Rumspringa...My Tracy Anderson Transformation: Fluctuating Emotions and the Power to Ignore

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Fluctuating Emotions and the Power to Ignore

Foodwise I've been generally keeping up my new habit of recognizing the difference between wanting to eat out of emotion versus wanting to eat out of hunger. I wouldn't say I only eat when I'm hungry and stop the instant I'm full, but I have made in my mind a monumental shift.

I am constantly recognizing that the thing I use food for more than anything is for AVOIDANCE. Even today, I wanted to avoid all sorts of little things in regards to dealing with my life, or life circumstances. And so quickly, like split second I was misinterpreting these signals as hunger. I went to the fridge probably 3 times today, opened it up and remembered, oh yeah this isn't hunger and walked right out of the kitchen. It is such an ingrained thing to think food will solve whatever issue I'm dealing with. In my mind I think, oh as soon as I eat this I will feel...energized, focus, calm, more put together, settled, and that's why I need to eat before I can deal with (fill in the blank). I don't think any of those things has ever happened after a meal. Quite the opposite actually. I'm inclined to feel sleepier, out of control, and left wondering what happened to the clarity that was supposed to come from that meal? And then I'd search for something else thinking the first meal was the issue, and not the fact that the reason food didn't solve my problem is because hunger wasn't my problem. That's pretty big to me that I've made it to that next step that I recognize my feelings but now instead of eating in spite of those feelings I'm mostly able to walk away from the food.

Something I noticed is if I plan to eat something, and then I ask myself what are you going to eat afterwards it also helps me tell if I'm hungry or eating emotionally. If I'm hungry I think I won't want anything after this meal. If I'm emotional, I start going through a list of other things I'll eat as soon as I'm done with the current meal. I also check to see what I plan to do after the meal. I've asked myself several times, are you hungry...yes, are you really hungry...no. But I'm not forcing myself not to eat, and it goes beyond just acknowledging what I'm feeling. I'm actually REALIZING I am not hungry and food will not solve my issue. Does that mean things are peachy keen?...Well, no not exactly. And yet I do believe it's still progress.

I mentioned the other day how stopping eating emotionally is not when you start to feel better, because now I'm dealing with my actual uncomfortable emotions rather than suppressing those emotions with food. And now, I am finding myself sitting here, pacing, scratching my head, shedding a few tears with what I'm to do next. I want someone to rescue me because in this moment it feels like I cannot rescue myself. And yet here I am still standing, still breathing. To my surprise, not stuffing my emotions has not been the end of me. Am I comforted? no. Would food bring me comfort? surprisingly no.

So now I'm looking for that comfort and I'm not yet sure where to find it. I tried praying, and I haven't given up on prayer but when you don't feel any different after you've prayed you wonder if anyone actually hears you...well the point is, thusfar it hasn't brought me the level of comfort I'm looking for. I tried talking to my bf and he supports me the best he can, he really does. He's amazing! But in talking to him I realized too that in my mind I want him to drop everything in his life so he can focus on taking care of me, of rehabilitating me. And that's not really reasonable. So that leaves me with counseling which I've not yet tried but it feels like another obstacle to overcome to find a counselor and the fear of will this actually work or will it make me feel worse comes up.

I feel like I need rehab. I don't know what rehab actually entails but in my mind it entails a supportive counselor who helps you discover how you can help yourself. It's removed from your current life in a peaceful setting so there's a certain degree of not being smack in the middle of your problems. And maybe there's massages? These things don't seem so unreasonable. A counselor, massages, and a peaceful environment.

I'm sorry this one was a bit of a downer. It's not all bad. I'm moving forward, I'm not stuffing myself with food. But now I'm in uncharted territory wondering: if I'm not going to eat to procrastinate dealing with my emotions anymore, how do I actually deal with them?

