Against the Grain.

As you can probably tell, the overarching theme of my life right now is "Healthier".  Or at least, the prequel to "Healthier."  Since coming to England, I've gained 30 pounds (well, that started a few months before getting here), joined weight watchers (again), lost 20, quit doing weight watchers because I hate counting, stalled in my weight loss, gotten really sick and lost 10 more pounds, then gained 20 back.  The other week I was considering going back to weight watchers (for the... 4th time), because, well, it works.  If you do it.  But I HATE doing it.  I hate counting.  The restrictions wear on me.  I know that.  Diets in general don't work with me.  I get really pumped up for it, or for the newest workout routine that I've decided will be the one to help me suck in the baby belly.  Then a week or two later, it grows old, my motivation putters out, and I'm left with a box of dvd's (helloooo P90X) and several cookbooks sitting on my counter collecting dust.  And though Weight Watchers and P90X both tote the Lifestyle Change motto, it just doesn't work.  For me.  My problem is not that I don't know what to do.  It's that, deep down, I just don't want to.  Do I want to lose the weight?  Sure.  Do I want my clothes to fit better (including the two bridesmaids dresses that are looming in my future)?  You bet.  But do I want to keep a food journal? Nope.  Do I want to bust my butt for an hour a day to lose weight that will bounce its way right back to my butt as soon as I stop?  Nope.

My problem is not lack of knowledge.  It goes deeper.  The book that I mentioned in the previous post goes into why you eat, not what you eat.  It's been eye-opening.  She goes on about reaching a healthy weight, one you can maintain without feeling destined for failure if you ever let up and relax.  One that you can feel happy about, feel happy in.  How losing 50 pounds is not going to make you happier, more relaxed, more patient.  It will just make you a thinner person who is still sad, still angry, still impatient and still searching.  I absolutely know that I did not gain weight because I ate fries.  I gained weight because I ate fries when I wasn't hungry.  Just the other day, the kids were going nuts, which meant that I was going nuts.  I turned on a show for them, stomped into the kitchen, grabbed a box of crackers and a chunk of cheese and went to town.  As I was cutting and topping and stuffing, I was thinking to myself "Laura, you aren't hungry.  Put the box down."  And that was the followed quickly by "SHUT THE HELL UP! DON'T YOU KNOW IT'S QUIET TIME!" and another cracker.

My problem isn't food.  It's why I eat it.

For the last week, I've been trying to be really conscious of why I eat.  If I am not hungry, I don't eat.  Even if it's that time when I usually have a snack.  Or even lunch.  If I'm not hungry, I'll skip lunch and eat a smaller meal later on.  And when I do sit down, I try to pay close attention to when my hand starts moving on auto-pilot.  That's usually a sign that I am full.  Of course, I don't have the luxury of eating slowly, but that doesn't mean that I need to gorge myself.  I just eat half, clean up the kids lunches, getting them settled, then revisit.  Do I need to finish this? And if the answer is yes... then I do.  I eat it all.  The whole thing.  Because if you trust your body, it will gently guide you to your weight.  No rules, no timelines.  Just trust.

Five pounds down.  Plenty more to go.  But hopefully I will shed more than just pounds on this journey. Hopefully I will also lose some baggage that I wasn't even aware I was holding on to.  Hopefully I will lose the need to quiet the storm in my house with a few (large) mouth-fulls of food.

Read.

Food is not the enemy.
Your body is not the enemy.

Learn to love both.  Learn to respect both.    This is my struggle.

But, I've stumbled across a great book, and if the idea intrigues you, I think you should check it out!

Women, Food, and God by Geneen Roth.

Full disclosure, I'm only a few chapters in.  But I love how she writes and already the book has made me question the reasons why I grab a box of crackers and a chunk of (oh so delicious) cheese and have at it.  Is it the chaos in the house?  Is it hunger?  Is it boredom?  I'm sick of having to think so much when it comes to food.  Food should be loved, it should be delicious, it should be made with real ingredients.  I want to make it become a part of my life, not what my life stops and stutters around, always glancing back to see if the choices I made were correct.  I'm done counting.  I'm done weighing.  I eat when I'm hungry.  I stop when I'm not.  

A new find.

I just stumbled across this blog, and it's had me sitting here, scrolling through the back-logs of posts, reading about this woman's journey of weight loss and finding her happy self, without the back-breaking sweat and toil of the gym, and the disheartening view of all things food related.  Please, go, browse.  Check out her weight loss journey, and her views on exercise.  Currently, I am running every day in an effort to train for a 25k, but it is not something that I will be doing for the rest of my days.  It's not 'an escape' for me, it's a goal I set because I knew it would be hard.  And it's been too long since I've pushed through and finished something, so I wanted whatever it was to be BIG.  To be SOMETHING.  To be a moment in my life that I (and my husband and my kids) can be proud of.  Because it doesn't come easily or naturally.  I hate it.  But I'm doing it.  For now.

Go, read, and be merry.

A change.

I'm not even sure how long it's been since I've written anything.  I'm happy to report that it's not because I have nothing to write about, but because in fact I am too busy to write! What a great change!

I was thinking tonight, though, that I miss all that blogging holds with it.  I miss being able to sit down and write a summary (that's longer than a facebook status) about what my life is doing right now, knowing that family near and far (well, mostly far) will be able to read and keep up with our ever-moving lives.

I think, from now on, this blog will be a combined effort from my other (failed) attempts.  I want to include snippets of our lives, yes, but also recipes, and perhaps an encouraging word or two.

So, I suppose, I'm back.  For now.

Persephone's Return.

