(Regarding The New York Times article “The Mental Strain of Making Do With Less.”)
I spoke on NBC15 news last week about persistent problems that threaten our daily intelligence – the inspiration for this segment was an article published in The New York Times, entitled “The Mental Strain of Making Do With Less.”
What happens when we have an issue, problem or condition that constantly takes up a good deal of our available “bandwidth” – the energy, attention, focus, emotionality, and thought processes that go on beneath the surface?
We actually have less capacity to handle the important things in life: Career, relationships, environment, meaningful connection, pleasurable pursuits, and personal fulfillment.
These often unexplored topics are where we feel scarcity in our lives, or where we feel ourselves lacking, like esteem, intelligence, money, weight. And what do we create when we run the energy of scarcity in our lives?
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Someone just asked me what I thought about the Rachael Ray ads for the miracle weight loss product that burns fat.
My response: “It’s always nice to see rich people making millions off water loss.” @@ (rolling my eyes).
Haven’t we had enough of celebrity dieters and supplement hawkers?
I’ve seen this same ad for over forty years. Just a new name and a new audience of suckers.
Products like this can’t address why you overeat, binge or food addictions. Products can’t address that overwhelming need for food you feel in your body, that compulsion that drives eating behavior.
Nothing can cause your body to burn fat without exercise or change in food intake. In fact, if you were burning fat at the rate they claim you’ll see weight loss, your body would shut right down to protect itself.
If you want to learn the facts about how permanent weight loss occurs, and how to support yourself mentally, emotionally and spiritually, check out my new class starting in October: enLIGHTen Your Life!
Because knowledge is empowering!
Making celebrity dieters rich is not.
I grew up in a cranky Southern female family that emphasized looks over achievement, the perfect body over brains, style over substance. I was ninja trained in the black arts of judgment, comparison and self-hatred by a mother who could eviscerate the toughest-skinned cowgirl with an evil look or a few words. In the face of unbearable beauty, her final clawing words were:
“Yeah, she’s pretty, but she knows it, so that cancels it right out.”
It wasn’t easy knowing you’d never be good enough, and, if you did have the luck to grow up pretty, you couldn’t even enjoy that knowledge without the dreaded cancellation effect occurring.
Talk about a lose-lose situation!
I was only ten when she put me on my first diet. Even though I wasn’t fat, there was fear I would be… because she was fat. Mama taught me to closet eat and to use food for every possible doubt, fear, delay or frustration. She also taught me to diet with a vengeance after days, weeks or months of channeling the power of food into bodyfat.
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Even though this Winter in Wisconsin has been a very looooonnnnnngggg ordeal, it is finally looking like Spring. And I’ve become a spring cleaning whirlwind.
One of the metaphors of losing a substantial amount of weight is holding on. In order to lose weight, I had to let go of old ideas. The less I grasped at trivial things out of a mental sense of scarcity, the more abundance I found. And stuff… well, letting go of the saboteur in my mind was tough, but it mysteriously made throwing away the crap in the attic easy.
So, I love letting go of stuff. And I was busy letting go of lots of clutter in my home office this weekend when I opened a drawer that is sticky and often stuck. It obviously hadn’t been opened in years. I knew that because, inside, were…. old bank statements. Very old bank statements.
Some of the statements were so old they had returned checks inside (yes, that old!).
So, I sat on the floor and dragged this over:
As I began to feed the shredder, I was fascinated by what blurred past my eyes. It was a little snapshot of a true lifestyle change.
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I was once fat. Many people prefer another word but I like “Fat” and, since it was mine, I figure I get to call it any name I want.
In the year 1996, I weighed 242 lbs.! That’s quite a bit of fat, no matter what you like to call it. Like most people, I wasn’t fond of my fat. I desperately wanted to change it, and I had tried for over 20 years to solve fat. My first diet was at age 10. And, when you try to solve something for 20+ years, and aren’t successful, you get pretty pessimistic about the whole damned project.
The way I saw it, Fat got in the way of finding a career I loved. It got in the way of relationships. It affected how I felt about myself.
And, by 1996, I was seeing it pretty much as UNSOLVE-ABLE!
This wasn’t just an obstacle – it was the biggest obstacle of all time in my eyes. No matter what I had tried, and I had tried every diet, intervention and exercise modality known to wo/man, the excess weight always came back.
Like a stalker!
Like it had FAT GPS!
And I thought I was the only one in the world who had this problem!
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I have fallen. Deeper. Into my body. Into love.
I had to be shown the way, finally. I had forgotten. How to love. How to hold. How to honor. And worship.
Some days, I am in love with everything and everyone and myself too. But, the days I do not love everything and everyone, I am intensely aware I am out of balance and need to get back in love.
Once you know how to love, you cannot stop. You cannot forget. You must have it again. Once you love yourself, you know you will love and love again and because you have to.
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This is the prime week for weight loss depression in the United States. Dead of winter, resolutions a thing of the past… reality sets in. Weight loss can feel hard. Goals can seem F…A…R… away.
Needless to say, a weight loss coach hears these things a lot. But, the failure or lack of original gusto for a weight loss resolution doesn’t have to be “hard” or “depressing.” It doesn’t even have to suck the life out of your energy.
It’s all a question of perspective.
What bothers most people about weight loss is that it doesn’t happen quickly enough. And, if we switch perspectives, that’s a fantastic fact.
Quick weight loss comes back. If your weight loss is slow, it’s much more likely to be permanent. I’ve been helping clients lose weight for over 10 years, and I’ve done it myself – I’ve lost almost 100 lbs. and next month will mark 13 years I’ve sustained that weight loss. I’ve been able to see what makes people successful:
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- Confused? Most people are. All this is diet advice from the perspective of what I call Diet Mentality. Based in fea… https://t.co/oLbdhU6utw
- https://t.co/0JcSIOHFVS https://t.co/0JcSIOHFVS
- I've always said exercise is more important than food control. What do you think? https://t.co/nRyJeKMZ9y
- Before and after pictures are usually complete fakes, and give us the misconception that the "after" picture is the… https://t.co/QUdTrITjeG
- Take a look! Wisdom! https://t.co/zjh6DbmIh9