The Body Practice

So I am feeling like Alice today.  I have found myself slipping into another world.  A world where my reality is turned upside-down and where I am faced with strange but fascinating adventures.  Somehow, the ways I have been tending to myself (self-love, counseling, cultivating awareness) have caught up with me and swept me into The Wonderful Land of Weightloss.  (Angels sing, harps sound, and lovely birds fly round my head.)

Everyday that I get on the scale and see the numbers slide down or hover around my new average, I am in awe.  You see, that is how weight has always been for me.  A big, fat mystery!  I gained weight….how did THAT happen?  Weight came off…what did I do to get this happy gift?  Oblivious to the changes in my body, seemingly reeling out of control of anything happening to my body.  The harder I tried to make something happen, the worse things seemed to get.

So this time, even though I only practiced it in faith of a theory, I focused on loving myself. Even when, even though, it way hard.  I invested in loving my body, accepting it.  And the weight on the scale started to MOVE….down!  Truth be told, sometimes when I get on the scale it will even move up a bit, then even off to the lower a few days later.  I don’t let it freak me out.  I just try to have a healthy curiosity about what it is doing.  So far it is working.

Now my honey and I have been eating at home more (we wanted to spend less by preparing meals ourselves).  It has been 5 days since we have eaten any big meal our (over $5…and we don’t do fastfood).  We are really feeling good about ourselves and more in control than ever.  Life is good. 

 Thanks for listening,

Rae

About once a week for the past 6 weeks, I have been seeing a counselor.  Among other things, we have been working on how I think about my body.  I shared with him about my new scale yesterday.  It is not just my new scale, it is the only scale I have ever bought.  I could tell he was concerned that I had bought it.  I told him I had mostly had bad memories about scales, but that I discovered one day that there was some kind of shift in my thinking.  I also told him that the scales I had weighed on all my life had been other peoples scales, and this time I would be measuring myself on my own scale.  He went nuts, and said I had just said something really profound.  (duurrr, I was in the dark)  He explained that I had been measuring myself my other’s standards and that my scale was an opportunity to set up new standards for “measuring up”.  I got it.

So we talked about how I might measure accomplishments other than the scale.  And even other than weight loss.  Here is a list I am working on….if you have ways you measure your accomplishments, feel free to add in comments.

•  My attitude is number one.  There will be some days when I can’t do what I want because of my back injury, because of pain.  I need for attitude to bring me to balance even on those days.  Especially on those days.
• My ability to laugh at my life.  To see humor is to have a light heart.
• My willingness to express my feelings.  When my feelings get stuffed or suppressed, when I am trying to be stronger than my feelings I can become victim to food and other self-sabitoging behaviors.
• The strength of my self-love.  How hard core could I be about loving myself?  What if we had a self-love ticker!  It could measure the degree to which we practice acceptance of who we are in the moment and how we invest in nurturing ourselves.

I would love to know other ways in which you measure your accomplishments.  I would also love to hear what your relationship to your scale is.  Are you friends or enemies?  How do you know?  What if you could make your scale your friend, today?  What would that look like and what would change?

 Just curious,

Rae