I’ve had a headache for 3 days. It pretends to go away for an hour or two, and then it reappears.
I have no desire to write. I keep telling myself that I need to. That I should. That if i just sit down and open up one of the 17 drafts I have in live writer, that the words will just pour out of me. because i am wordy. and that’s how it’s suppose to work. Regardless, I haven’t been able to finish one of those posts.
I have been a Debbie Downer for the last week or so. I can tell because my twitter feed sounds more whiney than cheerful. I can tell because my google reader keeps looming around 500. I can tell because there are only a handful of people that I want to talk to as of late. I can tell because I am stuck in this feeling sorry for myself attitude that I really do loathe, but keep finding myself sitting it it. GROSS.
I want to escape it.
I want to escape the negative comments. I want to escape the mean words. I want to escape the confusion and the headache. I want to escape the desire to quit, to give up, and to stop doing the things that just a few weeks ago made me extremely happy and feel “at home”. (which is something I feel I am constantly on a quest to find)
I know that healing, any kind of healing takes time. Healing from an injury. Healing from an illness. Healing from heart break. Healing from this stupid reappearing headache. It all takes time. And so does healing from a bad day, or a rough week, or a poor attitude.
So this weekend, I find myself taking time.
Time to watch the snow fall from my deck.
Time to eat grapes and tangerines and a peach+banana green monster.
Time to journal through my doubts and fears and find rest in words of hope and faith.
Time to read my Bible, and some Donald Miller, and Losing It by Valerie Bertinelli, and the March issue of Women’s Health.
Time to listen to NPR podcasts on my ipod and not say a word for several hours.
Time to watch Sydney White and giggle. and giggle. and giggle.
Time to drink a Cherry Coca-Cola and dig deep into my heart to figure out WHY I am feeling this way.
It’s not enough just to treat the symptoms. I need to take time to treat what it is that is causing the symptoms. It’s a matter of transformation & change.
Hello to all of you fabulous Then Heather Said readers! My name is also Heather, and I have a blog, Heather’s Dish, that I’ve devoted to my attempts at healthy living as I try to lose the “love weight” that I’ve gained since getting married. It’s been an incredible journey so far, and I hope that by sharing that with the world it will help motivate myself and others to live the best life possible! When I read Heather’s post about her “More Than” series I got so excited! There are so many things that I’m beginning to discover on my road to being happy with my body, and there is certainly more to “health” than just eating right and exercising. One of the first things I thought of was how being married to my amazing husband has truly helped me to work on the first steps in learning to love myself.
I am extremely blessed in the fact that I married the man of my dreams at a young age (I was 23)! My problems in our marriage have arisen from my own past struggles with food and, rather than coming forward and being honest about where I struggle and why, I hid behind the popular phrase, “I just feel fat.” It always seems so much easier than sharing and dealing with the actual emotions!
When I met Nate, I thought he was really cute, but as I got to know him better, we became very good friends, a great starting block to an honest relationship. He knew about a lot of the struggles in my life, and I knew about his. We started dating, and were together for a year when he popped the question; we were engaged for another year while I finished up school and planned our wedding. Everything went smoothly: we got married, had a fabulous honeymoon, moved into our first apartment together, and got a puppy. We were living the dream, and from the outside everything looked great. However, I was internally struggling with all of the pain of gaining weight and not living up to my expectations of being slender and ripped at.all.times. I never once told Nate about how I really felt and so, hiding behind, “I just feel fat,” I went on my merry way down the path of mental and marital destruction.
11 months into marriage our apartment was broken into. Our dog broke a tooth. Nate broke his nose. He hated his job, and then got laid off. I changed careers. I decided to start grad school. And we moved in with his mom for a few months between our lease being up and moving to Colorado. I don’t know if you’re catching my drift but that’s A LOT OF CHANGEin a SHORT PERIOD OF TIME. We were rocked pretty hard by all of it, and that’s when the stuff hit the fan. I blamed everything that was happening on my weight gain (because that’s rational, right?) and Nate had no idea what to do. He was dealing with his own internal stuff at that point, and it just felt like we couldn’t escape. I’ll be honest; the only thing that kept us together was our faith and the love that came from that.
We moved to Colorado, and things slowly started to get better. I was watching what I ate and working out hard every day, but that only made me feel better. It didn’t make the situation better, and I started to take too much pride in my weight loss and started to backtrack. I got a desk job, which hardly promotes a healthy lifestyle, and the fat talk started up again. I was getting more and more lost and unable to share what was actually wrong with Nate. I started to hide within myself.
My husband’s love for me is the next thing I want to talk about. Even though he has gone through his fair share of issues and struggles, he’s never once made me feel as though I’m anything less than the most beautiful woman in the world. He’s loved me, body and soul, since we started dating, and I know that. He countered my unrealistic expectations with a love I can only describe as unconditional. Every time I used the “I feel fat” line, he would emphatically tell me I wasn’t, that I was beautiful, his love, his bride. He would always say, “Stop talking about my wife like that!” The thing is, Nate didn’t know about how I was really struggling with self-hatred due to my weight gain because I never told him. Ladies, men really aren’t mind readers…trust me! It wasn’t until I was called out (in a really good way) by the page on Fat Talk at Healthy Tipping Point that I understood that my “feeling fat” was really a cover up for feeling guilty about letting myself go, for not respecting my body, and for not having the desire to be healthy. When I figured out that I was feeling things OTHER than just “fat”, I told Nate that his job was to call me out on saying I felt fat and force me to say how I really felt. Just giving him that permission was freeing for me, and I’ve made a conscious decision to never tell him I feel fat again!
