The Complex Digestion of Change (2nd Post)

There are some changes that are easy to make such as haircuts, the way you dress or even what you like/don’t like. The changes that are harder to make are those which are entrenched and entangled with other aspects. I am the first to admit to being stubborn and slow to change in many respects. When an argument  does come along that brushes against what I believe or understand but is easy to see as a better or more accurate view than my own, often I will adopt that without any hint of stubbornness. I process things very quickly and do not believe in sticking to my guns on all things just for the sake of sticking to my guns. I have decided that which I know can be augmented, changed and, in fact, abandoned if it does not suit me anymore. This plays a major role when it comes to the type of changes I am embarking on. I am going to take you through the things I’ve learned must change and some that I have changed in the last month. This is long but please bear with me.

Let’s start with excuses. I believe that there are two types of excuses when it come to health and weight loss: Denial you have anything to do with  it and acceptance of what is because of x,y and z “positive belief”. My denial excuses are as follows: It has been my belief that because I am a fully trained chef I have not been the cause of my fatness. The reason I am fat, therefore, must be everything else’s fault; Heredity, my poly cystic ovarian syndrome, my degenerative disc disease and multiple herniated lumbar discs that are preventing my ability to properly exercise, my excessively (even when at a decent body weight) enormous boobs and anything else that I could pass blame to. But not my cooking or my eating habits. Never either of those things.  My acceptance excuses are as follows: It really doesn’t matter to me what people think of my body, so it is fine the way it is (I honestly do not care how others feel about my body). I also know that I will never be a bikini model and I don’t want to be, so my body is fine as is. I can still move around well enough that it isn’t like I am house bound. I can still climb flights of stairs, ride a bike, and lift heavy objects, etc., so I must be doing something right. This is bending what  you don’t like or are unwilling to accept into an acceptable light. And both of those types of excuses are equally damaging. I do realize that I don’t need to be super über fit. I just need to be comfortable and have a body that is maintainable, usable and enjoyable. You can see how the excuses pile up and are easy to find or manufacture. They are like garden walls, not so tall that you can’t see over but still easy enough to hide behind. And now I have started on busting those walls down so I will have nothing to hide behind. Another reason, as I see it, to do this journey publicly. I know that if I do this alone and quietly than I can give up because no one is watching me. “No one is watching me” has been an unfortunate excuse I use to often with unimportant things and I have also used in other “get healthy” attempts in my past.

I have swaddled myself in excuses that are now my fat. And now that swaddling is uncomfortable, suffocating and hot. For me, putting on the fat was this simple equation: EXCUSES + TIME = FAT. Sure you could add to that bad eating and lack of exercise but the main components of how I made myself fat are excuses and a lot of wasted time. I’ve essentially wasted a decade of time being fat, unhealthy and uncomfortable because I excused my way out of doing anything about it or taking responsibility for it. Which goes back to my thoughts in the first paragraph; I was unwilling to abandon my excuses because I was stubbornly holding on to beliefs and arguments that it wasn’t my fault despite knowing things weren’t ok. I was raised to question everything, to be liberal enought to listen to others ideas and associate with those who were not like me because it would broaden my scope. But, and this is not a reflection on my parents, I am liberal until it comes to actually changing my mind when it comes to things that relate to my person. We won’t even get into political issues… that is a kettle of fish that has little to do with my fatness (except perhaps food legislation). Perhaps now, even though I’ve always been accepting of new ideas, I have become willing to implement and shift my stand on my more personal matters and to admitting that I am perfectly okay with changing my stand because new information and evidence is giving me reason to. Somehow we have this societal idea that if you change your belief on something you are wishy-washy, you are a hypocrite, less trustworthy and a number of other less than flattering things. If you change frequently and without any reasons that you can articulate, I can understand how a person could be seen that way. However, taking the time to evaluate where you stand on anything and then changing your stance is completely acceptable. Even if it is political or religious…. Just saying… moving on. *Cough*

When you finally realize that you are not okay with your health and body, you are not okay with the excuses of any kind and you are not okay continuing down the path you are on what do you do? How do you move on? Why does it always feel so overwhelming that you give up before you start? Answer: For me it is lack of information and direction. Today we have a plethora, a veritable smorgasbord of information to gorge on but, how do we know what is the right information for us? What do we need to really have a reliable road map to follow? I love the saying K.I.S.S: Keep It Simple Stupid. Now I am not calling anyone stupid. I am not stupid and you are not stupid, but we all have the ability to be stupid from time to time. Don’t go complicated. I’ve done that in the past and I was determined not to do that this time. This is not to say that the road ahead might not be complex or the way you get there might not have aspects of complexity to it. What I mean is to not go out and buy 30 books, sign up at the gym, register for five different guru talks and do three hours of yoga all in one day or even a week. Stop. Do not overwhelm yourself. Think of the initial phase of learning like this: If you take too big  a bite of something that is hard to chew you’re gonna have problems and choke. The same will happen if you try to chew and digest information that is not in the size and at a speed which you can handle.  Just stop and give up on the idea that this is going to be instant and immediately gratifying, because it won’t be. Rome was not built in a day, my waist did not expand overnight and I cannot do this in the span of a few weeks and expect it be all be finished. As a matter of fact, there is no end date on this project.

