Perspective

It seems to me that if I am losing weight just for the sake of losing weight, something is profoundly amiss. After doing so many different diets off and on over the years, the one thing I have learned is that the body reflects the mind and emotions. If I am emotionally upset and eat to comfort myself, then dieting isn't going to fix the problem. Maybe it will for a while, but if I don't address the emotional issues, the weight just comes right back.

So after trying traditional therapy, Re-evaluation Counseling, Overeaters Anonymous, dozens of self-help, psychology and philosophy books, numerous Landmark Education programs and seminars, practicing yoga with two Indian gurus, delving deeply into a few mainstream religions, as well as New Age faiths, I feel I have finally worked through a lot of the most plaguing issues I have had in this life.

This week I got a new perspective on it all. There haven't been multiple problems, there has been one problem that has had a hundred different tentacles! The problem was a crazy childhood as a result of being raised by adults who never dealt effectively with their own problems. Please understand, I loved my parents very much and miss them everyday, but the two of them were a couple of highly dysfunctional people trying to live their lives around some pretty big problems. I learned at a young age that food equalled love and it brought a lot of comfortable feelings. So untangling all the upset of my childhood has taken me a long time. For years I had a love/hate relationship with my mother that was a constant roller coaster ride of emotions. But in the end, I finally realized that my mother had been dealing with the hand she was dealt, just the same as my grandmother had!

I finally came to understand how I got so screwed up, but it wasn't until I cared for my mother in her final years that I was able to forgive her and ask for forgiveness. Our relationship was finally healed and then she died. I am now left to clean up the rest of the mess. It looks like 33 boxes of her stuff in my garage and another 20 or so in my basement. Once her possessions are dealt with, then I will be free to live my life and will have no more excuses for abusing my body with food.

Thankfully, I think I have learned something through all this. I have worked through a lot of the painful memories and learned that I don't have to binge on SAD foods to comfort or nurture myself. I know that a living foods diet of mainly fruits and vegetables will restore my health, my sanity and my body.

I bless the path that brought me here.

On Wednesday I ate:

• Breakfast: Green smoothie of mango, orange, banana, and spinach.
• Lunch: Salad of escarole, mustard greens, orange bell pepper, celery, mung bean sprouts, and a dressing of lemon juice, Dijon mustard, agave nectar and olive oil.
• Supper: Corn chowder with fresh sweet corn, cashews, garlic, green onion, carrots, and celery.

On Thursday I ate:

• Breakfast: Power balls.
• Lunch: Salad with spring mix, spinach, carrots, celery, mushrooms, balsamic vinegar and olive oil.
• Supper: Lettuce wraps with romaine lettuce, avocado, green onion, orange bell pepper, cilantro, dulse, tomato and garlic powder.
• Snack: A bowlful of sauerkraut.

Emotional Detox

One thing that can not be overlooked when discussing detox symptoms is our emotions. For people like me who have "stuffed our feelings" for most of our lives, there can be some very unexpected consequences to eating raw. As our bodies get cleaner, feelings that have been trapped as a result of emotional eating, start to emerge. And, they typically don't ask if this is a convenient time!

I have noticed as time goes on that more and more old feelings over a variety of hurts have been surfacing. Just about every time this happens I can identify a point in the past where rather than feeling some painful event, I suppressed my feelings with food. As I deal with the painful feelings, I find that it is much easier to experience them now than when the event actually occurred. But, I don't seem to be able to control when these feelings pop up or how long the emotional release might take. Several times there has been an almost overwhelming urge to go eat something to put an end to the painful feelings once more. Fortunately I have been able to recognize when this happens and been able to allow the feelings to just come out. But there has been an occasion where I decided that enough was enough and just ate my next meal or a snack to tone down the pain I was feeling.

Today was a good example of this. Possibly because Easter is this weekend, I started thinking about how much I missed my mom. We used to plan and start shopping for our Easter dinner right about now. We had many happy times around this holiday and today it was clear to me that I am not through grieving for her. I found myself in the grocery store, stopped in the middle of an open area, just thinking about her and starting to cry. I quickly checked my feelings until after I was back in my car, but then the tears really started to roll. I drove home and thought about what to do for myself. The feelings came and went throughout the day and I finally just surrendered to them. This afternoon I decided to go visit her grave and gave myself permission to just feel how much I missed her. After a while, I left there, and being tired of feeling so crummy, I went to a restaurant and ate a salad. It was enough to push the emotions back down for a while. I will let them out again another time. But it felt good to let myself just feel my feelings instead of resisting them. This is certainly a much healthier approach than just eating to make all the pain go away.

Today I ate:
Breakfast: Green smoothie with pineapple, banana, collards and kale.
Lunch: Lettuce wraps with cucumber, carrot, avocado, and romaine lettuce.
Supper: Green salad with pecans, tomatoes, variety of lettuces, avocado, lemon juice and olive oil.
Snack: A few power balls.

Did not Body Flex today. Need to get that routine running again.