Monday, December 14, 2015

Stopping and Starting



Not again! That ought to have been my response. During these last few years, in a story way too complicated to layout here, I've been facing a move a year. Every time you move, it takes a month to pack up and three to six months to get reoriented. The more you move, the more psychically exhausting the disruption is. If you are a freelance writer, it becomes difficult to maintain the thread of creativity. Too much brainspace is spent in finding things, developing new routines and the complications that come from reestablishing oneself in a new environment. No moving truck was going to do me and my goals and dreams and calling in!
Image result for moving trucks images

For whatever reason, I have developed an untenable agreement with myself to keep making small strides of progress no matter what.

How did I do it? What are the benchmarks of success in moving life forward when faced with obstacles?
First of all, acknowledge the impediments.
 

Maybe you are being forced to slow down a bit. Divide your goals into smaller pieces so your rate of success is the same. There might be a gatekeeper in your life, someone who is determined to sabotage your best efforts. Make your work more invisible, keep your projects private. While doing that, move yourself out of the line of fire.

It might be there's someone who needs your help. Set your special dream up in such a way that it gives you refueling after caregiving or assisting whoever it is that needs it.

Perhaps the project itself has thrown a rock in the gears. Revamp, redesign, reframe.

In all of these practices, I found if I kept the energy and passion I had for my endgame, I could devise ways to adapt the steps of moving forward in any way I needed. Eventually, I was able to put together the small successes in a larger package.

Life rarely moves smoothly. By spending my focus on keeping what I could going ahead, I experienced success that encouraged more achievement.

Each determined move brought more opportunities for larger success.

Secondly, go through things the way it's healthy for you to do it. If you need extra sleep, work smarter during the times you are awake. If you need to lower the bar or adjust your timeline, stay calm. Adjusting is not failing. Create healthy diversions from the stress of having to recreate your plan. Stay present in your own experience of life. Avoid auto pilot. Do something for someone else. It keeps your heart soft and gives you perspective on your own challenges.

Life is rarely a smooth adventure. Change can challenge your comfort zones in ways that keep you fresh and creative.  Mostly, you will find a bend in the road, not a dead end.
Creatively engaging with diversity brings new adventures that will add to your life, your character, integrity and your opinion of yourself. You're stronger than you think, if you keep starting after stopping!
Love,
Deborah

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Why Less is More When Snacking

Wednesday. Hmpf day. Middle of the afternoon. Two skillion issues that are really probably only about five.
I think about all the people all over the world. What they have in common. In what ways they are dissimilar.
I ponder the things I can do well, and the things I'm not so good at doing. How to respond to being bulled takes up a lot of my bandwidth. Memories of me being teased at the dining room table and flying off to my room for solace haunt me. The world is a bullying kind of place.

I think about the people who voted Hitler into power. The people who say they didn't see something happen when they did. In business, in schools, in healthcare institutions.

Before me stretches a list of 'to do's' involving everything from personal care through volunteer responsibilities, new skills to acquire to talents to invest.

Then I think about what not eating has been like. I am pretty present in my own life and feelings. And yet, removing certain snacks from my life has given me an even deeper connection with what I  experience in my interior life.

I'm not used to it yet, so I can't say I like it, this going without.  But I like the feeling of connection. I like being more aware.

Quite frankly I am attempting about eight different impossible things. There was this poem that was popular in my late twenties and thirties written by a woman who wrote all in lower case. It was considered very trendy to do that. It was called "I love the word Impossible". It was actually the title of a whole book. Came out about the same time as this book that was all about a caterpillar becoming a butterfly that was also all the rage.

I'm am becoming a butterfly. Isn't that just so trite, but ohmygoodness, it is so true.  In the place of thoughts about the challenges, I see myself at a piano for the first time in my life playing what is within me without written music before me, not what was within someone else. I see myself on a surgical table getting a new hip, and then doing rehab and then dancing. I see my children all together at a dining room table with their partners, spouses and children laughing and enjoying each other, healed from every bruise and wound they ever experienced because their dad made a promise he could not keep, to be married forever to me.

I see a butterfly garden in a home I own in a place I love. I see people listening to me read and asking me how to feel encouraged and have hope when there is obviously no reason. I see myself singing, alone. I see my plays on stage and my stories on TV and my books in stores.

I see someone beside me, smiling at me, taking me only unto himself and feeling like I am a gift he never thought he would get or give himself. I see myself healed and free to be so loved.

I see more, when I eat less.

