My Journey To Me-Dom!

First let me apologize that this did not go up yesterday.  The memories of 9/11 always hit me harder than I expect them to, and I just couldn’t bring myself to focus on much else yesterday.

Last week I committed myself to walking 6 days per week with a day off after every 3 days in a row that I walk.  I have a confession to make.  My confession is that I have been doing this for a few weeks already.  The idea of this blog started when I was in the midst of deciding what my next life change would be, but wanted to think through my approach before putting pen to paper so to speak.  I didn’t want to wait till the idea was on paper to make the life change, however, so if you are following along I do have a head start on you, but don’t let that deter you from participating in any way.  If anything, let it inspire you to do more if you did join me in the journey or to start now if you haven’t already.

This week I decided I want to make a diet change.  I have the worst eating habits ever.  I am terrible about only eating once a day.  It has nothing to do with dieting or trying to lose weight in any way.  It started when I was very young.  I stopped eating breakfast because it actually made me feel sick to my stomach.  I just can’t eat until I have been up for a few hours and actually feel hungry and it takes a little time to get my system revved and ready.  I always ate lunch because I had a lunch period, but I often skipped dinner since my evenings were filled with one practice after another.  The time factor remained an issue over the years for one reason or another by letting myself be too busy to eat when I should have, and now it has just evolved into habit.  I no longer feel hungry more than once a day because I have 25 or so years of experience eating this way.  Unfortunately doing this makes you fat.  Even though I often eat well below 1000 calories a day my body stores each and every one of them as fat in order to get me through until I finally remember to eat sometime the next day again.  It has done me no favors, but is a really hard habit to remember to break.  I read somewhere about a recommendation to add a serving of cottage cheese to eggs in order to add additional protein to the meal and it got me thinking.  What if I just make the effort to try and remember to eat some eggs at some point and a serving of cottage cheese at another point just to get myself eating more often?  If you have high cholesterol then this will not work for you, but the idea can be easily adapted to suit your dietary needs, and we all should stop eating meals and start just eating about 100 calories per waking hour (divide food into 200-ish calorie portions, since that’s all the body can handle at one time anyway,  and eat about every two hours to make it more manageable) and we can all shrink down to a more appropriate size together.  So here is what I’ve decided to do.  Rather than eat the cottage cheese with the eggs I am going to boil 2 eggs (medium sized eggs.  We don’t need to cram extra large, jumbo, or anything else that refers to some version of supersizing our food down our throats)everyday and eat them at one sitting and then eat a serving of cottage cheese about 2 hours later.  This means I will have eaten at least two times during the day just by the nature of the idea which for me is a step in the right direction.  I realize that this is a lot of protein and is not equally balanced with fruits and vegetables in the immediate plan, and I will likely adjust the menu over time in order to morph it into something that is more balanced.  The idea for right now is that I need to make a conscious effort to eat more often in general and wake my metabolism back up and give it something to do. 

I would encourage you to try your own version of this idea over the next week with me by either dividing your regular meals up into 6 or 7 smaller portions rather than having them in just 3 meals or substitute something you know is terrible for you like 2 of the sodas you are having every day with the 2 eggs and the lunch sized bag of chips with the cottage cheese.  The eggs can be cooked however you want.  I am just choosing to boil them because it is easy and also portable.  Just remember that you have to take into consideration the extra calories required to cook them other ways from the additional ingredients like butter, oil, or bacon grease, etc.

So this is the habit I am adding this week along with the walking.  Let me know how your progress from last week went and what you will be doing this week for yourself.  Most importantly, don’t beat yourself up or quit if you had some failures along the way last week.  This is a new week and a fresh start and if last week didn’t go well you have a new opportunity to try again this week.  It is never too late and you are the only person sentencing yourself to the life you currently have.  If that boy that called you fat on the playground in 4^th grade is still ringing in your head then kick his ass to the curb.  You do not have to fulfill his sentence just because he dished it out on a day that he probably doesn’t even remember.  Today the only person that is designing your life and your future and the way you fit into it is you.  In fact, if you were called something other than fat like dumb, or ugly, or gay, or anything else kids say when they are too young to know better, then forget all of it.  The truth is that you were probably called a bevy of different things but that it’s only the ones you already felt slightly insecure about that stuck in your head.   The truth is that kids could have called me dumb or ugly or gay till the cows came home and I wouldn’t have remembered any of it the next day because I knew I was smart, I knew I wasn’t ugly, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with being gay even if I had been questioning it at the time.  The only reason fat hurt was because I was a dancer and was already too short to dance professionally in a lot of settings and you just can’t ever be thin enough as a dancer no matter what you do.  Because I already felt shorter and more busty than all the other girls, to have someone say the word fat anywhere near me no matter the context would make my ears perk up to see if they were talking about me because there is no such thing as not needing to lose 5 more pounds in the dance world especially back then.  Luckily I have always had a lot of confidence and felt comfortable in my own skin and have seen where the mouthy kids in school have ended up over the years.  None of them have the blessings I have and I’m thankful I was smart enough to not let them stick in my brain even when I was young.  The long and the short of it is that you have the control to change whatever you want to in life.  You just have to change it.  It really is that simple.  So, for me it is adding 2 boiled eggs and a half cup of cottage cheese a few hours later to my day to create ground breaking change in my life.  What is the simple solution for you this week?