Rumspringa...My Tracy Anderson Transformation: Learning the Goodness of Slowing Down

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Learning the Goodness of Slowing Down

I wanted to binge today. It's really not easy to distinguish hungry from full, but I can tell when I want to binge. It feels like I want food NOW, and I want a big bowl of it and then I'm thinking of what I'm gonna eat right after that. And when I want to slow down and take a few deep breaths and ask myself, "am I hungry, anxious, sleepy, thirsty?", my binge-craving mind wants to ignore those questions, tell them "go away, I'm busy with more important things like feeling at one with this food."

I did try to slow down though. I tried to breathe, I tried to chew more slowly, I tried to figure out what I was really feeling. Then thankfully as I went to get a second bowl of food, and came to sit back down on the couch, as I was sitting my fork accidentally fell out of my hand....I seized that opportunity as a sign that my sub-conscious or someone looking out for me in the universe was trying to help me out. It was enough to wake me up and out of my typical binge/overeating pattern for me to realize with a sigh, I am not hungry.

I'm not entirely sure what triggered me to want to overeat today. I think it's just the general feeling of all the things I'd like to get done but at the same time I'm avoiding (things as simple as doing the dishes. I can tell you that more than anything, my mind feels like it's running a hundred miles an hour, so fast that I can't even comprehend what it's trying to tell me. I feel like time is flying by, the day turns so quickly to night and back to day again. (I have no idea how it's already time for the holidays) I want to keep accomplishing more goals, but I feel like I just can't calm down and slow down mentally. I'm not a terribly busy person, and yet for some reason I feel like I don't have enough time to myself to stop and breath and think and focus so that I can start to work on my life list.

Sometimes, if I do slow down enough, I feel guilty for being "unproductive". Like this one time I was doing a jigsaw puzzle by myself...a good relaxing activity that I was really enjoying...but I felt guilty that there are people suffering around the world at this very moment and here I am selfishly doing this jig-saw puzzle intstead of going out and helping the world. I want to help the world, I very much want to help the world. Even when I was very little, I wished I'd had a magic wand to solve all the world's problems.

At this point in my life, I simply want learn how to take REALLY good care of myself, and in so doing, I'll then be able fill myself up enough to be able help others as well. I just realized now that I feel really guilty when I slow down. If I slow down too much, it feels like too much and I feel guilty. I need to give myself permission to slow down, to not feel guilty for taking time to take care of myself, or having fun just for the sake of having fun. Taking care of myself and having fun are part of a healthy life I think... yes, I'm pretty sure it is part of a balanced healthy life. And if I want to help others to have better life circumstances, I suppose I have to allow myself to be an example of a full and balanced life first, don't I? From this realization I feel peace, and I feel full.

..............................................................................................................................................................

I overate yesterday. I didn't binge but I overate. I felt underlying anxiousness through most of the day. You know when I finally calmed down? Just before bed. I was lying in bed reading a book, and my belly was very full, and I wan under warm blankets and wearing soft fuzzy socks. But more than anything my brain slowed down, my body slowed down. Something I've known about myself for a long time is that at night as I'm winding down in that last half hour of being awake, I'm calmer and my brain is more focussed. But because I'm so sleepy I can't harness that focus and that calm energy for productive things.

The contrast though of the calmness I physically felt in my body and brain, versus the hectic-ness of my brain and body during the day, it really makes me feel like I have some sort of chemical imbalance that makes it so difficult to not feel anxious and like my brain is spinning all day. Although I'm not sure what to do about it in this moment, it helps to be able to take note of these patterns. And it helps to be able to see that anxiousness is not a normal state of being, and that my body is capable of feeling not anxious. Anxiousness is probably the biggest thing in my life that not only causes me to overeat, but to be afraid of living. It inhibits me from taking care of things that I want and need to take care of. I think finding a solution to my anxiousness in gonna be an amazing starting point, and catalyst for so many other areas of my life. Wow, that feels pretty big.

4 comments:

AnonymousNovember 6, 2011 at 2:46 PM
Your on à good path, keep going.. And trust yourself
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LeahNovember 7, 2011 at 7:06 AM
Thank you for cheering me on :) Wise words to consider "trust yourself"...
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AnonymousNovember 27, 2011 at 8:47 PM
The best way to help the world is to take care of yourself :)
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LeahNovember 28, 2011 at 4:46 PM
Oh that is a great quote, I'm gonne write that one down...
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What has Made This Time Different?

I have attempted to try to stick to an exercise routine so many times in my life, and yet I've rarely made it past a week or two at the most. This time has been a whole new experience, and this is a list of the reasons why (subject to change). Perhaps one or all of these will resonate with you too:

1) I have a simple, mental, visual analogy to help me focus on the bigger picture: In the past I've dieted and exercised and wondered why am I not losing weight? The key was that I wasn't consistent. The truth was that my efforts were sporadic rather than stacking one on top of the other. So it felt like I had exerted so much energy (which I had), but because it was not one foot in front of the other, my efforts did not stack up to any actual results. This made the most sense to me once I understood the the visual analogy of climbing a wall. My goal (lose weight/get fit) was to get over this wall. My attempts to get over the wall included climbing up (working out, dieting). However, I was constantly climbing back down the wall without realizing it (getting off the dieting, not exercising). Over time, I was exhausted from climbing up and didn't understand why I had not yet made it over, after all I had put in a lot of effort. It was then that I realized that every time I stop exercising, I am not picking up from where I left off the next time I start up again. Instead, I have to start from the very bottom of the wall. The steps up the wall do not help you climb over unless the are consistenly moving in a forward direction upward. While this may seem simple, and easy to understand intellectually, it was something I had to understand in the form of an epiphany. It was the first step to me being able to be consistent with my Tracy Anderson Method.

