Finding a New Way to Cope with Stress

These are my skinny jeans.

You know, part of me feels like these posts about “Look at me, I am in Maintenance!” come across as a little braggy, but I am just reminding myself lately that I do not want to go back up the scale to the old me. Yes, I have changed my identity that I spoke about here.

But…

I have been thinking (obsessing?) lately about the feelings I used to have when I simply would eat food for fun, for indulgence, the way I still see other people eating food. For example, go to a movie theatre. I will see people sitting all around me just eating—for the pure pleasure of eating. I mean, come on. No one is sitting there in a movie theatre eating, for example, a mixed vegetable dish as a meal to nourish their bodies. They are eating food (popcorn and candy, etc.) for fun. Absolutely, I used to do that too. And this week and last week in particular, I have been missing how it felt to escape into something (anything) to eat for the pure oblivion of a few moments of time while just eating. Because for those few moments of time, real life (with its real stresses) just disappears. Oh, real life comes rushing back in as soon as the food is done, and I must NEVER forget that, but for that little bit of time…

So, the “desire to overeat thoughts” have been hanging around again lately. They have been popping in and out of my head for almost 3 weeks now. This is why I did my last post here about feeling so comfortable in the body I have right this minute, so I don’t give it up. I was trying to remind myself why I say no every day to eating (overeating) foods I did not plan.

It seems that lately, when the same old life stresses (that come and go for everyone, I am not unique) are particularly intense, I notice that it feels the very same as in my past when similar stresses were also very intense, and I would overeat my way through the ebb and flow. It was at first an escape. Then, the misery of regaining weight was a distraction. It’s this old familiar pattern of response. Today, I must respond differently.

So, I’ve got to be willing to be someone for whom the food and the weight loss is solved, (now, in the present tense). Period. No more past patterns of behavior.  Even when it seems hard to have given up that old version of myself, I am instead embracing that I am the new 2.0 version of myself. I remember the old version. I have even given her a big hug.

But now I step back and hold the old me at arms length. I am not her anymore. I don’t stuff down my feelings with food. I do not replace those feelings instead with feelings of misery about regaining weight. I used to know all about how to feel about regaining weight, I was comfortable with that negative place. In that old place, instead of hugging the old me, I’d be slapping her around and hurting her even worse than it felt that real life was hurting me at the time. I was an expert at that behavior.

So, maybe I am not exactly an expert at dealing with my emotions as this new version of myself (which is why suddenly the old me is standing just off stage. I can see her out of the corner of my eye). But what an unproductive and self-destructive state of existing it would be to go backwards at this point. And I do not want to simply exist like that (in emotional pain and trying to stuff it down with food) anymore.

I am the new me, and I am living my life feeling what I need to feel, instead of stuffing it down.

Maintenance is not Glamorous

Maintenance is not glamorous.

However….

Everyday, because I maintain my current weight, I get to wear clothes I love.  In the past, I wore clothes that were sometimes tight and uncomfortable.  Or even if they fit my body perfectly, I never allowed myself to feel “comfortable.”  Instead, many times I found myself hyper-aware of my clothing, and therefore self-conscious of my larger size.  

Even if it is not “good” to label my body as “large,” (we do not have to accept any labels we do not want, and can instead love ourselves at any size), my body was simply larger in the past than it is today.  And good or bad, clothing comes with its own labels as to their size.  I believe there is nothing wrong with any size, 4 or 16, small or large, but if we do not feel “right-sized” for who we want to be, then we may find ourselves moving through life with a feeling of not being comfortable in our current size.  I definitely experienced this in the past.

Now I move through life feeling comfortable in my current size.  

So, maintenance is not glamorous.  It is not as exciting as being in a weight loss phase, with new lower numbers on the scale to track each week, or month, or lower measurements, or new clothing sizes that now fit, (and new clothes to buy!).  But I must never let myself forget that I am comfortable everyday, in all my clothes.  I can go to my own clothes closet and select to wear my own version of the ever elusive—before which would be from the depths of the back of the closet—skinny jeans.  And I get to wear them any day I want, not just in some future picture in my mind, “I’ll wear those when I weigh X.”

Of course, it’s not just clothes.  It’s also the daily exercise and activity I can do each day, while feeling strong, able, and most of all—comfortable.

Living in Brilliant Color

I heard something on YouTube the other day that really resonated with me.  

“I live with my food black and white, so that I can live my life in brilliant color.”  