My parents visited not too long ago.  It had been  7 months since we had seen each other, and in terms of the kids, that's a big chunk of time.  I can't describe how wonderful it was to have them here, to have a little piece of home living in the house, playing with the kids, seeing my life here.  There were moments when my heart would grow heavy, when the realization of what we were missing by living an ocean apart from our families struck me with subtle but powerful blows.  To be completely honest, I don't get home-sick much.  I've put down roots here, and it's not often that I look back to the States with remorse.  I think it's the lifestyle that we've found here; the slower life with less things, less chaos.  It suits all of us so much better than the fast, big life that is so common in America.  But having my parents here, it reminded me of things that are easy to forget when we are so far removed.  And it was a lovely reminder, and a painful one as they left.

But, while they were here, my wonderful mother got her hands dirty with me as we started a little fledgling garden.  We went over the basics, with the promise that she was just a skype-call away should I need help. Since she has left, most of the seeds we planted in little cups in the house have sprouted, each injecting me with a fierce pride that (even though it wasn't all that hard) my hands grew something, something that will sustain (even if only a little) my family when it matures.  I think the day when I pick the first fruit or veg that is ready for eating (because honestly, I have no idea which to expect first)... THAT will be a good day.  I think it may line up with the day I picked Paul up from the airport after his deployment, when my heart was screaming i love you i love you, but my head was screaming i did it i did it.

With the life that is springing up on my kitchen windowsills, so it is outside.  The weather is turning for the better, wrapping us in gentle breezes and warm sun, intoxicating us with the smell of the earth waking up.  The kids and I are shedding our winter skins, which were starting to rub at us all, being stuck inside with each other.  I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the rains to come back, for the wind to resume it's gusting, but I'm trying to live in the moment, enjoying this glimpse of spring.

Detour.

Sometimes... well, ok... a lot of the time, I look on my life with a mixed bag of emotions.  I am so thankful for everything that I have.  I can look behind me and see my parents and my brothers (and all those who branch off), all who love me and who make it so easy to love them in return, who have been faithful and true and steady.  I can look to my side to my husband, my children, all who are healthy and whole and full of goodness and honesty.  And I can look to my future, to all of the roads that are open, all the possibilities, all the potential.  I am surrounded by blessings.  I am entrenched in the fullness of life.

Usually, my sinful nature allows me the freedom to forget all of this and mope about the little things.  The kids didn't take naps.  I'm tired because I stayed up until midnight reading.  I'm hungry because the simplicity of having access to food not only when I needed it but when I certainly could go without led me to be a glutton of sorts and now I'm trying to correct that.  It's cold outside today.  Whine whine, sniffle sniffle.  But there are times when a great shame and humility comes pouring down on me, leaving me drenched with the stink of guilt for forgetting that I can worry about the little things because the big things aren't blocking my view. They are nicely tucked aside, pretty and lined up exactly where I expect them to be.  I don't have to worry about my husband being unfaithful, so I'll worry instead that he didn't say the exact thing I needed to hear that one time when I was feeling sorry for myself.  I don't have to worry about whether my children are going to survive the next 24 hours, so I'll worry instead about why they won't let me sit and have a warm cup coffee, making me *gasp* sit and play with them instead.  I don't have to worry about whether I will survive the next 24 hours, so instead I'll worry about how all the weight seems to be coming off my chest, and not my butt as I was hoping.


It seems, as I use the great power of hindsight to look back on my life thus far, that most of the grit and grime that I enjoy pointing back to while I hark about how I've had a hard life, too! are things that I've placed there myself, held there myself, fought to keep there myself.  It's a harsh self-analysis, but it's also giving me a freedom of sorts.  A freedom to start to pry my grip off of those things that hold me down, which is harder than one might think.  I've held on to these things for so long, it's like a skin has healed over, which I now I have to rip and tear and bite at until it lets loose.  One of the passages from C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia reminds me of this.  It comes from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and it called out to me the very first time I read it, a full 5 years ago.  It speaks about one of the boys, Eustace, who had, quite unfortunately, turned himself into a dragon.  He started to peel off the layers of his skin in order to regain his boyhood, but after 3 layers, he was still left as a dragon.  Aslan came and told him that he would have to peel off this last layer.  

"The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.  And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt.  The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.  You know- if you've ever picked the scab off a sore place.  It hurts like billy-oh but it is fun to see it coming away... He peeled the beastly stuff right off - just as I thought I'd done it myself the other three times, only they hadn't hurt - and there it was, lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been."

Changing things that you've grown attached to, even if they aren't healthy or good or right, is a hard painful process.  The only way that it is done effectively and efficiently, to a point where change is actually possible, is to cling to the One who has the power to cut at the heart, peeling off the layers which have grown dark and poisonous.   Because only He is strong enough not only to take it off, but also to heal the raw skin beneath.  So that's what I must do.  Step back and allow Him to rip my hands free from the poison in my life, and to heal my inevitable wounds.  Only then will I be whole, free to live my life without guilt, and with a mindset to use the blessings in my life to bless those around me.

This post is not what I had in mind when I sat down to write.  The title was "Detour" because I had intentions of writing about a certain detour that my otherwise blessed life had taken recently, which dragged me through the valleys face-down, bleeding, and otherwise incapacitated.  I'll save that post for another day.  I'll keep the title as it is though.  Because it seems to me that that is exactly what this post ended up being: a Detour.

 

A Comfy Mess.

A Comfy Mess. by LRinas featuring browning boots

If I could I would pull this out and wear it for the rest of the year. Even the jean vest.

(ps- this site is oddly fun and addicting... if you need a time-waster, try it!)