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

The Challenge of Choices

This morning I read a post about the French Women's Diet. It's all about balance and portion control with the exception of the Vichyssoise two week fast that's  supposed to start the whole thing. Image result for vichyssoise

Our family's favourite holiday soup is Vichyssoise and believe me eating potato leek soup for two weeks is an odd fast. I could do it much more easily than the juice diet, but that is one boatload of potatoes and cream and leeks.

When I was being examined by my physical medicine doctor and we were mapping out the road to a new hip to replace the one long ago injured in the car accident, she made a pointed statement that all the studies affirm the way to weight loss is first of all portion control.

Well that may be. Easier said than done. Years of unconscious eating while raising children with occasional stabs at dieting which yo-yo-ed me up to enormous, kept me from even connecting with portion control let alone practicing it. Image result for fat waist

Yet, back when I was seventeen and thought I was as big as a house ( to be blogged about later), I lost thirty pounds in six weeks by simply eating less. Mind you I only needed to lose about fifteen of those pounds, if that. But nonetheless, I remember the simplicity of eating a half sandwich for lunch and having a snack of one orange each evening. Other than that I ate what I regularly ate. Not a big deal and the weight melted off.

Recently, I've found myself eating less again in a most natural way. I knew that with such a big goal to prepare for my new hip, I couldn't diet again because it only meant fifteen or twenty new pounds. Once again the weight is coming off. This time apparently for good, meaning longlasting loss as well.

Mindfulness is the big term now. Mindful eating, mindful parenting, and for me mindful portion control.Image result for mindfulness I'm never one to be particularly trendy, but it does seem to be working. It also means I have to keep it up, one bite at a time, for the rest of my life.
Image result for woman eating
The irony? I know, soon it will be habit, unconscious habit. Ah me....conundrum to be dealt with later.
Love,
Deborah

Monday, June 29, 2015

Returning to my skinny self...

It is significant that I have rewritten the title to this post four times already. If you look at the pictures of myself as a child and a teen, -- and as soon as I can figure out how to upload those here, I will-- you will wonder why on earth I ever thought I was fat and how I got fat. So here's the story....

My mom suffered from, among other things, anxiety disorder. For some reason she thought I was fat. So, when I was put on my first diet when I was in the fifth grade, 800 calories a day, I took on her anxiety about my weight.  Every day since then I have worried about my weight and yo-yo'd right up to twenty five pounds more than my current weight. I am living proof that diets make you fat.

About fifteen years ago, I found a picture of myself when I was in high school at my heaviest. Totally skinny. I mean skinny. Same with college. Yet my mindset was 'fat as a pig' in those days. It was what I was told everyday. I simply had no idea I was skinny.

So now...I'm going to attempt to really lose all the extra weight, which I have to do to get a new hip next year, and I can't diet. I have to only eat healthy. If I diet, I'll gain more weight.

I have to eat as if I weighed 148 pounds. It's been a looooong time coming. Losing weight without dieting is going to be one of the biggest challenges of my life. But if I'm going to live as long and as healthy a life as I desire, it's necessary.

Incentives? Not a lot. I can get pretty clothes at my size. My numbers are good, as they say. I don't like what I look like in pictures, but I'm pretty much leading the life I'll lead when I'm skinny.

I'll probably have to have that skin surgery afterwards and I'll be just as old as I am now:)

The real incentive for me is wanting to feel what being skinny is like. I've never felt that. I want a skinny mind, a skinny consciousness. I want to have the experience I didn't have the first time around.

I lost the first twenty five pounds when I went to a nurse practitioner who showed me how basically I eat really healthy, just need to adjust my mindset and do a bit of portion control. That was shocking to me. But the fat melted off. Now it's time for the rest. It takes so little focus and so little discipline but it does take SOME focus and SOME discipline...

One day at a time,  one meal at a time...I'll keep ya'  posted....
Love,
Deborah

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Eating the Whole Pizza

So after much waiting and concern that lodged itself in the back of my heart, I finally got to go to the doctor and have a work up to determine what was injured during a bad fall I had a year and a half ago.

Fortunately, my back, damaged from a childhood car accident, is no worse than before. Whatever happened that made the signal drop from my brain to my right leg so I couldn't move it,has repaired itself.

But they discovered I the joke I've made since I was nine, that the doctors put my leg back in wrong when they reinserted , or whatever it is doctors do to a completely dislocated right hip, my joint. X-rays showed that the top of the ball of my right hip looks like uncarved concrete and the edge of the socket has been worn away by the constant abrasion of bone on bone.