This is what I do.  My food is black and white.  I simply plan each morning what I will eat today, and then I go about my day eating what I planned.  And I plan good food I will enjoy eating, (which helps a lot!). I measure it all out, and keep track of what I am eating on an app on my phone, so the scale stays exactly the same (within a pound or 2).  This “black and white” behavior keeps my thoughts about food calm and quiet, instead of lit up by variable reward, that I wrote about here.

What a lovely January it has been.

Being Intentional, and Too Much Cake

Intentional is my word this year.  For the last 5 years my sister and I (it was her idea) have an anchor word for the year, which is one on which we can focus our thoughts throughout the year, with the intention of growing and flourishing along with the meaning of our chosen word.

2021=Culmination

2022=Momentum

2023=Secure

2024=Unimpeded

2025=Intentional

Being intentional, for me, has two main focuses.  1. Being in the moment and recognizing my thoughts and feelings, and then 2. making more deliberate choices and decisions based on that.

Firstly, being intentional requires me to be in the moment, to experience my life not overly distracted by future worries, (which has been problematic for me in the past, a long ingrained habit back to childhood).  Being in the moment has resulted in me being very aware of myself, and differentiating between what are my actual thoughts, and what are my feelings, (there is a difference).  

And then secondly, making decisions and choices NOT on autopilot to my old habits and triggers, or on just my feelings, but based on my reasonings, my thinking.  I am taking the wheel and driving the bus, so to speak, far more often than ever before.

So yesterday, I thought I would make a cake, (gluten free, rice free, made primary with cassava root four).

Throughout the Christmas season, I had planned on having a gluten free dessert option, if one presented itself.  I eat meals, I love what I eat, I put real sugar in my tea, so I do consume “sweet” things.  But I don’t usually have any desserts, (which are defined as the sweet course eaten at the end of a meal).  But it turned out, a gluten free dessert option never came my way.  Okay, no desserts through Christmas.

Back on Canada Day, July 1, I had planned to have a treat while watching the fireworks, some gluten free fudge.  But instead of having one piece, I had three.  The next day, I thought a bit about why I did not stop at one piece, but the fudge was all gone, so I didn’t really think enough about it to figure out why my decision to have a treat ended up in a bigger portion than I had planned.  

Until the cake last night.  Three pieces later, I realized I just wanted to eat. It.  All.

I wasn’t eating the cake because I liked it, (although I did certainly like it, it was very, very good), I was eating it to overeat it, just like I used to.  I used to eat to overeat.  Overeating (mostly sugar) either anesthetized any painful emotions I was having, or it stuffed my stomach to the point of discomfort, so that the physical pain was a distraction from whatever mental pain I was having.

But last night I was not having any mental pain, (other than the normal worries people worry about, that ebb and flow with what is happening in our lives at any given time). 

(And writing that makes me realize, even more than before, that this is why I had to stop overeating my way through life.  Ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys, will always be a part of life).  

Anyhow, I wasn’t experiencing an emotional reason to overeat the cake last night.  I simply overate it because that was the only reason I had to eat it in the first place.  I wasn’t hungry, I had just had dinner.  I realize I have not yet learned to intentionally eat cake, for a specific reason, like a moment (not a whole evening) of pure enjoyment.  I have only learned how overeat it (because of ingrained past behaviors) for emotional reasons.  

It would have helped if I had realized that BEFORE I baked the cake.  I didn’t realize having a good reason to eat it would help divert me from slipping back into an old habit.

So, today?  I don’t want to eat the cake unless I am eating it for a new reason, a new way to experience my food, (in particular dessert, which I so rarely eat).  In the past, I didn’t just eat dessert-like foods, I overate those foods to create a particular experience.  Now, having a different reason to eat them will change my experience of them.  I don’t want to go back to my old way of experiencing food.

When I say I experience food, I mean as a verb, not a noun.  As an action, as an encounter or to undergo (an event or occurrence).  In the past, I either used to only overeat dessert-like foods, or I abstained altogether.  Because I have been primarily abstaining for the last 18 months, I had not had an opportunity to be intentional about eating them, and therefore unravel some of this old pattern of behavior for myself.  Instead, last night I ate some cake, then ate some more, then ate some more, until I said, hey, wait a minute!  What is going on here!?

Now I know what was going on.

