When trying to view food through the lens of a 12 step program, I have found that some pretty profound realizations can be made quickly. If you are ready. Until you are ready to admit powerlessness over reckless behavior with food - then you can 12 step other aspects of your life and leave the elephant in the room alone. Eventually you can't squeeze your largeness around the elephant in the room like you may have once done. So you then see the need to figure out this food thing.
As I was doing the first few steps of recovery work, I noticed an inclination to add "emotional eating" to every question I answered as part of my step work. After several months of this, it finally dawned on me. Huh. I seem to keep wanting to do some work around my relationship with food. Interesting. A few more months passed and I took the leap to address food in a 12 step program centered around recovery from compulsive overeating. It was the third step and looking at the concept of God Hunger that I realized that literally I was hungry for God. Feeding my hunger for God with FOOD, however, was simply not working for me.
As a connoisseur of all varieties of dysfunctional eating, including but not limited to past experience with anorexia, I easily leaped into a losing weight mode. I went to 12 step meetings for overeaters weekly and counted Weight Watcher's Points Plus as the basis of my new "food plan". My mind was freer. I felt less trapped inside an eating machine and more inside the body of a person. I started to see weight coming off. Slow and steady but it was definitely going down. Then as I neared what I believed to be that pesky thing called a goal weight, I wondered how I would be able to stay in the point counting mode forever. Since I was so into it, it seemed hard to imagine that I would ever go a day and not count nutritional information of one variety or another ... but I think subconsciously I knew it wasn't really going to last forever.
Point Counting. Does it work? Yeah it works. It helps to have an easy way ("there's an app for that") to keep track of what you are eating and see that you are done for the day. I also liked keeping track of how awesome I was doing in the realm of eating copious amounts of fruits and vegetables and drinking more water regularly than I had been known to do. I definitely was making better choices while on a weight loss path than ever before. If you track your points well and stick to them, guess what? You loose weight! Isn't that the point (pun intended)?
Sure I guess losing weight was the point as I was starting out about 20 pounds too heavy. However what really took me down this path via my step work was something more in tune with an overindulgent relationship with food. What ever happened to that venture? Well, as I found out, about 5 minutes after initial panic over eventually having to maintain my weight ... I found it hard to continue to loose. Its like the cues of deprivation kick in and the mind goes overboard that it needs to not be deprived.
So over the past months of going back and forth between deprivation and binge cycles, I find myself more or less right back where I started. Albeit, I am actually still down those 20 excessive pounds. And I should be happy about that. However the anorexic in me says that I need to loose more. The compulsive overeater in me is all about finding reasons to not be accountable. And the soul in recovery in me knows that the path to serenity with food does not involve counting and numbers, which seem to further perpetuate the obsession.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
The Weekly Yogini
I got back into yoga last summer. And I say got back into it with a bit of a sigh. As, I have this pattern of creating healthy habits to enrich my lifestyle. And then. I sheepishly abandon them. It is always some major life change that comes up. Knee surgery, college, planning a wedding, graduate school, job travels, illness, pregnancy, new babies, emotional catastrophes. So many intrusions to what should be a zen routine.
I had walked away, pun intended, from most physical activity when suffering the ills of hyperemesis gravidarum during my second pregnancy. As the little one was over a year old, I dusted my lazy bones off and headed back into the yoga studio last summer. As I was saying before I described my obnoxious physical hibernation track record.
Usually I have to do everything all or nothing. I resumed my yoga practiced with the commitment of once per week. In my one night off a week, I would get lost in the sweaty confines of a local vinyasa class. And that would have to be enough. With all of our other family commitments and goings on, once a week was going to be as good as it got.
I trusted that for that period of time once a week would be sufficient and I would enjoy the time that I had practicing. So for about 3 months, once a week was all I did. I let go of the idea that I needed more. I savored the time that I did have. When other students of the studio chatted about the class they took yesterday, the class they were planning on taking tomorrow and the workshop they were signing up for next weekend - I knew that was what they were able to do and I was in a different place. I would answer people's queries of what class I was taking next with the honest answer. I'll be back next Wednesday. And the Wednesday after that. Once a week. That's what I'm doing. That's *all* I'm doing. And that is enough.
Amazingly I found that from one Wednesday to the next I could actually feel some endurance kicking in. I could find progress in my poses. My flexibility of yesteryear was returning. Faster than I thought. Don't you read things like you need to do a form of exercise five times a week or even three times a week to get any benefit at all? That's what I thought anyway. Well, some did prove to be better than none.
In three months time I was able to get my heels back down in downward dog. I could hang out in plank for some breaths without trembling. My fingertips reached the floor again in triangle. I could bind my arms and grip my hands in some twists. Not all, but a few. My past life's flexibility as a dancer returned, nearly untouched since its last performance. One day at a time I went to yoga when I could. Once a week. And that was enough. It was progress. Not perfection.
I had walked away, pun intended, from most physical activity when suffering the ills of hyperemesis gravidarum during my second pregnancy. As the little one was over a year old, I dusted my lazy bones off and headed back into the yoga studio last summer. As I was saying before I described my obnoxious physical hibernation track record.
Usually I have to do everything all or nothing. I resumed my yoga practiced with the commitment of once per week. In my one night off a week, I would get lost in the sweaty confines of a local vinyasa class. And that would have to be enough. With all of our other family commitments and goings on, once a week was going to be as good as it got.
I trusted that for that period of time once a week would be sufficient and I would enjoy the time that I had practicing. So for about 3 months, once a week was all I did. I let go of the idea that I needed more. I savored the time that I did have. When other students of the studio chatted about the class they took yesterday, the class they were planning on taking tomorrow and the workshop they were signing up for next weekend - I knew that was what they were able to do and I was in a different place. I would answer people's queries of what class I was taking next with the honest answer. I'll be back next Wednesday. And the Wednesday after that. Once a week. That's what I'm doing. That's *all* I'm doing. And that is enough.
Amazingly I found that from one Wednesday to the next I could actually feel some endurance kicking in. I could find progress in my poses. My flexibility of yesteryear was returning. Faster than I thought. Don't you read things like you need to do a form of exercise five times a week or even three times a week to get any benefit at all? That's what I thought anyway. Well, some did prove to be better than none.
In three months time I was able to get my heels back down in downward dog. I could hang out in plank for some breaths without trembling. My fingertips reached the floor again in triangle. I could bind my arms and grip my hands in some twists. Not all, but a few. My past life's flexibility as a dancer returned, nearly untouched since its last performance. One day at a time I went to yoga when I could. Once a week. And that was enough. It was progress. Not perfection.
The Journey Begins
This is the journey of Juniper.
A woman who loves birth. A woman seeking balance. A woman who adores a regular yoga practice. A woman trapped in the golden handcuffs of Corporate America. A woman in recovery from her own demons as well as coaddiction recovery from others' addictions. A woman with a husband and two children. A woman who has struggled with food - both in excess of and deprivation from. A woman who is in remission from violent episodes of anxiety and depression. A woman who has been reborn through tales of blueberries with continuous cups of tea.
This is my journey.
A woman who loves birth. A woman seeking balance. A woman who adores a regular yoga practice. A woman trapped in the golden handcuffs of Corporate America. A woman in recovery from her own demons as well as coaddiction recovery from others' addictions. A woman with a husband and two children. A woman who has struggled with food - both in excess of and deprivation from. A woman who is in remission from violent episodes of anxiety and depression. A woman who has been reborn through tales of blueberries with continuous cups of tea.
This is my journey.
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