JILL’S WEIGH TO FREEDOM - Blog 4

Date: Monday April 8th 2013

     April is going to be my personal challenge month. At the end of April I’m expecting to weigh less through intuitive eating, than I have through restrictive diets.  Although it sounds impossible to lose weight effectively by not dieting, I know it works. I haven’t weighed myself for a couple of weeks because, at the moment, the art of eating intuitively is more important to me than checking my weight on the scales.

     In the last week, I experienced “intuitive exercise”. I have a gym membership and in a perfect world, I would be at the gym three mornings per week as well as taking a walk outside on some days. Since it’s not a perfect world, this hasn’t been happening lately. I started to wonder whether my absence would be noticed at the gym; I began to consider the money that I was spending on my fortnightly membership and just for a moment, I felt guilty about not attending. 

     But then I considered all of the reasons that I hadn’t attended – my husband had been unwell and this had put additional pressure on my time and energy; I’d been helping my daughter to pull down her old fence and prepare the area for a new one; I’d been carrying on with my usual volunteer work and other weekly commitments; and I’d been extraordinarily busy with various other activities.

 

     As an “outlet” I had been getting out in the garden and doing the mowing. Every time I needed a “breather”, I found myself outside, pushing the mower around for a couple of hours. As well as that, I calculated that the time spent doing heavy garden work at my daughter’s house totalled approximately 15 hours. Why on earth would I feel guilty about not going to the gym? Not only had I been too busy, but I had put in more hours of strength, cardio and resistance training in the garden than I could ever have done during three mornings at the gym.

With the first 8 days of April behind me and quite a few ahead, I’m looking forward to eating and exercising intuitively so that my personal challenge month is a success. My measure of success will come from more than just the scales – if I’ve spent most of my days eating only when I’m hungry and stopping when I feel just satisfied, I will have made progress.

JILL’S WEIGH TO FREEDOM - Blog 3

Date: Monday April 1st 2013

     This week I found it necessary to delve back into Chapters 2 and 3 of “The Weigh to Freedom” and re-read about mindset and about overcoming emotional eating. The intuitive eating seemed to come naturally to me in the preceding weeks and I was joyfully discovering how to slim whilst enjoying the foods I loved. 

     It wasn’t Easter that presented me with challenges as there were no Easter Eggs in the house. The challenges came with a high stress situation that occurred over a number of days. I could barely think straight, let alone think about whether I was hungry or not.  By the time I realised I needed food, my eating seemed all over the place.  Was my body demanding foods that would provide the energy I needed to cope? Or was I comfort eating? One thing’s for certain: I was eating when I wasn’t hungry and didn’t stop when I was satisfied. 

     Although I’m still trying to gain back the control I had before the week began, I decided that I could look at this week’s situation from two points of view. The first would be that I’d failed miserably and I could “beat myself up about it” or the second (and most appealing to me) is that I’d experienced a situation that I can learn from.  How could I do things differently next time? What is one thing that I could focus on next time? By reading Chapter 3 I decided I could focus on how I’m feeling, accept how I’m feeling and then try to bring a balance to my thinking that allows me to “sit with it” rather than fight it. 

     Using Lysa & Gina’s approach to weight loss I don’t have a set agenda for losing my excess kilograms. I know that slowly and surely the kilograms will melt away provided I follow the three weight loss principles and examine my thoughts and feelings in difficult times. I am in this for life, so this week was merely a learning experience. I’m not dwelling on the decisions I made under stress, but I am looking forward to using my experiences to do things differently next time.