Through my weight loss, Nate has told me I’m beautiful and treated me as though I’m beautiful. He always did before, but the difference is that I now believe in myself as well. I can’t lie and say that there aren’t days that I don’t participate in internal fat talk; I did that yesterday and the day before. But it’s been lessened from me learning to love myself the way my husband loves me!
Now, this post isn’t meant to say that loving yourself only comes from
being in love with someone else. In fact, it’s the opposite. I came into loving myself a little late in the game, and there have been times that my marriage has struggled because of it. I want to encourage anyone who’s NOT married to understand that loving yourself will not only make you happier, but it will improve every relationship as well. Your life doesn’t start when you find someone to love. Start loving yourself now so that when you meet that person you can cut through the bull and love them wholeheartedly! The reality is you likely have amazing friends and family who want to be there for you; LET THEM! Be encouraged by this online community of food and health bloggers! The key is to know that you’re not alone, and you DESERVE to live a happy and healthy life. There is hope for all of us, married or single, to live a life of love.
You can learn more about Heather by visiting her blog. You can also read Heather’s 140-character or less thoughts by following her twitter feed.
Heather’s Dish may only be a few months old, but Heather’s swagger has long surpassed infancy. The Dish is actually a continuation of her earlier blog, The Joyful Kitchen. It’s obvious that Heather’s Dishes are coming from a Joyful Kitchen with tastymealrecaps and recipessuchasthese.
Like many people I reluctantly turned to yoga as an “easy” low impact exercise to help me “stretch” and strengthen my bum runner’s knees. And like many people I learned very quickly that yoga is a whole lot more than stretching. In fact, it has changed my life. Weight issues that I’d struggled with for years literally melted away with the pounds I lost and the damaging psychological pains associated with weight and food obsessions went with it. I learned to stop punishing myself with exercise, to accept myself and to challenge myself in healthy ways. But you’re not convinced that this silly “stretching” could do so much so let’s break it down…
Yoga looks pretty easy, right? Just stand there and look calm, right?
Exhibit A
Wrong. You are wrong. I was wrong. For the most part, the general population’s view of what yoga is and what it does for you is wrong. In my opinion, there are two schools of thought on yoga in America (excluding the teachers and students truly dedicated to the practice, of course):
1. Yoga is a nice easy stretch and will make an ideal interim between injuries.
2. Yoga is a trendy way to lose weight—all the celebrities are doing it.
I will admit to falling prey to both these assumptions. Yes, I turned to yoga as an “easy” exercise so I could recuperate after a running injury and, yes, my interest piqued when I heard Jennifer Anniston’s 40-year-old-and-still-hotter-than-me body was a product of her regular yoga practice.
These two different assumptions treat yoga as a workout, as a physical exercise for the body (which it is, and I’ll get into that) but what people neglect to consider is that yoga is even more an exercise of the mind. If you approach yoga simply as an exercise, you’re missing out on its most powerful benefits.
Consider that Warrior pose above. I know that it looks easy, but it’s not so easy after 60 seconds in a 90-degree room. What do you do then when your body is screaming at you to straighten your leg, your thoughts are wandering in all directions, your heart is racing and you’re panting like a dog?
You focus on your breath. You clear your mind. You trust your body’s strength.
Yoga is not easy. The hot yoga that I practice in a 90-degree room is especially not easy. But neither is life. As I’ve learned to focus on my breath, clear my mind and trust my body to get through a difficult pose on the mat, I’ve also learned how to apply those practices to help me get through a difficult phase in life.
If I were a character in a novel, one of my (many) fatal flaws would be my inability to enjoy today. By dwelling on the past and dreading the future I rob myself of the beauty of right now. Yoga teaches me to be present, to pay attention to the moment and to appreciate today.
If you let your mind wander on the mat—especially in balance poses—there is a very good chance you will stumble and fall. The same is true in life. When my mind wanders all over the place from past to future without regard to my present state, there is a pretty good chance I will stumble and fall. The physical poses in yoga are really nothing without the added mental component.
And the mental side of yoga has been the biggest challenge for me. Physical improvements came quickly. And while no one is ever “perfect” in yoga, I find it much easier to get close to mastering a pose than to get anywhere near mastering my own thoughts. The human mind is a complicated beast, but I am confident that a continued dedication to the practice of yoga will help me continue to grow and improve.
And now for the most important question: Do I look like Jennifer Anniston?
No, not at all. But I don’t want to anymore. Yoga has helped me to be comfortable with myself exactly as I am. I have never said this, but I feel most beautiful when I’m on my mat—makeup-less, sweaty and exposed.
I have lost 25 pounds since I started a regular hot yoga practice last year. The most amazing thing about that, however, is that I didn’t even notice. For the first time in my life I was doing something without the explicit intent to lose weight. And for the first time in my life, I actually did.
I can’t promise you you’ll lose 25 pounds, but I can promise you that yoga will strengthen your body and your mind so that weight loss will be less of a concern. Your obsessions with weight will be replaced with an interest in whole-body (and mind!) health. And that, my friends, is more important than any number on a scale.
To learn more about Katie and her life after losing “25 pounds completely by accident”, visit her blog. You can also read Katie’s 140-character or less thoughts by following her twitter feed.
