Tuning in to Inner Peace: The Surprisingly Fun Way to Transform Your Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

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10 Addiction: Tenaciously Lying to Yourself
     
    As a young girl, my friends’ nickname for me was Twiggy, after the slender actress/model of the times. My brothers just called me Toothpick.
     
    Holding onto this skinny image of myself, I was nothing less than stunned when I was trying to wriggle into a pair of size 14 jeans in the dressing room, and couldn’t get them on. By that point, a good 15 years out of college, I’d lost a sense of what my ‘natural size’ was, but I knew it wasn’t size 16.
     
    At age 21, I'd been a size 8 or 10. Somehow, that had slid to size 12, then 14. On the day, when I was going to have to buy a size 16, I for the first time ever, looked in the mirror and declared a simple truth, “You’re fat!”
     
    I went to the YMCA and weighed and recorded my weight as 168 pounds. With help from my sister, I figured out a likely natural weight (in college we were the same height and build). She said she’d maintained within +/- 2 pounds of 130 since college. So, I realized, I was about 38 pounds overweight, and hadn’t ever considered that I might be fat. How did it happen? I’d gained about 3 pounds per year, a quarter-pound per month, steadily for a decade.
     
    With all the books I’d read about nutrition and healthy meals, you might have thought I was an expert on the topic. I did. But the sheer size of my body showed otherwise.
     
    Even though I might have known the facts about nutrition, I wasn’t able to feed myself and exercise myself properly to maintain a healthy weight. I needed help and I finally admitted that. A friend had transformed her health and I asked her for advice. I enrolled in her nutrition support group, and began the weekly meetings.
     
    I had to give up my deeply ingrained habits, and start from scratch. We weighed and measured and wrote down our food. Our food choices were limited initially, and gradually expanded throughout the program. We learned about common emotional issues around food and explored their impact on us individually in daily journals. We learned how changes in the food industry might also interfere with our ability to control our food intake responsibly. We learned from nutrition experts about recent findings in nutrition research.
     
    During the first week of the program, the biggest change I noticed was a dramatically more peaceful brainspace. Seeing an item that I wasn’t going to eat, the process became simply:
    “Brownie?”
    “No.”
    End of mental discussion.
     
    Before the program, each opportunity to eat generated rounds of pro/con arguments. The simple appearance of a brownie could generate minutes of internal debating. I never realized how exhausting of a way this was to live, all day every day, until I experienced life without this running commentary.
     
    Like most of our mental chatter, seen from a distance, it was really quite entertaining. I chuckled replaying the scenes: Me, a rather fat lady, launching into declarations like, “I need this!” “I’m so busy taking care of everyone else, I don’t have time to eat anything else!” “I work so hard and no one notices. I’m going to treat myself! I deserve it!” "It's on sale!" “It’s healthy! It’s a whole-wheat brownie!” “I’m only eating this because it’s your birthday!”
     
    Throughout the program, as other foods were reintroduced, we learned how to recalibrate our intuition. The goal was to develop a healthy relationship with food, so it would be instantly obvious what to eat and what not to eat. No internal debates required.
     
    Every six weeks, we stepped on the scale for the reality check. If we were being honest in our choices and our internal discussions, we would be closer to our natural weight. If we spent the time deceiving ourselves, no progress was made. It was that simple.
     
    Most powerfully, we submitted ourselves humbly as novices who were ready to learn anew how