If I have some cake today, I will have a better reason to have it.  If it was still Christmas, or a birthday, that would have been a good reason. But honestly, I don’t feel like it right now.  I just finished a cup of tea sweetened with real sugar, (which is additionally sweet from the milk I put in it, because I drink tea almost like a latte with a lot of milk, and milk is quite sweet), so my desire for something sweet is already entirely satisfied.  Hmmm, who knew I would need a good reason to eat something, or I would truly prefer to just not eat it at all.

Finally Liking Myself

With respect to a problem I have been working on with self-hatred, (that I first wrote about here), a funny thing happened as I embraced liking myself: I started disliking other people.

I do not know why I have spent a lot of time NOT liking myself.  Even though not liking myself was a negative state of mind, which led to overall unhappiness, self-dislike or even self-hatred was probably a maladaptive coping mechanism of some kind.  I was used to it, and I did it a lot.  And maybe, it ultimately enabled me to not show up fully for my life = a ready made excuse for not striving to reach my full potential.  (And a ready made excuse to treat my body like a garbage can, and overeat, for example).

But the more I like myself, it seems, the more I dislike other people.

In the past, when I have thought about how I felt I was not like other people, (or that I was different from other people in some or many different ways, from my point of view), I used to not like myself.  And I would assume, “They don’t like me,” (afterall, I don’t like me).   And it felt like I should instead be like them, (and why wasn’t I like them??  What is wrong with me??).  They must be likeable, especially if I wanted to be like them in some way, (a way that I perceived I was not).  Therefore, I did not like me, and they got an automatic “like.”

But now that I am okay liking me, I’m getting a bit pickier about other people.

Of course, some people really don’t like me, and that is their right.  For example, if you find excessively talkative people like me annoying, that’s fine.  

(But we should not be mean to people, even people we don’t like, because you get back from this world what you put into this world.  So, kindness and politeness can go a long way.  Unless someone is endangering you in some way, I think we should all simply be polite and move on).

So lately, when I feel as though I am different in some way, I like how I am different.  I look at how other people behave differently from me, (more talkative, less talkative, smiley, not so smiley, stuff like that), and if they act in a way that I interpret as “I don’t think they really like me, maybe I annoy them,” instead of directing dislike towards myself, I have found myself disliking them.  The tables have really turned.  I like me, so now I find myself not automatically giving everyone the automatic “like,” so to speak, that I used to.

Of course, I think we should be allowed to just live our lives, and choose who we spend our time with.  ”Like” and ”don’t like” are simple preferences.  If you are on Facebook, you don’t automatically give everything a “like.”  But I used to, to a certain degree.  A form of extreme people pleasing, I suppose.  

I absolutely recognize that NOT liking myself tilted me out of balance, so that now as I correct that imbalance, the scales have overcompensated and tilted in the opposite direction.  I am sure that I will soon let go of “dislike of others,” (because it’s negative and unproductive, and is not even necessarily based in truth), and I will find a proper balance of not judging myself or others either.  I should be able to like myself without the need to dislike others.  

Negative emotions ultimately do not serve me, whether they are directed inward or outward, either way is out of balance.  I want to be more balanced in the middle, and simply be a positive person towards myself and others.  

Body Composition

I started January 1, 2024, at a healthy weight for my height of 5’6”.  My goal for most of this whole year has simply been to hold onto that level of health that I had achieved, and certainly to even improve it, if I could.

Backsliding with eating ultra processed foods, regaining weight, sloth on the couch = not an option.

Was I perfect all year?  No.  There was quite a bit of sloth on the couch in July.  But then I made new goals for kilometers (just over 1,000 total for the year) to log on my RunKeeper phone app, and my 100 Walks 100 Rocks goal as well.  

So, here I am on Friday, December 13, 2024, with some non-scale victories.  My hip measurements (which have consistently been a larger ratio due to having a “pear” shape) are finally in a place that makes me feel good about myself.  Of course, everyone has their own metric for what makes them feel good about their shape, mine is mine, yours is yours.  I wanted to feel in proportion to my small waist, which I now do.  And my body fat percentage is down from 25.1% to 18.2% since the beginning of the year, (figuring in that an average household scale can only be so accurate—or inaccurate—in this regard), so I know that walking 1,000 kms this year has (probably) meant I have changed my body composition for the better.

For 2025, more of the same.  Maintain the health I was able to reclaim after my accident.  Kilometers walked?  Probably 1,000 for the year again.  I am trying to find a very specific motivator also.  Something less vague than 1,000 total, but not too strict, (like 5K a day every day is too strict for me, personally).  Rock collecting, for sure.  I have great ideas for my garden like this:

I look forward to 2025!