Hip replacement time. Better living through titanium or whatever it is they are going to put into it. Surgery that will be a little bit complicated because of the extreme nature of my condition would be imminent except...

I need to lose a hundred pounds. Over the last four decades I've managed to put on about twenty five pounds a decade. More really because I've already lost twenty five pounds before the fall.

So...it's carbs only in the morning and then veggies and fruits and proteins in the afternoon and evening. Portion control, rules like ' no eating in a moving car', no eating after 8PM, and lots of water have been established as the gold standard of behavior , by me.

Putting all those rules into play? Not so easy. Take today. So I decide I can go out to breakfast with the church ladies, and (portion control, carbs only in the morning) half a half order of a single blueberry pancake with an egg and , oh all right, a piece of bacon. Salads the rest of the day coming my way.

Mid afternoon, I head to a place with a great salad. See I'm single,and frequently I get into sentimental shopping if I go to a store. I buy like there were still people in my house, well, and like I had a house. So sometimes eating out is cheaper. There on the menu I see Tostada Salad. I like the mix and figure I can save the shell for another time. Fifteen minutes later, after paying what seemed an exorbitant price, the waitress says to me, 'Your pizza is coming" PIZZA!!?? I didn't order a pizza. "Yes you did," she says. "You ordered the tostada pizza". What?? "You ordered a small tostada pizza" she says, cheerily. "And you'll love it!" Trust me, loving it was not going to be the challenge.

OK... so too much challenge...I've been craving pizza for literally weeks. Let's just say over the course of the next three hours...well... there were no leftovers eventually. It really was salad on a pizza crust, a chewy gooey pizza crust.

Moving past our mistakes, our times we give into temptation, our failures is one the most challenging arts of life.

Tonight I will force myself to go into the pool and do water walking, maybe. I'm pretty tired right now. I may fail twice in one day. But this I promise myself. I will do something to remind myself I am still committed to my goal of doing what I need to do to make my goal of a new hip replacement in a year.

That's how you move past a slip up, a down right deliberate much regretted bad choice. You just remind yourself that you are still committed to a change in direction towards healthier living.  And you rejoice that what you did is unusual. I don't eat a whole pizza everyday. Odds are I never will again. I'll remember to triple check exactly what I've ordered. New rule to add, 'When eating out, asks more questions'.
Love,
Deborah

Monday, January 5, 2015

New Years's Choices :Re-live, Re-boot, Re-fresh, Re-frame, Re-new

Ok...so it's time to really do this. Regular blogging. Reliable blogging. All three blogs. Good content. Spiffy presentation. etc. etc.
The problem is I just can't follow those marketing formats and 'do this and stratigize that. Would you follow me or listen to me if all I did was just talk?

I  just want to share what's it's like to fully bloom, fully live, fully experience, fulling dine on the banquet of life and serve up encouragement and my own personal wisdom of life that may resonate. And I want you to know that whatever it is that you are trying to do that uses the good within you and adds to the good of the world, don't quit.

Of course, if you are doing bad, stop right now! That's a joke. No it's not. The best way to undo a bad habit is to do something else and make that the focus. Otherwise it's like trying to not think about pink elephants.

The challenge for me as I moved through this latest period of growth during the last two decades has been living life so I could hear the still, small voice, or 'the thin silence' as the Hebrew directly translates. But I did indeed capture some life lessons and strategies about doing that.

Bouyant hope is a necessity and I've gleaned some habits for insuring the essential element of keeping your head and opening your heart.

When I teach I talk about Spiral Curricula. It means you circle and recircle and recircle up and up and up through an issue and each time you see something a different way.

Re-living means looking a the same history with a different connection and different perspective and that opens oneself up to new thinking.

Re-booting means just shutting down everything that isn't working and going for the same goal in a different way.

Re-freshing means putting some fresh energy into something you are doing that is habitual or tradition.

Re-framing means giving a different metaphor to the same declarative statement.

Re-newing means putting new input into content or a lifestyle that will cause a catalytic response that reworks the DNA of a situation.

If you listen very quietly to your insides, it's easy to figure out which action is necessary in your life right now, and shoot... I just did a mini outline of another topic I'd like to teach and/or write about.

Pick your potion. What do you need? Choose the right action and it isn't just a resolution, it's forward motion in your life.

I have this desire to make my blogs look spiffy and visually contemporary, but I don't think clip art or public domain photos have these in their coffers. For right now...can words be enough?
Happy New Year
Love,
Deborah