Regaining Consciousness From a Holiday Food Coma

Special Me: New Year's resolutions are upon us!  The time when you wish for the best because you have known the worst.  So you may wonder why I haven't blogged in the past three weeks.  Well, I have just regained consciousness from my family holiday food coma: the family home cooking brings you to make those finger-licking future memories: something magical happens when the family sits together to enjoy a meal: savory silence.  So my own New Year's resolution: yes, you guessed it - the proverbial winter weight shedding in time for a 2012 bikini body.  I first have to begin where I am - anything else would be arguing with what is and not accepting accountability and ownership for habits that have broken previous resolutions.  I have a hard time managing quantity and quality eating.  Once a self-disciplined eater, my self-control has given way to easier, albeit harder, times.  It is easy to want to eat healthier but the difficulty is changing engrained habits for a whole-grained, whole foods/plant based diet.  It comes down to my relationship with myself: if I have control over myself, few will ever want to control me.  More critically, if I have control over myself, there is very little else I would want to control.   

Confessions of A Food Addict (Do you want fries with that?)

So, yes, it is true, I obsess about food.  More than most, I presume.  Usually, I have a vague uncertainty of what I crave.  And I plow through that foggy, marsh-mellow-yellow-brain-custard like I farmed it, with no consideration to whether my stomach is hungry.  I say ‘farmed’ because my food addiction is a mental harvest.  Feeding hungry is incidental actually.  

I have made lunchtime my prayer and gluttony my religion.  I walk like a ritual into the temple that is my restaurant of choice and sacrifice my health on that epicurean altar.  What I find difficult to swallow is that although binges are a mental carnage, the mind is absent for its manufactured freneticness.  Odd that it should use me as its handy lackey.  It is almost as if the only way to shut up the brain is to plug up its pie-hole.  

Every bite is more than I can chew: never has my mind's wants been so separated from my body's needs at my hands.  Clearly, I take sides.  And, if I could feel it, never has my body wanted to be so divorced from the absurdities of my mental hunger.  They manifest themselves in the funny-mirror that now inhabits my person like a counterfeit imposter; a caricature of my former self.  If I am what I eat, I have effectively become my own criminal and warden. 

I am choosing to regain control because I realize that I need to mind my mind as I were.  As Eckhart says, it is a knowing of which the mind knows nothing.  And that’s something. 

 

A Moment On the Lips... (Or Why I Love Taste)

No, I am not talking about the breathe before a kiss but about the breathe-taking bliss captured in morsels melting like ice-cream on a sun-drenched day.  The sweetest thing about food is that it was my first love.  Long before I set eyes on my mother, I was fed to grow, to multiply my size for survival.  My tongued-cradled love for taste soon became a Freud fetish.  A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.

These past years have been more challenging for me in part because I am a full size 16.  Today, through my blog, I want to share my path back to the road less travelled. And that road is a more narrow, healthy one to be sure.  I would be more comfortable in my skin had I known the layers underneath it were built upon a sensible diet.  Not so.  I eat large portions rather than quality.  I think about food a lot because such pleasurable fixations stimulate my brain.  This makes me more action-lazy than anything.  I find myself wondering what I would be able to accomplish if my thoughts were not so taken.

Well, now I do not have to wonder but appreciate that I am doing something to change my poor eating habits.  Through my blog, I want to live as proof that fitness success is a daily habit and nothing else.  I have lost eight pounds since changing my optic: I no longer want to personify an overfed ostrich.

Alright, I am off to do something right with my day by going to the gym (elliptical is my favorite rhythm).  Who I am, why I am here and all that I know I can be tell me that the now is the time.

To Health,
Snow Blossom.