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Words to live by

Choose goals that infuse your life with passion and happiness and fulfillment every step of the way – even long before they’re completed.

A Life Less Bullshit - How To Grab The Next Six Months By The Balls

60 days of real food (and a 60 day goal)

So, I thought about starting a separate blog for this (and calling it, like, The Last 100 Pounds or something cheesy like that), on Tumblr or something, which seems less serious and a little less personal. I also really don't want this blog to turn into a weight loss blog, because I have a lot of feelings surrounding weight and food and everything that are sort of weird and unresolved - except not. I know how I feel but I also know that it's a strange subject (especially when you've had surgery, which people don't seem to like or respect very much for some reason) and that often, people interpret the things that weight loss bloggers say through their own internal filter. And, things. But in the end, I decided to talk about it here anyway because starting another blog is so not conducive to consistency, and well. This is a blog about life and moments and this is a moment, so it's relevant.

So, hi. The past few months have been harrowing and stressful and just sort of full on Cathy Guisewite ACK!, for a few reasons which really don't bear delving into here (relevance), and my commitments to healthy eating and exercise have really suffered. Why are healthy habits the first things to go (for some people) in the face of stress? Which people? Me people. Comfort food and comfort-in-food people. Immobilizing inertia people. I am so over it.

I'm still walking a couple of miles (ish) every day because luckily, the dogs command it, but I really want to get back to the gym. I miss the gym. I know, I know. I know. But there it is. I'm tired of eating convenient garbage and I'm tired of sitting around so much. I can feel my healthy habits reverting and you know what? No. That's not going to be a thing.

And so, what? This isn't going to be a complicated, convoluted endeavor with charts and graphs, because life is complicated enough, and food and exercise should be simple. It's 60 days of real food, and 60 days of getting back to the gym. Enough time to re-ingrain my healthy habits and restart my steady weight loss. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner - not from a box. Mostly plants. Up and to the gym bright and early. And I should probably get that kettle bell out of my trunk, where it's been for the past month. My 60 day weight loss goal is similarly simple; I want to knock off about 40 pounds. It sounds like a lot if you haven't had gastric bypass surgery, but it's only slightly ambitious for me. If I don't get there, it's okay, but I'm a numbers girl, sometimes. And sometimes I'm not.

Time to shake the dust.

Little birds, and the beauty of not knowing

Earlier this week we had some serious storms, as Florida is wont to do during hurricane season. In the midst of one of these, after the rain had gone, leaving nothing behind but wind and a yard full of fallen tree limbs, I watched from my bedroom window as a bird perched on our fence. He held tight as the wind whipped his feathers up, rocking him to and fro until the gusts died down long enough for him to fly away again. Hurricanes and other very windy storms have been a part of my life since I was little, but I'd never considered the way a bird weathers them until then. Curious, I asked someone knowledgeable, and I learned something new. This is the beauty of not knowing.

I learned that the muscles in birds' tiny feet contract automatically when they land, forming a tight grip that isn't easily broken - consider how it feels when a bird stands on your finger. They have to let go very deliberately when ready to leave the perch. As for storms, some birds take shelter, some huddle in the trees holding on for dear life, and some are picked up and carried far from home, trapped in the calm of the eye. Now displaced, they've become hurricane birds, left to adapt to their new surroundings once the winds die down. Sounds a lot like life, doesn't it?

This is not exactly relevant, but whenever I talk about the habits of birds (it doesn't happen as often as you might think), I talk about how much I love watching murmurations of starlings. In 2011, a couple of artists in Ireland caught one while canoeing, and it perfectly captures why a murmuration is one of the most breathtaking things you'll ever see. I think you should watch it, even if you've already seen it once or twice or twenty times before:

Birds have some very important things to teach us, I think: when you find yourself in the middle of a storm, hold on tight, find the calmest center, stay close to someone you trust, and adapt to whatever situation you wind up in. That's a bit of advice worth following, isn't it?

Lean into it

Something funny has been happening to me lately; the more whole, healthy food and juice I eat and drink, the less I want anything junky. And the more I move, the more I want to move and the less I want to sit, but that's a story for another time. This one is about food. Processed food doesn't taste good anymore. Sugary food is too sweet. And it all makes me feel like hell - sick and tired and cranky. The truth is that this kind of food no longer has a place in my life, really, but admitting that is hard for reasons that I'm sure go far beyond the simple.

I was re-watching Hungry For Change (which by the way you can watch for free next Thursday, or right now if you have Netflix) the other day, and I heard David Wolfe say something similar about how all the good stuff pushes the bad stuff out, and how that kind of change works for everyone. It must be true if it's working for me. I mean, it makes sense, doesn't it? The things that make the biggest impact are often the most simple.

This has been happening to me for awhile, and for awhile I pushed back against it (don't ask me why, it's a very strange phenomenon). I'd buy snacks, try to eat them, and then throw them away after a bite or two revealed that what I was eating tasted less like awesome and more like cardboard or chemicals. Something in me still wanted to enjoy them, but it just didn't seem possible, and eventually I got tired of wasting money on something I didn't enjoy.

In a way, I guess I got what I've always wanted, because there have been times throughout my life when I wished upon a star to have my cravings for salt, sugar, and fat magically removed. I guess whole food was the magic I needed. I didn't do this with any kind of strategy in mind, I just wanted to start juicing. Now I crave things that are unprocessed (or minimally processed) and as close to their natural state as possible. It's kind of amazing to me, this returning of my body to its natural state. My mind is taking longer to catch up (seriously, sometimes it's a very emotional process), but it's getting there. For now, I'm learning to lean into it and let my body take me where it wants to go.

This, by the way, is what I'd call speaking truth to power: