Time for a course correction! I have a NEW VISION!

Well, I believe I am long overdue for a blog post! The past few months have been filled with stress, decisions, and change. In the midst of all that was simultaneously heaped upon me, I resorted to my coping mechanism of choice to deal with it all: excessive exercise and food restriction. This led me to what many would refer to as “relapse.”

For a while, things were going really well! I was making huge leaps in recovery and was eating more and exercising less than I had in years. It felt good! After a few really great months, it came time to make decisions. One decision I made was the choice to end a relationship with a wonderful man, who spent every day trying to make me feel like the most beautiful woman alive. What a gem! I didn’t realize what a huge support he was to me until we broke up. While I still believe ending the relationship was the right thing to do, I lost my best friend and greatest support in a particularly difficult and stressful time. RECIPE FOR DISASTER! At this time, I was also trying to decide whether or not to move across the country, whether to serve a mission for my church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, whether to attend graduate school and what program to pursue, and what kind of job to pursue at the end of my nanny contract. I wavered back and forth between all of the different options, without any sense of closure or decisiveness.

I finally decided that I needed to decide on SOMETHING, so without a job or any serious prospects, I decided I would move to Utah at the end of the summer. My structured, perfectionist personality is not fond of ANYTHING that is not certain and set in stone, so this decision nearly killed me. I spent countless hours applying and interviewing for jobs, and spent a great deal of time trying to decide which offer to accept. After months of weighing all my options, I finally decided to accept a job in Price, Utah as an Early Childhood Interventionist. Moving from Washington DC to Price, Utah- a dramatic change, to say the least! But I am so excited about this decision.

With a job and apartment secured, my stress level has decreased a great deal. Now that things are settling down a bit, I’ve realized that my eating and exercise habits are out of control. I realized this last week as I pondered on the past few weeks and the feelings I’ve had. Last week, I was in Vermont with the family I nanny for, and I ran 60 miles. In one week, I ran 60 MILES, and I felt like it was a LAZY week. (At least it was in Vermont, where everything is BEAUTIFUL!)

The week before that, I spent an hour on the Stairmaster every morning, climbing 500 floors of stairs each morning. And some days I felt the need to make a second trip to the gym after work. In addition to that, I felt it necessary to cut all sweets from my diet and limit my food intake dramatically. Sadly enough, the past two weeks are not the most exercise intensive that I’ve experienced in the past several months. The worst part of all this is that it has become so normal to me. If I don’t burn at least 800 calories working out every day, it is difficult for me to allow myself to eat much of anything.

While I’ve exercised myself into a tough place, I know I can come out of it. I’ve pushed through many hard things before. I’ve come to know that the key to overcoming difficulty is VISION. Having a vision of who I want to become is the most powerful recovery tool I have. And I can see that my vision has been tainted recently by my excessive habits. But today, I’m redefining my vision. The woman I truly want to be is not one who spends every spare moment she has at the gym, on a run, or counting calories. The woman I want to be is one who spends her spare time serving and lifting others. I want to be a woman who can be relied on and trusted by others. I want to be a woman who will be a faithful wife and a loving mother. The women I truly admire and look up to the most are not the women who are the most physically attractive, but the women who make a difference in the lives of others. That is what I want to become! ON TO THE NEW VISION! J

PS: The past few months have been very stressful, but I’ve had so many blessings, as well! One of the many was a visit from my grandma and little sister. Here is a picture of us with my favorite munchkins at the Washington DC LDS temple. J

PPS: On a much shallower note, I’ve always wanted to develop the necessary strength to do a pull-up. Does anyone have any advice for how to make that happen? J

March update! One hundred pounds later...

Life has been really crazy for me lately! For the past month, I have been taking part in an extensive training to become a volunteer on a suicide hotline. Between spending 10 hours a day with the kids I nanny, and 13 hours a week at training, life has been crazy busy. But not too crazy to fit in some fun time--the most notable fun being Disney On Ice! Ben surprised me with tickets the day after Valentine's and it was wonderful. I don't remember ever being so excited before! Despite all the craziness in life, I've realized lately that I have been blessed with so many wonderful people who love and care for me. 