I’ve been about a month now educating myself and turning my mind around at a speed comfortable to me. I have, because I understand that I am a binge eater and a compulsive eater, begun to monitor my eating and I’ve lost about 10 lbs (5 kg). And that is good. I won’t take that small accomplishment away from myself but it is not near enough. I need more. I am hungry for the first time for information to heal me. I say heal because I am wounded deeply. I have been systematically abusing myself for years with the food I eat (even the homemade from scratch stuff) and with the darkness of my psyche. My inner monologue, my inner “mean girl” is a very effective and very devastating weapon. And think I’ve now got my hands on a muzzle: information.

The information that I’ve found in a nutshell is: Dieting will cause you to fail every time. It has before and it will again if I go that route. The thing is dieting is short-term and I am thinking long-term. Dieting is to meet a goal and then abandon the diet and go on as you were before. But what I have done before has and is causing me to be how I am at current. So why on earth would I want to ever come back to what I am doing after I change? The only answer to that is because it’s habit and habit is easy. I’ve had to come to the belief that what I am doing is not comfortable and any excuse/habit/easy way out I could come up with isn’t going to make it so. Where does that leave me? I have to not diet. I can never diet again. I have to change my lifestyle and the diet (as in the foods that I need to consume to live, not lose weight) that I subsist on. I have the idea of where I want to go and the knowledge that I do have an eating disorder. I have two key parts of my equation figured out.

I realize that changing my diet won’t help if I am just going to binge out on the new foods. I needed information on the eating disorder first and so I started with the information my friend gave me and then found more on my own about it. I read medical journals about it (some dry and some really great), I read personal blogs, I read articles by therapists, by doctors and by journalist. What I found is that it’s as much a mental game as it is a physical one. I came away knowing I needed to strap on the muzzle on the mouth of my inner mean girl and fast. I just needed a way to use the information to muzzle her. She might not be completely silent for a while, but I sure can muffle her up a bit. As I was working on the “how to muzzle you inner mean girl” problem, I came across something in one woman’s blog which was a clue:

“YOU MUST TRY ALL THINGS THAT ARE REASONABLY SAFE, EVEN IF YOU ARE SKEPTICAL, WHEN YOU ARE TRYING TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE”.

I wish I could quote the blog and woman who said that, but I can’t. I am horrible at closing windows before I save the url and this was before I decided to go so public with all of this. I will work on that. Safe and the definition thereof can be subjective. I felt she meant not drastic, nothing that will do either immediate or long-term harm. Nothing truly foolish. I found her statement to be a personal truth for me. I am going to have to try new things, perhaps things that I am not certain about at the onset. I am going to have to override my skeptical-brain with some of these things as I find them.  Skepticism is a safety mechanism, an evaluation tool but it can also be a major road block. I am going to use is as a safety mechanism and tool and do my best to not let it block me. And then I stumbled on a suggestion in another blog that immediately put that to the test. It said try hypnosis for eating disorders. Oh boy. My skepticism flared like some super power newly awakened.

Now I tend to be either a complete skeptic or a complete believer. And it can be seriously confusing and give you mental whiplash from time to time. I’ve moved from one end of that spectrum to the other with all the gradients in between as I’ve change my position on things. However, I’ve never come against any topic or belief that I am middle ground from the get-go.  I was skeptical, but I thought what the hell. It was safe, as far as I could discern and what have I to lose but a bit of time right? Why not try hypnosis as a method of controlling the binge eating and my mean girl? I need to name her…. It would make her easy to tell “Shut the hell up and go to your room” if she had a name. Anyways.  I went looking in my local area. I am American but I live abroad in Norway. The language barrier was making my quest flop. I do speak Norwegian but not fluently enough for hypnosis in Norwegian to be a benefit. I thought then, well, I am going to London shortly perhaps I can do some when I am there. But then the cost became prohibitive. This is both an excuse and a fact. It was going to be insanely expensive and I couldn’t justify it because my skeptic brain had taken over. Then another excuse popped up: I have ADHD, which I thought there was no way I could focus long enough to have it be of benefit so why spend that kind of money. I didn’t think that the constant chatter that goes on inside my head would be conquerable. I realized I was making excuses. I had to stop. Just stop and try. But I still couldn’t justify the money. So to the internet I went.