Feelings: Friend or Foe?

Work on my rock garden that started with 100 walks 100 rocks continues.  (Definitely more than 100 rocks have been involved…)

Right now, when I experience a poignant strong feeling, especially if it is a negative and ultimately unproductive feeling, I can no longer shove it aside, push it down, or tell myself I am not allowed to feel it. Right now, as I move away from old habits like stuffing down those feelings (or any feeling, really) with excess food, I have to allow myself to feel what I feel. I need to give myself time to allow the feelings, examine them, and heal them (by accepting them), and then I can ultimately move to the other side of them, especially the negative and unproductive ones. In the meantime, I am simply allowed to feel them so I can heal.

And because I do not stuff my feelings down with food, I no longer need a maintenance range in weight.  I just do not need it anymore, because it is no longer my identity that I need a buffer zone to allow for the occasional binge. But I am keeping to planning meals ahead of time and keeping track of how much I eat, because without a weight range that allows for an increase on the scale due to allow myself periods of overeating, (which I don’t want to allow, because it has not worked out well for me the past), I simply just try to stay the same weight I am now, which feels very comfortable.

Old Story New Twist

I have been giving a lot of thought to identity, and how believing certain things about myself contributes to who I think I truly am as a person.  Of course, the goal is to write this new story for myself, a new identity.  One where I believe my weight will remain stable because I do not overeat anymore.  It’s not my identity anymore.  I am not someone who overeats.  That problem is in my past, because it is a past version of myself.  This is the new me.

This is not just wishful thinking.  It has been long enough now that my new identity is my reality. 

And it was never more true than last night.

I stressed myself out leaving assignments too close to the due date, too many times, while finishing my bachelor’s degree.  I did my degree as an adult learner, completing it part-time while working full-time.  So, when I did my master’s degree, also part-time while working full-time, I made sure I NEVER left assignments to the last minute.

Recently, I got a gig freelance writing articles for the entertainment sphere.  I feel like I am in school again, I have assignments and due dates.  So, for the first three articles, I was fine.  There was a small amount of procrastinating on the third one, but I still had it mostly done a day before the due date.  The next morning, I finished it up and edited it.  I submitted it with plenty of time to spare.

But the fourth article…I do not know what happened.  For five days, I just could not make myself start it.  Right up until noon on the last day, (when it was due at midnight that day), I was watching TV, playing solitaire on my iPad, vacuuming, anything to avoid it.

Then I finally started it at about 12:30pm.

Ug!  I do not know what got into me!

And my back was killing me, because I wrote for five hours without taking a break, (I don’t even remember going to the bathroom).  My body needs me to get up and stretch every hour, when working at the computer like that!  And the phone kept ringing.  I had to answer it, and deal with whatever it was, as quickly as possible, and then get back to my writing.  It felt just like the “old days” as a Bachelor of Arts student.  Trying to get an essay done while dealing with unexpected work tasks, the phone, a call-out, which—Murphy’s law—always seemed to increase exponentially when I had a school deadline also.

So, back to the connection with overeating.  If I allowed my identity to be that of someone who cannot resist X food, (as I have in the past), then I would have to give into temptation (for example, at Christmastime) to match that identity.

The same is true of the reverse situation.

When my identity is that I do NOT procrastinate assignments, breaking that promise to myself yesterday…well, all last night it felt just as if I had cheated on my diet and overeaten.

What a roller coaster of emotions I had last night!  I didn’t even really enjoy the dopamine rush of getting my writing assignment done, because I was so dismayed by my procrastination behavior. 

And that’s because that behavior is so contrary to my identity now.

The good news is that I really have changed.  My procrastination just reminded me of the old me.  But that is not who I am anymore, or I would not have been so upset. 

I woke up today knowing I will NOT procrastinate again, just like I will NOT overeat again.  I simply eat what I plan to eat, no more, no less.  And I enjoy every minute of it without any stress.  😊

Writing a Better Story For Myself

People just have to live their own lives and do what they need to do.  I see it on social media a lot, people struggling in so many different ways.  And whenever I want to jump in with a comment, even just a “Me too, I know how you feel,” most of the time I instead think to myself, “Don’t try to insert yourself into their story.”

All I can do is just continue to live my own story, and I try to write it better this year than I have written it in the past.  2022 and 2023 (before my accident) were not the best story I could have written for myself.  I am writing a better story this year, for sure, and today I want to remember that.