Many Changes in a Lifetime

Hello there, dear readers,

This is scary/funny/true.

I apologize for this three-week gap between posts.  I was working through something relevant to this body love thing and I felt I needed to have a grip on what I was experiencing before I tried to write about it.  This is not a constraint I usually possess (ask my fiancé), so I am grateful that I gave myself this time to ruminate on my own.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been struggling with reconciling my desire to lose weight and my unshaken belief in loving my body.  Not to mention that I've now broadcasted this belief to all Facebook friends, Twitter followers (all 5), and friends-of-my-parents (all 150).  It seems like there's a conflict of interest here and I have been determined to justify my feelings and actions in a way that stays true to all of those beliefs.  Now that I have begun to succeed in that endeavor, I can share what I've discovered!

Step one.  Why I want to lose weight and why that doesn't interfere with positive body image.

I will say over and over again (to you and to myself) that my top priority is health, not "beauty".  Yes, thoughts of achieving some unattainable ideal figure will inevitably pop into my head, but my motivation is mental and physical health. For myself (but not necessarily for everyone else, of course), gaining weight has added a strain on some joints, muscles, and bones that has not been there before. Feet, back, hips all can feel the change in my body, and though they are surviving, my physical joy of moving has significantly decreased.  If I can get back that joy and put a spring back into my step (literally), then I will jump at the opportunity.

From Beauty Redefined

Step two.  How I have tried going about doing that and why it hasn't worked (I think).

Because I am determined to keep my relationship to food and to my body emotionally healthy I have avoided making any sort of rules for myself when it comes to eating.  No "No food after 8pm!" "No carbs!" "Only 3.75 desserts a week!" Instead, I have worked on listening to my body, giving it what it needs, and stopping when it is satisfied.  The pitfalls in this system are twofold. 1) I can listen to my body all I want, but I can't always understand what it's saying.  I try very hard, but sometimes it is just speaking an entirely different language than I am.  2) I am very good at tricking my brain.  (Most of us are good at self-justifying.) So I may be able to tell myself that my body really does need a Venti Frappuccino to get through the day, but my body may be actually just needing a big serving of Vitamin A-filled veggies.  Together with not always understanding my body, this tactic is much easier said than done.

A beautiful photo of some vegetarian proteins!

Unwilling to give up on this mindful eating strategy (and I never will be!), I moved on to focusing on eating protein, realizing that my other food group proportions fell more neatly into place if I made sure I was getting protein at every meal and snack.  Nutritionally, this helped a lot! But proportion-wise, I ran into trouble needing to satisfy my body's hunger but knowing that if I continued to fill myself completely, I would remain at the weight I am now.





Step three.  The newest experiment.

I went to the doctor for an annual check up and we scheduled a follow up appointment for a nutrition consultation a week later (this is why it has taken me so long to write).  At that appointment, I briefly summarized my journey with my body and explained that I was looking to slowly lose weight, but was at a loss as to how to do that without losing any of my positive emotional relationship to food and my body.

The doctor assured me that that healthy relationship was of the utmost importance.  Then, she began to lay out the facts.  She told me how many calories I needed to eat in a day to lose weight and told me how that should be broken down throughout the day.  She also told me which types of foods (ie. carbs, fats, proteins, veggies) would be helpful to eat at which points during the day.

While she was calm and encouraging, I automatically had a bit of a nervous breakdown.  How was I going to do this while holding on to everything that's important to me??  The answer: I was just going to have to try it.

And guess what? It has been going well.  I told myself that I would take one week to actually count/measure food just so that I would have an accurate idea of how much was how much.  Putting a one-week limit on that part of the lifestyle change helped calm my nerves, because I knew that this wouldn't turn into a full-on calorie-counting diet.

And the most surprising part is - having the minimal amount of other guidelines has actually been INCREDIBLY LIBERATING! Who knew? But once I started, I realized that this holds true in all parts of my life; I do well with a little bit of structure. It actually makes me feel more secure and stable and healthy.

I want to emphasize here that I am sharing this as my own personal experience of this experiment and the feelings I have been having along the way.  The reason this is part of my body love journey is because it is helping me love my body, emotionally and physically.  BUT - it may not be part of yours. If there is one tenet I believe about body love, it is that we are all unique.  That is what the mainstream media tries to take away from us by selling us one ideal beauty and the fad diets and tricks to make us look just so.  That is not the love our bodies needs.  Our bodies need individual attention and a willingness on our part to adapt.  My body needs something entirely different from yours.  And then, within that one body, changes in lifestyle may be necessary.  Even the most stable of bodies change throughout their life cycles and need us, as their loving owners, to switch it up in order to take care of them.

This breakdown can't possibly be right for every human body.
You know?

So, when I say that this new way of eating has been liberating to me, I do not mean in any way to sell that to you.  I am just sharing the joy with the hope that you can read this and say to yourself, Hm...that might work for me! Or Nope...that would definitely not work for me.  Or Wow...I really don't care at all whether or not that would work for me, I have much more important things on my mind.

