Connecting to my feelings about food

Yesterday in my appointment with my therapist she asked me what I envisioned when I thought of when I connected to the part of me that wanted to be healthy and fit. I told her that I get so frustrated because what I really want is to just be "normal." She sort of poo-pooed that away, saying ... "Forget that, no one is normal. All women have body image issues of some sort." I was angry at her for her flippancy. So I stopped for a minute and then said, "What I am telling you is that inside my head, I have the idea that there are people out there who don't have to constantly think about what they are going to eat, when they are going to eat it, they don't think about food all the time, they can shop in any store they want." For me, normal means I don't have to battle with food and exercise issues every day of my life. I can work out every day and love it -- I don't have to worry about what people think about me when I'm at the gym, or have a constant feeling of "I can't do this. I'm too out of shape." The truth is ... I am not "normal" ... I am a compulsive overeater, and I will always have struggles with using food as something other than nutrition. I doesn't mean that I have to let it run my life, but I have to give up that pipe dream that I'm going to be "normal." And honestly, she's probably right, there are few people out there who really can just say they have NO food issues.

One of the reasons I chose "kindness" as my secondary "focus" word for the year, was because I am trying to learn to be kind to myself, including to my body. While kindness to others (when I pay attention to them) comes pretty easy for me, kindness to myself is so much more difficult. I am really hard on myself and that is something I want to work on. But I am also continuing to realize -- peeling the proverbial onion -- how little I have seen my own responsibility for myself. For all of my life I have sort of seen things as "take what you get." Whether it was my health or my happiness, even though I worked hard, I always sort of just lived life without much discipline or thought, never recognizing that part of being "lucky" in life was doing some work to prevent disease and unhappiness.

A friend sent me this in one of our New Year's exchanges. It was something she read elsewhere: If you (1) want to change, (2) decide to change, (3) learn how to change, (4) take action to change, (5) persist in your attempt to change, and (6) start again when you backslide, there's a very good chance that you will change in the ways you want.

The Woman Within

There is within me a woman who loves the way she feels when her body is exerted and stretched to its limits by exercise. I can feel that woman.

There is a body surrounding that woman, a body built for protection, that prevents that woman within from living.

May 2008 be the year the woman within begins to live.

My beautiful body

This weekend I went to a workshop in which the speaker, a well-known self-improvement author, walked us through a process of self-discovery. The speaker's general theory, adapted from the theories of Carl Jung, is that anything we can't embrace about ourselves creates difficulties in our lives, and keeps coming up (we keep attracting it) until we "learn the lesson" of acceptance.

So on Saturday we had to face our "shadows" ... those things that we didn't like or didn't want to be called. Of course, my list was a million miles long ... but we had to narrow it down to one sentence that we would never want someone to say about us under any circumstance, and then say it over and over again to a group of three people who were our "mirrors" until we could see that the negativity and "badness" in the words was of our own making. They are just words after all. So ... my focus sentence was "I am a disgusting, fat, ugly loser." These are words that have hurt me in the past tremendously.

Well, after 18 minutes of chanting "I am a disgusting, fat, ugly loser," I still hadn't accepted them as "just words." The other three members of my group made it through their "shadows," so I of course was feeling even more like a "loser."

But the next morning, I got up and went next to the ocean for prayer and meditation. I was still thinking of those words. The first thing I saw was a bird with feet that looked like fern leaves. The divine message that came to me from God was "I give every creature the body it needs to survive." A few minutes later, I saw a seal ... and watched with childish amazement as it went under the water and then came up a few minutes later for air. I thought of its big body and little short fins it was using to propel itself through the water and was again reminded of the fact that it has just the body it needs. A crane flew just barely above the water, looking for food or a landing spot below the water's surface, and a huge bird, maybe a pelican (I'm not familiar with ocean birds) also flew nearby ... its large body and widely expanded wings so close, but never touching the water. I needed the acceptance of my own body ... and I found it in all these animals. Their beauty and the amazement with how they used what they had to go about their day was a beautiful revelation to me.

I too have a body that has protected me over the years in many ways ... it is a body that deserves my love and respect, not my self-hatred. Accepting others judgements of my body is giving away my power and forgetting to appreciate every step of my yet unfinished journey.