Mediocre Days

It helps to have a goal life and not a goal weight. All these magic numbers, what do they mean to you? How do they make you feel in your story about them? Go for that feeling directly. The number itself means nothing. You can achieve it and still not be at all happy or confident, especially if you treated yourself badly to get there. If you want to feel fit, healthy, happy, confident, powerful, peaceful, free, whatever it may be, engage in the thoughts and behaviors that actually produce that. It's not a diet. It's not a number or a size. When I first started strength training and building significant muscle, I found myself twenty pounds heavier than my old "goal" weight and fitting in the same jeans. I was heaver but no bigger. I've also experienced the opposite, starving myself to some magical weight and still not feeling good or fitting in the clothes I had imagined wearing. In the last few years, any push to keep my scale weight as low as possible only depletes me and leaves me obsessed and disappointed. Plus it's temporary and generally unsustainable. If I focus on how I want to feel, I may weigh more on the scale but I don't flippin' care because I'm happy in my skin, happy with my life, and happy with the way I eat. That happiness and confidence is what we're all going for, but fixating on a scale number doesn't produce it. I treat myself with kindness and respect and eat to feel my best. What I weigh as a result of that is my body's business. The more I stay out of it, the better.

Trust is everything, and it's created through repeated action. Doing the new behaviors, facing the scary thoughts, and seeing that everything is still ok. You can't decide in your mind, "ok, I trust now, problem solved." Or, "I'm not going to take action until I trust." That means never taking the steps necessary to experience the positive mental shift. Each time you try something new and learn from it, your confidence grows. Then you trust. Then it's real and not hypothetical. It's not, "If I don't trust, I can't do this." Nooooobody who has restricted for years trusts that not dieting is going to be ok. You've kept yourself in chains all this time by actively telling yourself the opposite. "If I eat this, terrible things will happen. If I don't do that, terrible things will happen." It's fear and negativity all day long. Even when we're doing restriction "right" there's always the fear that it can't last, and the horrible story about what will happen as a result. See the problem there? So, when you eat what you actually want for dinner, and don't restrict the next morning, diet brain goes INSANE, but that's what you've programed it to do. Now, we're going to teach it a new way of being. The more you do the new behaviors that you want and react with kindness and curiosity instead of guilt and fear, the more your brain is going to dial down the panic alarm and begin to turn up the trust.

After having painful, all-consuming body image issues most of my life, I don't really have them anymore. It's not what I imagined though. I imagined that I had to learn to love every jiggle and roll, feel super confident and enthusiastic about my weight no matter what, be like a pro-fat cheerleader. That's not it. I don't think about it anymore. I don't worry about it. I'm neutral. If it comes up at all, I'm grateful for my health. I'm grateful for what my body can do. But I'm not posting lovingly about my cellulite and stretch marks on Instagram. I'm not talking about body positivity and body acceptance all day. I don't think about it. I have other things going on. Developing some other interests was probably the biggest help of all. Oh, and getting off of Facebook and Instagram. I had tried heavily editing my feeds to only body positive, weight neutral, health at every size kind of messages, but that still had me thinking about food, weight and bodies ALL the time. I got rid of those accounts and then it was friends and family posting swimsuit "progress" photos, and all about their new diets, and judgment about other people's bodies. I'm out! I'm happier and healthier when I don't scroll through other people's issues all day. I follow some fun dog accounts on Twitter. 🐕🐶