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.
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