YouTube to the rescue! I found a licensed hypnotherapist from Manchester, England who had put free 30 minute sessions on YouTube and on his website for a number of things. He too had suffered with weight issues. I listened to the concept, how it would only work if I was willing to let it work and he was not going to make me squawk like a chicken or hump a light post if I saw a green car pass by. Thank goodness. I can honestly say I was pleasantly surprised and that they’ve helped a lot. I will link his page at the bottom of this post. I can’t say it will work for everyone and people may find me foolish for trying but it was safe and I had nothing to lose. I am also going to use traditional therapy as well. A check up from the neck up, so to speak. (Got that from Kris Karr from “Hungry for Change”) I’ve used therapy before but not as openly as I intend to this time. I realize now that I was wasting time before because I was only opening up just a little instead of trusting the full process. It isn’t that I haven’t trusted my therapists before. I just wasn’t ready. And I wanted the symptoms of my depression, my ADHD and anxiety to disappear quickly. I wanted the medications to cover them up to make me feel better instantly. I realize that in this quest I am on that perhaps I can cure those things with my diet, or at very least make them things that I don’t need meds for. I should say that I take no meds now because the side effects are not something I enjoy. It could very well be that my depression will, like so many before me, lessen or disappear with the weight loss and exercise that is to come shortly.

I have digested a lot of information in a relatively short amount of time. For some it will take longer than I, but as long as you are moving forwards that is still movement. I read insanely fast and I process information really fast. I realize that these are gifts that I possess and I am grateful for. After I digested the information about binge/compulsive eating I moved into lifestyle based diet changes. I want to make sure that you do not confuse my use of diet with “a weight loss diet”. I will never mean that at all when I say diet. This is about the time my friend told me about the two documentaries I mentioned in my first post. I was already familiar, and by that I mean conceptually familiar and not intensively familiar with, the Atkins, South Beach, Paleo, Vegetarian/Vegan and so on “diets”. I’ve tried calorie restriction, carb restriction and so on. I used to use yoga and the gym regularly. I enjoy both a lot and at one point forced my body thin with exercise. Not healthy. No, I can’t claim that. Thin. Thin was fun but short-lived because I didn’t change my eating habits.

I was coming across and reading all the standard weight loss diet information. Things we’ve all heard time and time again, including the idea of exercise your ass off type approach and they just don’t make sense to me. They are lacking in aspects. Everyone comes to truths on their own terms. I understand that something which resonates as truth for me may not for you. For me the truth is that the processed food companies are not in business to make me healthy food. They are in business for profit. Profit is OK.  I am not anti-profit. But, I can 100% believe that good health is not on their agenda. Which means to me that I need to cut them out. That leaves me with veggies, fruits and seeds in their whole form for me to manipulate and use. There might be some companies out there which are not ethically bankrupt and are indeed making healthy food… I cannot say everything that is pre-made is wrong, bad, evil and so I won’t. But the majority? Yeah, I feel I can say that. I can also believe that the pharmaceutical companies have duped us and our medical system into believing that pills cure and are the only way. I believe that medicine does have its place. I have had some accidents where I have never been more grateful than I was for the doctors who’ve treated me, put my bones back together and could scientifically heal my infections. I am thankful for the drugs that make pain more manageable and so on. But, in terms of making me healthy I don’t believe they can. I promise I am not trying to sound sanctimonious at all. Unless a doctor (and this is big) believes in nutrition first and foremost and nutritionally feeding the body right down to the cells without anything but what mother nature provides, than perhaps I am going to use them for the things that they are best at: Being body engineers and germ destroyers. They are great at that. And I thank them for being so.

When I saw “Hungry For Change” and listened to the ideas about using fresh veggie and fruit juices to detox the body and then feed the body deeply using whole, clean food like a strictly plant-based diet the light went on. It seemed complete. I listened and I saw the results. And I got excited…. And then Skeptical-Brain kicked in. Now, it seemed to make perfect sense but where was the catch? Everything has a catch right? Probably. In this case it is “this is not a diet”. That is a pretty big catch if you are not ready for it.  So I started reading the books by Jason Vale, I read what he had to say. He is a funny man. He is a realistic man and skeptic-brain started to stop being so… well, skeptical. And then I read some older material about using fresh veggie juices to detox, nutritionally load the body and how the weight loss and health gained are quick but natural and safe. I believe these things to be correct.

But the pervasive idea that losing weight fast is bad still lingers. And I understand why. The body is a great machine but much like my pc or my phone, when it gets a good shock it tends to do some quirky things. I believe that traditional “Get thin quick” model is akin to dropping my pc on the floor and then expecting it to work normally.  I’ve had my body go into shock three times that I can remember the event and it feels like war between survival and shut down on your insides. It is a terrible experience. Fast weight loss through means that shock your body will cause a war inside your body; things will stop working properly, a fight to survive will ensue and then something will have to give; most often namely you in the form of a pig out. I do want to stress I am not in this for quick results but the veg/fruit juicing path does yield fast results so I want to explain it before your brain does the skeptic-brain “Why am I listening to her” thing. Unless you are giving your body everything that it needs to work something will always breakdown. Just like any other machine. We, as humans, happen to be biological, squishy machines but machines none the less. I intend on giving this machine everything it needs, now that I know what in fact needs. A good old detox flush out and then jet fuel in the shape of a raw and vegan diet because that is what I need now. This is my truth. This is what I have digested in the last 30 days. This is my road map thus far. Now, go chew on that 😉

Gary Maddison: Hypnotherapist http://www.freehypnosissessions.com/your-therapist.html