2) Make the goal about following through with the actions, rather than just focusing on the end results: Now that I understood that consistency was such an important factor in being successful with my goal, I had to figure out how to actually be consistent when I had never before been able to. It was so hard for me to imagine getting past level 1, because in my previous attempts I had learned how to do a few days of level 1, feel defeated, take a break, and then start over on level 1 again once I felt like I just couldn't take being overweight any more. My brain only understood how to stop and start over, so it just couldn't imagine what it felt like to move forward to L2-L9 and beyond. So, I made a commitment to myself that I did not even have to do the levels if I did not want to, but that I would play the videos every day as though I were doing them, just for the sake of my brain understanding what that would feel like. Amazingly enough, this triggered something in my brain so that it could at least entertain the possibility of experiencing the program beyond level 1.

3) Don't tell anyone I am learning to establish an exercise routine, until I'm on a roll. I understand using someone as an accountability buddy, and I do think that is helpful. But for me, I found that when I told people I was starting to exercise I diverted energy away from my goal (establish a regular exercise routine). So when I used to tell people, "oh I'm starting something new" people kindly wanted to know how it's going, how much I've lost, all these reasonable questions. For me, that added an extra pressure that I just didn't need. I didn't want to be accountable to anyone but myself, and I because I am someone who worries too much about what other people think, it just served me better to start the journey on my own and learn from my own experiences, learn to trust myself and my own instinct, and feel free to experiment without fearing judgements from others.

4) Don't make any changes to diet initially, but instead first focus on making exercise a regular part of my routine. Learning to exercise regularly and consistently & eating nutritiously are both lofty goals in and of themselves. To do both simultaneously has never ever worked for me. For my brain, my emotions, my inability to adapt to change, it was far too large an undertaking to attempt diet exercise simultaneously. For me, exercise is the easier place to start because it feels more in my control. There are only two choices (to exercise or not), and it is completely up to me, and not influenced by much else. On the other hand, food requires more preparation what with shopping, and storing and cooking, and taking food with me places. Exercise is just once a day whereas eating is something to work on multiple times throughout the day. Another thing is that if I attempted exercise and diet at the same time, if I did poorly in one area that day, it wiped out any good work I did in the other area (in my mind), and made me want to give up on BOTH. Exercise is the place to start for me.

5) Accept that my objectives are long-term and therefore no matter how hard I work, I will not be skinny in a month or two. But a year from now and for the rest of my life I will be.

6) Keep a blog or journal. For me, blogging has enabled me to see that some days are challenging, but there are also other days are easier. It is easy to forget the good days when I'm just focusing on the negative one at hand. Blogging allows me to go back and remember the positive things I've gained and learned along my journey.

7) Exercise with a buddy in the beginning to help make exercise a daily habit. While I didn't tell anyone about working out until about 2 weeks after I'd started, after that when I told my friend she was excited and wanted to try it out too. We exercised together for about two weeks, and that helped me establish a routine of exercising first thing in the morning consistenly.

8) Immerse myself in the success of others. I read others' blogs and success stories and facebook and the TA forum. www.masteringthemethod.com was such a great tool because it was the first visual I had to understand that this was going to be a journey and a process. It is so easy to see the "before" and "afters" and think that 1 week or a month of commiting will take me from before to after. Being able to see the "during" as well made such a difference to my brain because it was like the missing piece of the puzzle to understand this is not in any shape or form an overnight, overweek, or overmonth process. It showed me the bridge from "before" through "during" to "after".

9) Watch and re-watch and watch again Tracy's informercial and multiple visits to QVC. Especially the first month I watched them almost every day. Seeing the informercial is the pique of excitement in the beginning of a new exercise routine. Watching the infomercials help me remember the feelings I had in the beginnning and reminds me why I began this journey in the first place.

10) Trust Tracy, yourself, and those who have come before you, and have faith that while you can't imagine it today, each step you take will lead you to your after as it has for so many others.

11) Let go of being a perfectionist. Being a perfectionist prevented me from succeeding 100% of the other times I've attempted to exercise. It was vital to learn to only do whatever my personal abilites are and nothing more. Understanding and believing that I would build from wherever I was starting, as there is no need to exhaust myself physically and mentally by exercising beyond my capabilites was again instrumental. The very first time I tried metamorphosis, I was beyond defeated and in tears as there was no way I was gonna be able to do 40 reps of all the leg exercises as she did. I initially would pause the TV after every exercise attempting to complete 40 reps like Tracy was going. Helllllloooo, Tracy is in shape and she invented the method for goodness sake. I never exercised and was carrying around at least 50 pounds that didn't need to be there. Because I couldn't be "perfect" I thought I couldn't do the method. This was completely false. Finally, I figured out that I just had to do whatever reps I was able to do while she was doing the same exercise. Then when she moved on, I moved on to the next move. Suddenly my abilites were increasing, just by doing my personal best. It was the same thing with the cardio. It was important to me to play the whole tape, but that didn't mean I had to be jumping the whole time. Instead, I would step touch or march in place, drink some water. The point is that I got to experience what 30 minutes of cardio would feel like, and eventually be able to build up to it. I can now do an hour of cardio :)

...to be continued

90 Day Metamorphosis with Tracy Anderson

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Learning the Goodness of Slowing Down

4 comments: