

And let me just say that it is very hard to admit that after everything I have learned on my weight loss journey, I am still capable of caving like this.  I don’t want to just gloss over it because it is an indicator that I still have so much to learn.  I think I will always be a student of the healthy lifestyle.

As many of you out there doing the weight-loss thing know, eating poorly like this can just blow the scale up for a few days and even if no actual pounds end up being gained, it takes awhile for the scale to adjust.  All that being said, here are the final results of June’s Domestic Weight Wars Challenge:

Week 4 #’s
Hubby lost: 0.2 pound
Julie gained: 0.2 pound

And the final results for the month:

Hubby lost a total of 8.4 pounds!!! 
And I lost a total of 6.2 pounds!!!

So by all means of the agreement we made at the outset of the challenge, Hubby won the challenge!  Huge congratulations to him for sticking with  it and making big changes to his diet!!  And I am thrilled to announce that he is going to continue on this path of healthy eating and exercising! 

If you are interested in the percentages, they finished as follows:

Julie lost 4.07%
Hubby lost 3.99%

Ouch, says me.  But we already know what I learned about percentages!

So, being the me that I am, I wanted to get this whole mowing thing underway and not give Hubby all month to tease me about it.  So once we tallied up the numbers yesterday morning, we got busy right away with Lawn Mower Training!    And then there was the Weed Eater (also known as PURE EVIL) and learning to use that sucker was a whole new experience in and of itself.  Let’s just say that next time I will be wearing pants, sleeves, shin guards, elbow pads, and a helmet when I weed-eat.

So here I am mowing my little heart out. I soon discovered that mowing is very similar to vacuuming!

And showing a little sass for the camera.

Dude. Weed. Eating. Sucks.

Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

And the final results of all my efforts! Not too mention burning 320 calories in the process!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
What are the lessons I learned through this month-long challenge?
1) Seriously, I need to not be cocky. Go with percentages next time.
2) Healthy competition can be great for a relationship.
3) Healthy competition can be incredibly motivating.
4) I still have a lot to learn about my eating habits and triggers. Self-sabotage is something I will be tackling.
5) The readers of my blog are AWESOME!! The support and encouragement meant the world to me!!

And did you think that this would be the end of the Domestic Weight Wars? Not a chance. Look for upcoming challenges real soon. I’ve got a comeback to pull off!!!

Tune in tomorrow for the results of the Domestic Weight Wars!  Today is the final weigh in day and tomorrow all the results will be posted along with pictures and video.  Don’t miss tomorrow’s blog post for all the details! (Incidentally, Hubby and I are “kid-less” right now and using every second of our time doing fun “stuff”!)

Until then, have a fabulous day!