Kitsugi – Breakage and repair as part of the history of the object.

I’ve spent many Monday mornings picking up my broken pieces, like a clay pot thrown to the ground.  The pieces of whatever was my current diet plan was the least of the damage.  The really jagged pieces, the ones that cut, were the pieces of the broken promises I had made to myself.  The promise to not overeat to soothe anxiety at a social event.  The promise not to overeat as some ‘food funeral’ before I start my diet Monday.  The promise not to overeat just because of whatever stress I felt at the moment.

Today, I am not picking up the pieces, I am whole.  I promised myself last week that enough was enough with treating my body like a garbage can and filling it full of foods with no value.  I have yet to add in exercise, instead last week’s spare time was about shopping for dresses with a friend for her son’s wedding, which was truly more important spiritually.  My food choices were based on health and taste, not on stuffing.  I hosted a small backyard pool party with family and friends and I absorbed the joy of my seven-and-a-half-month-old grandson pulling himself up and taking steps.  Food was just the background.  I loved the fruit, (three different kinds of fresh cut melon is a rare treat), the steak was cooked just right, but that wasn’t where I found my joy.  The very definition of Bio Joy was found in seeing the next generation grow and thrive.  It touches something very deep in us biologically.  I am so happy for his parents who have found their center with this little guy, their first and only child.  I am so blessed this is a part of my life.

This time of my life is flying by so rapidly.  It was only just shy of one year ago we had the gender reveal party to go to (another pool party), and I was worried about my weight then too.  With this new outlook, based on living life focused on Bio Joy, I am looking forward to all my future events not being served up with a side a dieting just to lose weight that I have little chance of keeping off.

Last week I started this journey at 175.8 pounds.  Today I am 173.8.

Was Mother’s Day the trigger to this recent backslide?  It didn’t seem like the trigger at the time, but it could have been.  Even though I accept I am only a step mom, not a ‘real’ mom, and even though that is my choice (I could have had children, I just decided all my nieces and nephews and my step son were good enough), maybe it’s me that feels “not good enough.”

I suppose that is one thing I’m trying to figure out, as I move forward.  I have the typical emotional triggers, stress, etc., where I find allowing myself “off the diet” is a release of tension and eating makes me feel better.  But there are deeper ones that erode my ability to stay consistent, lose the excess weight I want to lose, and then stay at a healthy weight.  Those deeper triggers are in the “not good enough” narrative.  The feeling that I’ll never been good enough so why bother.  I may never know where those feelings come from, and I don’t need to know.  I just need to learn to manage these feelings without snack foods I don’t need.

Deep breaths, it’s Father’s Day weekend (pool party this afternoon, ug, bathing suit) and I want to stand on the scale on Monday knowing that I eat what I needed to nourish my body, and not that I ate to stuff down anxiety.

Yesterday, I was struggling to silence the voice in my head that said I should be doing a workout instead of shopping with a friend.

Then this morning I came across an article that called that voice “The Shitty Committee”

Kelly is right!  The Shitty Committee is lying to me.  Of course, I should be shopping with my friend.  We’ve been friends for two years, we’ve gone for walks in the park with our dogs, we’ve worked on our writing together, and we’ve worked out in her gym almost every Tuesday and Thursday for over 18 months.  Her gym is closed this week.  She has a wedding to go to in 8 weeks.  We needed to go shopping for dresses.  I did not need to feel guilty in the least.

But I felt guilty, not good enough, never good enough, because I’m struggling with regained weight at the moment.  But when am I going to stop telling myself that I’m good enough, and start telling myself what will lead me to long term success with getting into a right sized body for me?

I was inspired to start this blog (after three years of just thinking about it) by a fellow classmate and blogger who stated on her new blog, “My writing is often infused with women struggling with the balance of hard emotions- loss, love, joy, fear, deep sadness, and deep gratitude. I write from where I have been and from what moves me forward. I am forever changed by that line in the sand of my life. And forever grateful…”

After reading that I told her, “I think your resource page is the perfect segue into other areas of your life (yoga, for example) from which you can draw your audience, and because your audience can be found in both those areas.  I’m actually a little envious that your genre and your life connect like that.  In our readings this our class this week, Kirsten of Create If Writing wrote, ‘When I first started blogging eight years ago, I had a simple goal: to share updates on my pregnancy with friends and family who lived in other states.’  Lucky her!  Women’s lifestyle blogs are big business these days, seriously.  I’m big into reading diet and health blogs, where average women just like you and me build up huge audiences, but for me, that wouldn’t necessarily translate to speculative fiction book sales, even if I did get a huge mailing list with my The Bio Joy Diet (yet to be realized).”

Wow, as soon as I typed “yet to be realized” I realized that I have to do it!  I’ve had The Bio Joy Diet cooling in a computer file for 3 years.  I would truly regret it if I never saw the successful outcome of writing the story of my own life long problem with gaining and losing weight.

I don’t want to admit I have struggled with this.  And that is probably part of the problem.  Hiding from my struggle.  Well, my classmate and new blogger is not hiding, she is writing “from where I have been and from what moves me forward.”

My speculative fiction novel (thesis) is about a dystopian world where a 45 year old women is abandoned by her husband of 20 years.  I guess this course in Finding and Reaching an Audience is already paying off, because I finally clued in that my market for my book is me, so if I read diet blogs, then so do other forty-something women who are watching The Handmaid’s Tale and loving dystopian fiction!