Although I had a busy month with work, training, and all the fun I was having, I still managed to find plenty of time to concern myself with my body. This past week, I came to a milestone that has intensified my contemplation on weight loss and body image: I lost my hundredth pound. While a small part of me feels some sense of accomplishment, the greater part of me feels a great sense of frustration and a LACK of accomplishment. If I could have seen a glimpse of myself now before I started losing weight, I am confident that I would have been more than happy to accept the body I now have. However, willingness to accept my body as it is now is not the current set of emotions I am experiencing. All of this has really got me thinking: when will I ever feel good enough?

I don't feel like I am the only person who has experienced this before. I am now at a healthy weight, but I am still unsatisfied because I don't feel like I have yet met the standards of beauty and thinness that I am exposed to every day. The more I've considered all of this, I've come to realize that I truly never will feel good enough if I make the standards imposed on women by our society the standards I strive to live by. At the beginning of this new month, I am recommitting myself to live by the standards of womanhood that I really do feel are important. Those standards include becoming a person who loves others and serves them, and is kind to all people. It includes rejecting the impulse to focus my life on physical characteristics and to instead focus my life on becoming the kind of woman I have always desired to become. It includes using my time to make a difference in the world, and to lift others up. If I could lose 100 pounds and still not feel good enough, what will make me feel like I am good enough? I believe that the answer to that question is a shift in focus--from myself to others.

I could lose another 50 pounds and still not feel satisfied with myself. But I've realized that there are ways to be happy with myself right now. When I finish out a shift at the hotline, having been able to divert someone from their plan to commit suicide, I feel good. When I make a call to a friend who I know needs a little extra support to make it through a tough day, I feel happy. When I take the time to read stories and play with the children I spend my days with, I feel so much more joy and happiness. Truly, a life lived to serve others is a happy life. That is the kind of life I am going to live!

New Year's Resolutions

It's been far too long since I've spent time on my blog. For the past few months, I've felt like I should get back into blogging, but I haven't taken the necessary time to do so. I've decided that the new year is a great time to start it up again, so here we are!

Although I'm not a big believer in waiting for a new year to make changes in life, I think that the beginning of a new year is a great time to consider areas that need improvement and to make specific goals to promote those changes. In past years, my resolutions have consisted of one or two things I could do to improve myself spiritually, combined with a lengthy list of things I needed to do to improve myself physically. My past resolutions have always included weight loss, and often included other things such as training for a marathon, totally cutting chocolate out of my diet, etc. 

While I do believe that physical health is extremely important to living a satisfying life, looking back on my resolutions, I can see that I was compromising my overall health in an attempt to achieve a worldly standard of physical health. I can see now that while to others it seemed like cutting chocolate was a really disciplined thing to do that would lead me to better health, I can see that it was just a year spent eating things that were just as unhealthy, I just didn't enjoy them as much. In another year, it seemed to others like I was so on top of things because I was training for a marathon, but I can see that my obsession with exercise took control of my life and on days that I wasn't able to have a lengthy workout, I slipped into an anxious depression that I felt nobody could understand. In years where I was "successful" in losing weight, I received nothing but positive feedback that let me know that others approved of what I was doing, when looking back I can see that I was slowly destroying my body and my self-image. 

At the time I set each of the previously mentioned resolutions as well as many others, I felt that they were my ticket to happiness. I felt that if only I was skinnier, more fit, or more disciplined, I would be happier. That's the message the media commonly portrays to us, and it was something I came to accept. Looking back, I can see that the majority of those goals led to the exact opposite of the happiness I was striving to achieve. My inability to meet the standard of beauty portrayed all around me made any accomplishments I did have seem so unimportant. My goals led me to have even poorer self-image, greater depression, and more obsession and preoccupation with my imperfect body.

While there's nothing I can do to change the past, there are a multitude of things I can do to shape my future. The challenges I've experienced in the past have made me into the woman I am not, and the woman I am now is capable of change. This year, I'm ditching the resolutions to lose weight, restrict my diet, and to get more "fit" in the way that society portrays fitness. Instead, I'm replacing them with resolutions to live a healthy life, to obtain a healthy view of myself, and to forget myself in serving others. I know I have a long journey ahead of me, but I've also had a long journey behind. Although nothing is possible on my own, I know that all things are possible when we have help from the right sources, both mortal and divine. Happy 2014, everyone! May this be the best year yet!