I M Perfect lady

Tag: diets

  • Unravel

    In the past few months my teeth have been falling apart, broken teeth, fillings falling out and just this past Monday a root canal, all signs that my eating machine was breaking down.

    At one point I had 6 teeth with issues, both sides of my mouth and top and bottom, which created new challenges in eating, I could no longer just eat, I had to be aware of what and how.

    How interesting that I became aware of this Pac Man like eating machine only when it broke.

    And it took 7 broken teeth to get my attention and one root canal, but I am seeing it now. It slowed me down the only way it could by busting the Pac Man…the eating machine.

    When the eating machine was broken I saw my eating in slow motion.

    The frenzy pace was brought into focus…I became aware of how much I was unaware.

    How incredible is it that the Pac Man is the control center of eating instead of it being a team of mind, body and soul…this cavity of teeth and tongue is the ruler and the rest of me a victim of its poorly developed palate?

    Changing the palate to fit the fitness of my body is my latest adventure, to begin eating from the body and using the teeth instead of the teeth using me.

    I am sure in an uncontrollable environment, we control what we can, and eating uncontrollably gave us control, as well as the feeling of being satisfied in an unsatisfied world.

    What also linger at the fringes of my out of control eating are recollections of me being out alone with my father. I don’t recall anything but us eating alone. I was young, I was special I was out on a date. Yet, knowing he is a pedophile, this isn’t a nice scene…however the food was normal or more normal than what happened before or after…was I bought by a malt, was that my price? Did my life become normal again with food? It is funny how I can’t recall the abuse, but I can recall the food and can picture the restaurants and booths and even the swirling stools…

    Each part of my world is complicated with abuse.

    How I used food to normalize or control myself is the mystery I will unravel.

  • Your Diet Today

    As I did yoga today I was reminded of where all the unexpressed emotions lay, the container that holds them when I lived a short distance from my body, is my body.

     

    What has always been true and will always remain true, is even if you mind doesn’t allow you to stay in reality, we haven’t found a way to take our bodies out of it.

     

    Our heads only live in denial; it is like the phrase, ‘get your head out of the clouds’.

     

    I am reading “The Joy Diet” by Martha Beck.

     

    Her book contains instructions for a different kind of “diet,” one designed not for the body but for the soul.

     

    “When the word diet first entered the English Language, back in 1656 when I was a little girl, it didn’t refer to food intake.  It meant “a way of living or thinking.”  A few decades later, diet also came to mean “a day’s journey.”

     

    Her first technique is to do 15 minutes of day of nothing. 

     

    The second one is to be truthful.  Imagine this is the chapter I read last night.

     

    “The practice of telling ourselves the truth is so simple and so freeing that you’d think we’d all do it constantly. The fact is, however, that most of the people tell themselves the truth only in selected areas, and many of us lie to ourselves and others about practically everything we experience.  Why? Because living behind a pane of glass, numbing and empty though it is, also feels safe.

     

    …in 1992 and the years that followed, I realized that the simple, small truths of my real thoughts and experiences were the keys that unlocked the dungeon doors for my true self.  Trying to stop telling them would have been like trying to give up oxygen.

     

    This was an almost inexpressibly painful period of my life, but as it drew on, I began to feel intensely, vividly alive.  Prior to that time, I ‘d had no idea so much joy was even possible.  I’ve watched in pain and pride and dozens of my clients have taken the same kind of plunge, determining to tell themselves the truth, no matter what, then opening up secret after secret, breaking through lie by lie, until they find their hearts.  I only recommend that they go for one Moment of Truth a day, but the effect is the same whether you go for broke, as I did, or proceed gradually, as I suggest.  As far as I can tell, this process is always hard, always painful, always so, so worth it.

     

    If you did nothing but pursue the truth about yourself for the rest of your life, you would never run out of fresh discoveries. Every day brings you new experiences, changing you, bringing new aspects of your true self into expression.  There are many layers of thoughts and perceptions in your mind, so many interactive connections that have been developing from infancy on, that the largest part of you will always be an undiscovered country.  As you tell fewer fibs and keep fewer secrets in your inner world, you’ll find energy you once spent on denial turns outward in a kind of creative bloom.  Fascinating ideas, compassionate actions, unheard-of adventures will bubble up from the inexhaustible well of your unique personality during your Moment of Truth.”  Martha Beck

     

    This is the perfect book at the perfect time to help me articulate the ways of living outside of the bubble or as she says, behind the pane of glass.

     

    I love that diet is a day’s journey!

     

    What will you do on your diet today?

     

     

     

     

  • Book

    I am reading a book called, “Woman Food and God” by Geneen Roth, and in Chapter Two she opens with this.

     

    “On the first morning of my retreats, I tell my students that the greatest blessing in their lives is their relationship with food.  They look at me rather quizzically, but the sentiment sounds so lovely that they are willing to hear me out. Then I say that we are not going to fix their relationship with food; we are actually going to walk through the door of their eating problem and see what’s behind it.  Instead of using food to avoid discomfort, they are going to learn how to tolerate what they believe is intolerable.

     

    They stare. They scowl. They whisper to one another.

    Why would any sane person believe that tolerating the intolerable is a worthy endeavor?

    Mayhem is five minutes away.

    Then, because it seems like the thing to do, I tell them the struggling, suffering, hellish part of my story.  Over the last few decades I’ve discovered that stories of personal hell, sprinkled with intense and hostile moments, go a long way in diffusing bitterness.  I describe the years of gaining and losing a thousand pounds, loathing myself, being suicidal.  Then I talk about the switch to not diet and eating what I want to eat.


    I’ve told this story for many more years than I have lived it, but it only recently became clear to me that the radical part of the tale is not that I stopped dieting; it’s that I stopped trying to fix myself.  I stopped fighting with myself, stopped blaming myself, my mother, my latest boyfriend for my weight. And since diets were my most flagrant attempts at fixing myself, I stopped them as well.  I didn’t care anymore that I was fat that I could only fit into summer dresses in November; I had reached the threshold of struggling and figured I had two choices:  Stop dieting or kill myself.

     

    Most of my students can’t imagine a world in which they would stop dieting or trying to fix the size of their thighs.  It is easier to imagine people coming back from the dead or Brad Pitt asking them to get married than to imagine themselves dropping the war with their bodies.  They have whole relationships built on commiserating about the twenty pounds they have to lose and the jeans that are too tight and the latest greatest diets.  They fit in by hating themselves.  By trying hard and then harder to lose that last twenty, fifty, eighty pounds- and never being able to do it.  The never being able to do it is necessary if they want to fit in.  The constant war on food and body size is important if they want to be loved.  They are like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain and almost getting there but never actually arriving.

     

    The great thing about being Sisyphus is that you have your work cut out for you.  You always have something to do.  As long as you are striving and pushing and trying hard to do something that can never be done, you know who you are; someone with a weight problem who is working hard to be thin.  You don’t have to feel lost or helpless because you have a goal and that goal can never be reached.

     

    In an April 2007 UCLA Study of the effectiveness of dieting, researchers found that one of the best predictions of weight gain was having lost weight on a diet at some point during the years before the study started.  Among those who were followed for fewer than two years, 83 percent gained back more weight than they had lost. Another study found that people who went on diets were worse off than people who didn’t.

     

    Failing is built into the weight game.  There is no way to play and win.”  Geneen Roth.