8/16 weigh loss success! (and thoughts, especially spiritual)

Hooray! 207 this morning! A new low for this weight loss effort and hopefully the last time I ever see 208!

I'm feeling very encouraged about the stuff I'm reading in The Weigh Down Diet, so thanks, Tia, for the rec. I will be covering this at more length soon.

Furthermore, I'm feeling great. I'm feeling good about myself. I feel fit and healthy. I feel positive about my outlook and energetic in general. I feel like I'm on the road to weight loss success and healthy eating. I want to keep this ball rolling!

Slept in this morning because I didn't have to do a morning workout. In fact, no workout today (save mowing the lawn, if the rain holds off). But, crazily enough, I am looking forward to getting back to cardio tomorrow morning. Like I said, I want to keep this ball rolling...

One tenet of Weigh Down is being able to eat what you want as long as you stop when you're full. Listen to your body. There's a lot more to say about this, but I've been trying to put it into practice and have been allowing myself some small treats if I wanted them: 1 serving of ice cream on Friday and Saturday and a brownie today. And I'm feeling good about it. (And, yes, I'm still losing weight, but the results aren't instantaneous, of course, and we have to look at the trends, etc...)

Having a treat is working much better for me than my previous program of semi-binging days off. (You know, working much better over the last 3 days ;-)

(One result of listening to my body is trying to pay attention to desires for reasonable amounts of fat and protein v. a 'low-fat' higher carbohydrate diet that can leave us feeling unsatisfied and hungry.)

Another principle is slowing down while you eat (ok, I am kind of getting into Weigh Down here, but not a comprehensive or critical treatment). I have been the last person in our family to finish eating all this weekend, and it hasn't even been close. This overlaps, of course, with some of the earlier thinking I was doing about mindful eating.

Weigh Down also addresses emotional eating, so that's something I have been thinking about as well. I want to break the habit of going to food for emotional comfort. There's a vast chasm between enjoying food and looking to food for emotional comfort.

Furthermore, when we go to food for comfort, our eating takes on the dynamics of addiction: we go to the thing for comfort, but it actually provides less and less comfort, prompting up to dose more heavily, resulting in poorer function/health, prompting us to go back to our addiction for comfort. Vicious circle by definition.

We're still in John 6 in the liturgy and Jesus is still saying crazy things about Himself: 'Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will have no life within you.' Ties right in with looking to God for life and not to food.

My syndrome has been: disappointment with God, despair, depression, hopelessness, ennui and then grasping, like a drowning man, for any comfort I could find, including food (how's that for sounding melodramatic? ;-). Then, again, in the addiction pattern, even when I don't feel like I'm drowning, I still go back to food for comfort, even when I don't really need it or when it's the results of too much eating that are themselves causing me to need comforting!

So, I need to get out of the dynamic all together. I need to opt out. I need to get on a different track. Jesus is my source of life. Yes, I've been disappointed in Him, but that was not His fault. My expectations were unreasonable and less than what He wanted for me. He gives life now and forever. I need to fill up on Him, not on earthly food. Food needs to recede to proper comparative unimportance in my life; more like oxygen and less like some emotional underpinning without which my life will collapse! ;-)

Change gears:

So, does it seem entirely too early to be talking about pitfalls to watch out for?

My Achilles' heel in past weight loss efforts has been getting to a place of complacence. I get disgusted and spring into action in the 205-210 range (like this time, frankly). But then when I get down to 200 or 190, the Return on Investment diminishes. 'I'm not that overweight, and is losing weight really worth all this work?'

I don't want to fall into that pattern again! This (hopefully) last time I have been trying to emphasize lifestyle changes and to stay away from temporary fixes that might work for awhile but are ultimately unsustainable and even undesirable.

Barely related: had a great idea for supine pullups with my new exercise 'rings' (as a way of working up to those 10 real pullups that are my distant goal).

Ok. That's more than enough for today, aye? Obviously, I had a lot on my mind ;-)