One really interesting thing is that I am also finding more energy to move my body. Which to me is a surefire sign that I am giving it what it needs.  Of course there are always days where I am just too wiped - but I will take advantage of the days when I am feeling feisty!

My body really is feeling good right now.  I look forward to keeping all of you updated on the roller coaster as I continue to try new things to figure out what works for my body.  Like I said, one body changes many times in a lifetime.  I don't expect mine be the outlier to this rule; I expect it to need something different later on.  If I'm lucky, it will give me a few years to function in a way of life before suggesting I change.  But should it demand something new tomorrow, I like to think I'd be willing to give that something new a try.


With strength, love, and protein,

Gabriella

Possible-izing the Impossible

Sometimes it feels like body image struggles, both physical and emotional, are impossible to overcome. I dedicate this post to everyone who keeps coming back to find their body love, even when it feels hopeless.

It may seem like one step forward, two steps back, but I have to believe - and I hope you will, too - that the reverse is True. So let's take those two steps forward, whatever they may entail for each one of us, and no matter how many times we have to take a baby step back again.

I say this to show my pride in all of you for whatever you do to increase your body love, but also as a form of self-encouragement! Since the beginning of this blog, two months ago, I have made major improvements on listening to my body and eating nutritionally.  I have not, however, been "moving" as often as I had wanted to, nor have I been slowly and healthily losing weight to relieve my joints and muscles. (See my first post for a more detailed account of my goals.)

I cannot express over typing how frustrating this is for me.  Here, I feel like I am doing everything right that I can possibly manage, and yet my body is not rewarding my efforts.  What is up with that?!

The answer is - it could be lots of things. For all of my body awareness, I cannot pretend to know everything that is going on in my body.  So I cannot despair, and I will continue to do what feels good, that is, to eat nutritionally and as my body needs it.

BUT, to satisfy my frustrated mind, I can postulate about mental blocks that may be in my way, preventing me from achieving the other hopes I have laid out for myself.  Talking with my besty from my home town this past 4th of July weekend, I discovered some of these personal mental and emotional blocks. I will go through them in reverse order:

3. My desire to feel ultra-relaxed during my downtime.  Logically, this cannot include movement.  Therefore, when I get home from work I am determined to be as sedentary (ie. restful) as possible.  We deconstructed this.

2. I feel hypocritical trying to lose weight, even healthily, because I know that a part of me still insists that I will look more beautiful if I am thinner. Even if that is not the ultimate reason that I desire a lighter physique, I feel guilty hearing it chatter away in the back of my head. We deconstructed this.

1. My sparring match with severe restrictive dieting has instilled in me an instinctual fear of hunger.  Any amount of hunger is automatic reason to find food, and if my stomach is growling, I must be restricting myself and something. is. wrong.  The problem with that is, in order to lose weight, I need to decrease my net calorie intake (ideally through exercise primarily), which, at the weight I am now, will not be quite enough to satiate me. So as far as I can tell, I will be a little hungry until my body adjusts.*  And I just cannot tolerate this. This did not need deconstructing because, as you can tell, I already knew where this one came from.

We talked these out for a long time and I won't bore you with the details.  What I will share are the solutions that we agreed may help.

Solutions (at least for now):
1. It is okay to be a little uncomfortable.  Try it and see. (I am currently experimenting with this.  It is going well, but I am still questioning when hunger is healthy and when it is not.  One technique I may try is eating small meals 5-6 times a day instead of 3 medium meals a day so that I do not feel as if I am operating on small amount of food all day.)

2. When I find myself focusing on ideal beauty, tag on a line about health (ie. "I will look so much better if I lose some weight...AND I will feel so healthy!")**

3. Relaxation does not have to be sedentary. I will attempt to do some moving as many days as possible before I relax all the way into my couch and can't get up.

A wonderful Beauty Redefined post-it note message
that I try to remind myself of when problem #2 surfaces.

Those are the experiments I am working on right now.   As I wrote this, I couldn't help but wonder if the experiments will ever end.  But why is that bad? If body health and body love will always be important to me, then, yes, I will always be asking my body what it needs.  Since it can't speak English back to me, I will have to continue to experiment to allow it to answer my questions. Maybe instead of calling it an experiment, I will call it a conversation.  Hm. Yes, I like that.  And I sure hope my conversation with my body will never end. (That would be bad.)

Well, that's it for now.  I'm off to move my body by wringing out hand-washed laundry (trust me, it is a workout).

With hope, clarity, and Dustin Hoffmanº,

Gabriella



*Since I have a doctor's check-up this week, I will follow up about this matter and let you know if that is, in fact, true.

**Ideally, I would love to cut myself off and say, "I will look so much better- NO! IT'S NOT ABOUT LOOKS! YOU WILL BE HEALTHY!" But I don't believe self-denial will do me much good.  I am subject to the unrealistic ideals of beauty as much as any other media-bashing, self-aware, body-image enthusiast out there.  The only way I can fight that body hate head on is to remove it further and further from my focus by redirecting my focus somewhere else (not by denying the thought in the first place).

ºHere's a little body love treat: