Just one minute!

As I sat in the car on my way to South Hebron Hills (West Bank, Palestine) I read the 2^nd chapter from Marian Williamson’s book A Course in Miracles. I’m not going to lie I was glad it was on my Kobo so that no one would know what I was reading and then slightly blushed when my co-worker peaked over to look at what I was reading. I’ve always been embarrassed to admit that I struggle with my weight. Not that I don’t want to admit how I feel about the way I look, I complain all the time, but I don’t want to admit the inner struggles behind it and embarrassment I feel concerning my inner struggles. Coincidentally, today’s lesson dealt with the side of us that rejects our “fat self”.  She explained that our fat selves appear because we are rejecting some other pain that can only make itself seen through this layer of unwanted fat, so denying the weight is denying the pain.

So her exercise in that chapter was to write a letter to “our fat selves” where we expressed everything we felt towards it and the fat sides response. While I thought this would be a useless exercise. “What do you mean write a letter to me?” was my initial reaction. But as I picked up my phone and started typing on my letter in my notes (I didn’t have a pen and paper) I realized I had so much pent up frustration that wanted a way out. The more I wrote the more things just appeared. My response was even longer; it was my way of forgiving myself and trying to let it go.

L, I agree with you, I don’t know how spiritually awakening these exercises are and whether or not they really do help us deal with these issues. I do believe that having a challenge to resort too definitely keeps me in check, it’s like this book these exercise and this blog is a support system and one that I don’t want to fail. Although, looking at it from that perspective might not be ideal as my fear of failure is one of the things I need to learn to deal with a little better. Also, I think it gives me something to do. I know one of the reasons I binge sometimes is because I feel like I should be doing something but I don’t have anything “responsible” to do. Although I could do something like read or watch a movie, I wont be able to focus because my mind is all focused on eating. Advice that was given to me was to try and meditate or reflect when I felt that need to binge creep up. These exercise allow me to do that before I get to that point which I really do find appeasing, and if I haven’t done it yet then it’s a perfect excuse to self-reflect and do something instead of eat when I’m not actually hungry. And I don’t know bout you L, but I tend to disregard my feelings. Ignore my anxiety and never spare any time to take a minute to just listen to my emotions and what they want to say to me. This in turn prevents me from dealing with them. How did you react to this exercise?

Oh! It also dawned on me that I’ve been talking about what I think about these exercises, I never talked about how my eating has been! It had been my goal before L suggested I read the book and we work on all this together that I wanted to lose 10 pounds. So when L proposed this idea I decided I would work on it simultaneously. So far my 3 days have been pretty good, I avoided seconds, I stopped eating when I wasn’t hungry (which is a big deal for me) and saying no to snacks I don’t actually want but I’m simply craving. It’s also only been 3 days, Anyone can stay motivated for that long, but the knowing I had this challenge to fall back on helped stop me from caving when burgers and fries were staring me in the face today! 19 more days! 

Listen to what it has to say!

I’ve read several of these popular modern self-help meets spirituality type books. While I did find them fun and entertaining, they were no more than a light sitcom to me, a cheesy chick flick if you will. I tended to roll my eyes at half the stuff I read and skipped over the exercises. Since this is a challenge, I decided I would approach it with an open mind and take it more seriously.  So this morning I read my first chapter of A Course in Weight Loss and did the exercise Williamson asked of me. Out of a list of negative emotions, I had to pick the ones that I felt applied to me and write about a time when I felt that way. Once that was done, I had to ask God to take the pain away from me. Like I said, I don’t believe in God. I do, however, believe in some sort of universal divine power that has a hand to play in all occurrences and that there exists within each of us a place where we can connect on a deeper spiritual level to ourselves and to the world. I also believe that our need to mold ourselves into all the things modern society wants us to be in addition to the feelings of guilt caused when we fail to do so are what cause this disconnect between our outer layers and our inner ones. By layers I don’t mean the physical and metaphysical layers of us. More our emotional and mental layers that we are made up off. The top layer is the most rational, the most reserved, the strongest, the protective force. As you go deeper within you are more prone to hurt, but that does not mean weakness, it means you have more ability to feel yet at the same time it is stronger because it is where your power to understand and deal resides. On the other hand, when the outer shell “feels” and is “hurt”, it crumbles and thus we need to call on the inner to make sense of this and come out of it. Our resistance to it, I think, is what tends to lead to neurosis, tic, binging, anger…This was a point where the author and I agreed.

Therefore instead of speaking to God as we know Him, I spoke to the Universe, these cosmic powers that surround us, and to this inner being, this part of me that I had shut out for so long, to help rid me of these mental poisons. I spent over an hour detailing the guilt I felt when thinking of how I let my self go, the moments of shame from my binges, the anger I felt at myself for what I believed were my failures and my lack of will power, but also anger and resentment at my friends. I saw them as part of the cause. To them I was the tiny girl with the big appetite and I couldn’t resist and just say NO!  The un-forgiveness towards the boys I hold accountable for my pain and lack of self-confidence. The unfairness of having to work so hard and struggle for anything I want while other people seem to get it so easy. I asked myself to let go of regret, the past would not change, instead chose to learn from it, chose to find the positive in this negative. Eject that poison! I asked the universe not to take it away, but to meet me half way, help me see the beautiful, the positive, the wisdom I could take from it. It was exhausting! But what do you know?! My mother called me less than an hour ago to talk to me about one of my tumblr blog posts. I spoke about a woman from the refugee camps here in Nablus (Palestine) who has desperately trying to befriend me. Her life is rough, 11 children, pregnant with twins (one of which is dead in her womb), abusive and jobless husband, all living in a one bedroom apartment. Instead of finding compassion I chose to judge her. I saw her dishonesty and manipulation as she tried to coerce me into buying things for her children. I saw her anger in the way she dealt with and treated her kids. And I saw her self-victimization as she vented about her situation while her kids ran around looking like they grew up in a jungle. My mother scolded me. She told me that I was judging her through the spectacles of anger instead of compassion and because of that I regarded her with disdain and ignored any sense of humanity. If I were to look at this woman’s situation from a different angle, I would find that she is fighting to survive and protect her kids in the only way she knows how and can. This is not the west. Her kids might get bullied even more if she became a single mom. There aren’t day cares and baby sitters. Her parents will not take her in!

One of the words I had chosen on to describe myself with was disdain. While I like to pride myself on being open-minded and accepting, there are moments where I could look down on others whose life choices I don’t believe match up to mine. In regards to this woman, I failed to see that yet again I had done just that.

At first, I was angered by the call. I wanted to tell my mom that she was always looking at what I did critically, if only she would look at it from my perspective, would she stop making me feel guilty all the time. But then I realized that she was proud of my work, who I am and what I do. However, she was looking at this situation from a place of love while I looked at it from a place of anger and fear. A place where I did not want this woman to depend on me, where I was so afraid that I would feel pain by her situation, get attached and stepping out of my comfort zone to spend time with her and her kids that I chose to see her as a lousy mother and conniving bitch. In other words disdain.

Tonight, I have to do a meditation exercise; I’ll let you know what I got from that tomorrow

Today’s events might be  a complete coincidence, but I chose to ask for help and open up my heart and a hand was handed to me. All I had to do was crack a whole in the wall and listen! Obviously my issues aren’t solved, but it’s fun to think that there is some power willing to work with you

Let us start with determination!

I am stuck. While I once had the drive to lose and maintain my ideal weight, I am now slowly losing the will power and have fallen into repeated cycles of yo-yo dieting. I struggled with weight most of my life, while never FAT per se, I was always on the chubbier end of the spectrum and was never confident about my body or my appearance in general. This was made worse by my parents pointing it out and making comments such “Should you really be eating this” or shooting me a sideways glance whenever I went for seconds. While that contributed to my overall negative relationship with my body and food, I can’t say I resent them for it. Due to my neurosis concerning my weight, I always remained within a healthy weight frame (not one that I found attractive though).

My first year of college I fell victim to the freshmen 15, well actually, in my case, the freshmen 22! Yes my first year of college, I gained 22 pounds! An I’m barely 5ft! I managed to lose the weight, and more, and even kept it off for more than a year. Then, some kind emotional turmoil struck. My second to last semester at university, I took some really hard classes, I was nervous about graduating, had no clue what would come after and a few other emotional hardships (from the perspective of a university student) I slowly lost the extensive dietary control and restrictions I was following. Luckily, I’m rather athletic which prevented me from gaining too much weight. In addition, I went through phases where I thoroughly watched what I ate, but those were always followed with a period of binging.

While the healthy phases were usually longer than the binges, lately, it seems that my unhealthy days are outnumbering the good ones. By unhealthy I mean days where I eat peanut butter, pizza, cookies and ice cream icing... Pretty much the entire junk food isle finds itself in my stomach. And every time I tell myself it’s just today. I had a long day or I did so well this week or everybody’s eating and the list of excuses go on! I realized, after my several failed attempts at “today is the day when I will no longer disappoint myself, and will go back to my old healthy self and fit into my favorite jeans again!”, that there is a much deeper issue here. I have a very unhealthy relationship with food, one might even say I was a compulsive eater or a food addict. The stress of being a recent graduate, my volatile year (moved around different countries), lack of confidence in my ability and my current yet temporary living situation in Palestine have all lead to an overall sense of confusion and chaos in my mind.

After several rants on the phone to my cousin, who suffers from similar social distresses and is a co-author on this blog, she suggested I read the Marianne Williamson book “A Course in Weight Loss” and that we work on the exercises together and use the blog as a means to keep focused, driven, encourage each other and share our experience with other who may have similar issue. Today was day one, which comprised of reading the intro and talking about it. Personally, she gets too into her “divine being” and God is the only way you will heal this wound that is causing you to over eat. Basically, it’s eastern philosophy worded in extremely North American and pop-culture metaphysical lingo, something I always found irritating. Moreover, I am not a religious individual at all, nor do I believe in God I don’t think. So telling me that I can’t do this alone, only God could help me, that’s basically setting me up to fail. Therefore I will approach this with a Buddhist mind set: I need to connect with my own inner being and let go of the ego (a very brief summary of Asian philosophy). Alas my friends, other than telling you that I ate well today and worked out, there’s not much else I have to offer. I shall bid you good night and let you know how day two went!

Sending out a hello into the ether!

To get to the point, we are two childhood friends who have struggled with weight and self-esteem issues our entire lives. We've heard it all: you are not alone, love yourself for who you are, losing weight requires self-discipline and perseverance, cut out carbs, don't cut out carbs, eat in moderation, eat like a rabbit, you have to exercise, exercise is not necessary (we could go on and on, but you get the point).

Then one of us stumbled upon Marianne Williamson's A Course in Weight Loss at Walmart and started reading it in an attempt to experience a weight loss epiphany like Oprah. Fast forward a year later, and said person has gained 40 pounds and book has been stuck on Chapter 16 in her Kindle for the past year.

We have both reached a point in our lives where we feel we need to take drastic steps to change our lives, to end this vicious cycle of guilt and self-pity and enjoy what's left of our twenties. Fad diets and exercise haven't helped us. We've both read enough self-help books to know there are 200 versions of the same moral: change must come from within. So we decided, as a duo, to give Williamson another try. Well one of us is, the other is approaching Williamson a blank slate. We hope our contrasting perspectives will bring about some new insights into the 'mindfulness' approach to weight loss Williamson so actively promotes.

We are going to blog our way through Williamson's A Course in Weight Loss, starting with the introduction and each of her 21 lessons for weight loss. We welcome any (helpful) suggestions, and we promise not to sugarcoat our experiences.

Here goes!