Friday, August 09, 2013

Restart and reinvent


The last two days I've lost control.  I've lost control of my eating.  I know what happened.  I made cookies.  I made the cookies for Todd...they were for his band practice and they are for a band that has been working with him for a while (I do that for long term clients sometimes).  I also brought some into work.   I made them on Wednesday night.  Cookie dough is a HUGE attraction for me.  HUGE.  So yes, I had some cookie dough.  Normally I am only irresistably drawn to the warm ooey gooey cookies......except for my banana peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. Uhhh yeah, those cookies are like crack!  And of course that's the cookie I made.  So out of control cookie consumption on wednesday evening and it carried into Thursday.  Uhhh NOT good.  But I recognize it and the problem WILL be rectified!
 

Songs are very powerful.  They make me smile, they make me cry that transport me back to a different time and place and evoke memories and feelings.  Lately on the one station that we listen to at work they have been playing a LOT of REO Speedwagon….in particular one song “Heard it from a Friend”.  This isn’t a bad thing.  It’s a good song.  It transports me back through the years.  Each time I hear this song I am transported back to a time where I am roughly 20 years old and I’m in my car driving around Fort Wayne , Indiana .  I am attending college and myself and my friends are out having fun.  The warmth and acceptance of the friends that are in the car with me is evident in the feelings that flow over me.  However, more importantly, for a few seconds I forget that I have become the jaded 40 year old woman that has had her dreams and hopes squashed like a bug on the windshield of life. For those few moments I am the idealistic young woman.  For that brief flash of time I feel as if the world is still at my fingertips.  I am positive that my world will turn out exactly as I had always dreamed. 
 
The real world comes crashing back down upon me.  I won’t lie.  Those few moment of memories and feelings that the song evokes fades. Life wasn’t what I planned. 
 
At zumba the other night a girl walked in…flush from the beauty and fresh love of her very recent wedding and the honeymoon that she had just returned from only two days earlier.  I choke down the bitter pill of her happiness and wish her well .  I try not to cry when she talks about how “I just got hired so I’m now officially a teacher too”  She then says “It’s all falling into place”.   Well, it didn’t fall into place.  Yes, I eventually got married…I was also full of happy love….but it’s been a rough rough patch for quite a while.  It wasn’t the ‘fall into place fairytale life”.   I counted back on face book.  I’ve had no less than 6….friends have babies in the last two to three months.  SIX.   One more had a baby that is not included in the six, simple because I’m not friends with her on facebook and 2 friends who have recently announced pregnancies.  I would not want them to hide their births or good news from me.  But it HURTS.  That was MY fairytale.  That was MY dream….that’s been dashed.  It hurts.
 
So what the heck does this have to do with a weight loss journal?   Everything.  Good weight and good healthy habits are grounded in having our whole life in balance.  So it has EVERYTHING to do with it.  But even more importantly I need to turn my life changes into a full all encompassing change.  This is my chance to reinvent myself.  I don’t know what kind of person I want to be.  For 40 years I wanted very specific things.  I’ve dreamt for all of my life about some very specific dreams.  It’s not easy to change those dreams. It’s not easy to just all of a sudden have new dreams.  But I know this…..there is no better time like NOW to reinvent who I am!   A new, better than ever