I love food.
All food.
I love to try new foods and go to new restaurants and learn about other cultures and try their foods. I love French food and Moroccan food and Afghan food. I love Indian food and Seafood and Tex-Mex. I love food.
I have always loved healthy foods. As a child I would opt for the salad bar over pizza. I love most all fruits and vegetables and especially love the rare occasion when I get to try a new one. I love to cut them and cook them and find different pairings.
Food and the experience of taste is one of the most amazing gifts from God and maybe one of my favorite blessings.
We eat to live, but there are times when I have lived to eat.
I love sugar. I absolutely love sugar. There are times when I am obsessed with sugar. Any form: candy, cake, ice cream, hard candy, chewy candy, sugar, honey, etc. And one is never enough. One turns to two turns to five turns to ten.
As a younger person, I worked out all the time. I was extremely active with sports and running and playing with friends and swimming and with whatever activity the day held. Being active and having built up toned muscles led to having a high metabolism. Eating was a pleasure with no bounds. I ate healthy foods, butI also ate a great deal of non-healthy foods.
Time changes things: life, habits, schedules, metabolism, muscle mass, choices, bodies, eating, health.
Sometimes, life changes some things while other things do not.
So, with time, my schedule slowed down, my eating maintained, my habits became more sedentary, my metabolism slowed down, my muscle mass dwindled, and I slowly began gaining weight.
I realized I was changing, but truthfully, I wasn’t concerned or worried or interested. This had never happened to me before and I was in a bit of a state of denial. Despite having a Bachelor’s degree in Exercise Science and a Master’s degree in Nutrition, I did not really know what to do or how to change.
With time, I realized that I fed my dogs cleaner, healthier food than what I was consuming.
I saw myself in pictures and did not understand what I saw. In my mind’s eye, I was still healthy and fit and trim and the pictures I saw did not represent the me I believed me to be.
Working as I do, I have free access to a significant amount of food at all times. It is not healthy foods: unlimited soft drinks, chocolate, chips, crackers, cookies, etc. It would be nothing for me to go through a 13 hour shift having consumed an excess of free foods and think nothing about it. We even joked at work that I was a trash can and would eat anything.
A coworker mentioned this to me one day. Something in the
way she said it sounded different this time. I heard her different. Why would I
ever be okay with someone equating my body with a trash can, least of all me? God
created me as His beautiful workmanship, a temple, and I was allowing my body to
become a trash can.
Concurrently, I found myself neck deep in an ICU filled with dying COVID patients. Nothing we did helped them. No meds we administered made a difference. Week after week, month after month, we watched them die.
The ones who had diabetes, hypertension, and obesity were the ones who did the worst. These were preventable chronic diseases that these patients had simply from making poor choices.
The same poor choices I was making.
I could not help anyone with COVID; only God can do that. But I can help myself. I can make better choices. I can change my behavior and prevent these chronic diseases from taking root in my body. I can honor God with the temple He made me to be and stop treating my body like a trash can.
Around this same time, a friend posted a book that talked about the psychology and neuroscience of eating. Susan P. Thompson, a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, wrote, Bright Line Eating. From the moment I began reading, I realized that her writings aligned with many of my core beliefs around eating and food. From an anatomy and pathology standpoint, her writing made sense to me. Almost immediately, I bought into and believed in the psychology behind what she wrote. I knew that this was the key for me beginning my journey out of treating my body like a trash can and into the temple I was called to be.
From the start, I have been adamant about not calling this a diet. When you go on a diet, then you go off a diet. I do not diet. I eat. What I wanted was a new way of eating, thinking, behaving. I wanted to change my habits, my mind set, my lifestyle. While I was hopeful to experience some weight loss, that was not my ultimate goal. My goal was to be healthy, to be happy, and to be free from eating in the manner in which I had been eating with no respect for myself.
So, on June 22, I committed to change my life and eat in a more God honoring, self-honoring way.
I committed to more vegetables, more fruits, eating three meals per day, no sugar, no flour, and no snacking.
There were moments in which this was difficult, but within a very short period of time it became automatic.
I ate my portions and I was satisfied, not painfully gluttonously over full. I found that I wasn’t hungry between meals, but calm and more relaxed. I found that my mind wasn’t obsessed with food and that I was mentally free to think on other things. I contentedly looked forward to the next meal without worry.
Foods began to taste better than they ever have.
I was not exercising and the weight literally just fell off. I simply stuck to the meal plan. Weighed my foods, planned my meals, and was more filled than I have ever been in all my life.
In just under three months, I lost just under 30 lbs. I feel so good and I am so proud of myself.
I believe in exercise. I believe in moving. I believe in taking care of one’s self in all the ways that one should.
But you cannot do everything at once. It takes work and effort to change habits. It takes willpower.
To change everything at once is to expect too much of oneself. If I had been trying to incorporate more exercise while also trying to change my eating, I strongly believe I would have failed at both. I am not strong enough to have the willpower to do it all.
As I said, I believe in exercise. Now that I have lost most of the weight and this new way of eating and treating myself is becoming a lifestyle change, I can begin thinking about incorporating exercise.
I am not quite ready yet, but I am almost there. I believe in taking one step at a time.
And I am so very glad that I did.