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Oh my goodness I was so depressed yesterday! I am feeling a ton better today. I ended up killing time at Target yesterday and picked up a book by Joel Osteen called Every Day a Friday. While he is a pastor and I don't have a religious affiliation, I was skimming through the book and found a lot of positive messages in it that were very applicable to me. So I sat reading it and reading it and finally after a while I started to feel little glimmers of hope in me again. It simply helped me remember what hope felt like.

The most powerful message I've gotten from it so far is this. He said something along the lines of: "People are fully entitled to express their opinion." Now I didn't like hearing that because while I feel people are entitled having an opinion I don't like hearing rudeness or having to deal with their opinion if I didn't ask for it. But then he said "And you are fully entitled to ignore them". That was something I'd never really heard before, that my option to ignore them was just as powerful as their option to have a negative judgement. But the way he said it really struck a chord with me. It gave me back a sense of power. I am unhealthily sensitive to others' negative comments or negativity in general. It makes me so mad/sad because I'll think to myself "why are people like that?" But when he said I was fully entitled to ignore it, it just empowered it. It made me feel that I could function even if someone had a negative opinion of me because I have power too, and that's the power to choose that their opinion is irrelevent in my life if it doesn't serve my life. That even though I heard it, doesn't mean it has any power. That even though they may try to burden me with their negativity, that I can say no thank you without saying a word. My power is within me, not within them. I know these sound like logical things, but sometimes a phrase just resonates at a deeper level. And that little phrase made me feel so much better today. Happy Weekend!

3 comments:

ShanFebruary 10, 2012 at 3:06 PM
Leah, when life has us down and we're dealing with what feels like insurmountable issues, there are a number of avenues to take. Yes rehab, yes counseling, yes confiding in friends. All great tools.
I deal with issues in my life and a small thing that helped me was a gratitude ritual. I read somewhere that if I did this for 21 days, it would change my life. Has my life changed? I'm not sure but I think I may have changed. I started it in December and have been doing it daily since.
It's simple. Get a notebook. At the top of a clean sheet write the date.
Then fill the whole page with things you are grateful for. Some days that's hard. You have to really stretch and it might just be that you're grateful that someone make the damned notebook, or the sun is shining or that it's raining or that you don't have to shower that day if you don't want to - whatever - just move your hand, fill the page and do it again the next day and the next for 21 days.
Or not, something else may work better for you. But it's quite a surprising exercise tho because suddenly you become grateful for all this great stuff in your life and things have a way of turning around after that.
Good luck and with much love and respect.
Shan
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ChristineFebruary 10, 2012 at 6:15 PM
Leah, you make me realize, I use food for avoidance too. Knowing is half the battle. It's good that you are not keeping your depression to yourself. Even writing it on the blog is such a powerful act of therapy, I think. It allows us to materialize our thoughts and go to a place where we can see what we are feeling and heal ourselves. You aren't alone, we all need healing of some sort.

Glad you are feeling better!
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CarrieNFebruary 14, 2012 at 1:34 AM
Holy crap... are we sisters from another mother or something???? You've just nailed EXACTLY what I'm going through right now.

As usual you are a step ahead of me, though.

I have some next steps in mind but old habits die hard. I'm having difficultly letting the food crutch go a little (seeing I'll actually have to deal with things instead of putting them on hold).

I'm looking at some goal setting stuff and using this online tool called Hunger Coach I found to learn alternate coping mechanisms.

Do a Google on "shrink yourself hunger coach". This may help. There's a lot of info on there and you can pay for an online counseling course if you wish. I'm going to have a go at sorting through this myself before I start forking out cash for counseling (online or otherwise).

I've used the free online Hunger Coach tool a few times. In my mind it's a little imperfect because one of the questions doesn't have an option to fill in your own response like the others do (you'll see what I mean if you check it out), but it's very helpful to stop yourself reaching for food and consider what you could do instead.

Don't know if that'll help you but maybe worth a look.

All the best,

Caroline xo
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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

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Fluctuating Emotions and the Power to Ignore

3 comments: