Do something Friday

Steven Pressfield is talking about resistance, addiction and the higher-self.  The whole post is fabulous and I highly recommend you head on over there right now for a quick read with an eye toward how his words describe your eating behaviours.

To get you started, here is his thought on Resistance (or the Lizzie, as we call it here):

"...Resistance wants you to go back to sleep, meaning remain unconscious. Resistance is always selling the easy way, the shortcut, the cheap shot. Resistance urges the artist/addict to slack off from, to sidestep, to avoid, to run away from, to not do. It wants you and me to stay shallow, to remain superficial, to continue unfocussed and uncommitted; to accept mediocrity, to avoid pain, to back away from the fight...."

I expect better from you.  Don't give in to resistance this weekend.  Be compassionate with yourself, listen to your body, and fuel it accordingly.

Preachy

Your Super-Fan

I just read an blog post on how to create a popular blog.  The short answer is write the kind of blog that makes you popular.  Hmmmm, clear as mud, right?  The author talks about which attributes make certain people popular (blogs not withstanding) and the attribute that struck me most was:

People who are popular converse with others -- they don't preach at others. 

Now you might be thinking I am getting ready to launch into a dissection of this blog but...that isn't where I'm headed today.  I'd like to get back to the preachy part.

How much time each day do you spend preachin' at yourself about food, your weight, how much you aren't exercising but should be ???

I know when I get on a jag with myself, it doesn't make me feel better -- it actually makes me feel more hopeless about whatever the situation is.  If the preachy voice inside your head was another person, would you choose to spend your precious time with them?  Or would they be someone you dread seeing -- always sniping about your outfit, you food choices, and your under-used gym membership?

How would your life change if you jettisoned the dead weight of your nagging Lizard and activity started giving yourself compliments, kudos, and the occasional pep-talk for your eating choices?  What if you changed the Lizard voice into your own personal Super-Fan?  Would you be more likely to make more positive choices for yourself if you had a cheering section urging you on?

How do you want to feel....

Have you given it any thought -- How would it feel to reach the weight you are working on? Don't stop with the easy, breezy "It would feel great!" answer. Work a little harder...

Envision this --

You are running some errands on a Saturday morning -- nothing special, just a quick trip to the grocery store, run through the bank and meeting a friend for coffee after.

You reach into your closet and pull out a pair of jeans -- not your yard working jeans and not the best pair either -- just an old pair of jeans. You don't think about what they are going to look like on you (Lizzie is quiet). You set one foot in and then the other -- still no comment from your reptilian peanut gallery.

You pull them up, button and zip 'em. You're out the door to run errands. You might be thinking about the best traffic route. You might be thinking about whether you will need a jacket or not. You might be wondering where you put your car keys when you came in last night.

What you're not thinking about is:
Whether the jeans are too tight in the butt.
How you wish you didn't have to button them because the waist is too tight.
How long you are going to have to sit at the coffee place because the jeans make sitting uncomfortable.

None of that is entering into your head. Lizzie might be talking but she isn't talking about your weight or your choice of pants.

You are just you running errands.

How would it feel to live that bit of life day after day?

Mindfulness is...

Deliberately paying attention, without judgment, to one's own experiences.

Mindful eating is like driving a car. As you drive, you are checking the speedometer (at least once in a while) -- sometimes without consciously having to remind yourself. When the speed creeps up, you slow the car just a little bit. If you notice that you are passing everyone on the road, you might check the speedo to see if they are really slow or you are going fast.

In most cases, this all happens without your inner Lizard kicking up telling you how bad of a person you are -- you just make adjustments to your speed and move on.

Eating can be the same way. Check your stomach gauge (rated on the hunger/fullness scale) once in a while as you eat. Sometimes the h/f gauge creeps up -- when that happens, you can make the minor adjustment to your eating right then. If you notice you plate is getting clean quicker than everyone elses -- you might decide to slow down a bit. No judgment. Small adjustments. No inner Lizard commenting on what this says about your success (or from Lizzie -- failure) as a person!

Lizards, Lizards Everywhere

As sometimes happens when you are working on noticing things, I got up Saturday morning, opened my fridge, and thought of y'all. I have been giving some brain space to the Inner Lizard (but not particularly on Saturday morning) when I opened the fridge to get milk for my coffee (so you KNOW I wasn't fully awake OR functioning at my peak) and the picture on the left is what I saw.

Now -- lest you think someone was playing a crazy prank on me ... let me properly introduce you to my Fridge Lizard. A few years ago (and by a few I might mean closer to 10), I bought a BRAND NEW refrigerator. Some weeks later, my whole family was over for a birthday party and my sister brought the fridge lizard as a gift. (I don't really know why a lizard -- who can really fathom the thought processes of that dear brain) -- Anyway, after showing him to me -- she put him in the fridge and that was that. He has been in my fridge every since. Even when I moved, he moved too (traded in the white and up to stainless!)

I see him everyday. He is always in there. The kids don't bother him or take him out or play with him or hide him anywhere in or out of the fridge. When I notice him, he makes me think of my sister and that makes me smile. But I don't always notice him -- he has just been waiting there ready to be notice when I have taken the time to learn something that makes me look at him in a different light --like Saturday morning.

Now, that's one lizard but....then....I went into my closet while I was waiting for the coffee maker to do its magic and what else did I find??? My fav hat was sitting on the shelves -- just where I left it -- to be put on at a moments notice to cover really bad hair when I take the kids to the bus stop in the morning. I love this hat! It is my almost constant summer companion.



After noticing the fridge lizard and thinking how ironic it is that I have one (considering the posts I have been writing), the hat was another little revelation. I am surrounded by lizards. And I was so much quicker to pick up on the second one once I had made the connection of the first. I wasn't trying to think about them -- I wasn't writing a post in my head (like I sometimes do). The first one was just there and the second one recognized even quicker.

Keep your mind open and sometimes things that have been sitting right in front of you jump into clarity when you aren't even looking for them. Sometimes you need to learn a new way of thinking about something and then the next step seems obvious.

Harnessing the Power of the Lizard

I have been giving this some thought. Per the request of a reader (I love requests by the way!), I have been doing some research on the Lizard, as in Inner Lizard or the Lizard Brain. Here is what I have learned:

First of all, the Lizard Brain, phyisologically speaking, is one of the oldest part of the brain from an evolutionary stand point. Its job are to keep us living -- its is the non-verbal part of our brain that runs on instinct and ritual. It catalogs our behaviors and their repercussions -- which ones worked (pleasurable)and which ones didn't (those that caused us pain or discomfort). It sees things in black and white -- there is no gray matter here.

This is the place that we act on emotional memories. This is the part of the brain that looks for patterns that concern our survival.

So...fast forward to the other day, when I was talking about the Inner Lizard. If you google the term, Seth Godin (who we all know I love!!) has put out a business book that talks a lot about overcoming the resistance of the Lizard. His contention is that the Lizard needs to be quieted. The Lizard is the one keeping us in our "safe" (read: known) bubble. We may not like where we are but we understand it -- it is status quo, we haven't died from it yet so it must be safe (because we aren't dead).

Because of what the Lizard is, it always looks backwards. It can't plan ahead. There are no known patterns of your future -- only your past has been proven out -- this is the knowledge base of the Lizard.

It is the Lizard that tells you your plan is doomed to fail. "You haven't lost the weight yet, why would it be different this time." Maybe you have lost the weight but it is starting to creep back on -- "Yup",your Lizard says, "of course it is. This is what happened last time, and the time before that, or the time before that..."

So what should we do with the Lizard? Duck tape his mouth shut? Put him in a coffee can? Tie him to a chair and threaten him with immediate demise should he open his mouth? Or (most terribly) live in fear of every time he opens his mouth?

I don't know what your Big Universal Truth (BUT) is but here is mine. Everything happens for a reason (I do not expect to know what that reason is most of the time). I believe in Synchronicity (the concept not the song by the Police). And I believe our bodies give us a ton of information about our internal and external environments that we can chose to listen to -- or not.

Based on my BUT, I am going to take a leap and come down on the side of making friends with the Lizard and seeing if we can harness his energy to help us get to where we want to go.

How's that work? Well, let's go back and look at what Lizzie does.

1. Runs on instinct and ritual
2. Sees things in black and white
3. Looks for and stores patterns in our past
4. He is loud and persistent

What if we started listening to Lizzie and understanding that (much like an overprotective mother)she just wants to keep us safe -- to have us not put ourselves at excessive risk. However, safe now is different than safe when mother-Lizzie grew up. There are no tigers at the ends of our driveways. We don't experience food shortages now like she did in her day -- there is no reason for us to gobble up our dinner or stuff ourselves. There will be more food available tomorrow. And just because we haven't been end-all, be-all successful yet in the weight loss department doesn't mean we will repeat our past ad infinitum (like mother-Lizzie keeps telling us).

And because the world is all about push and pull -- you can't have mother-Lizzie without having the recalcitrant teenager rebelling against everything she says. This is the part of you driven to eat the whole cake because Lizzie is encouraging it (you're sad you know -- the cake will help). The part of you that acts out by putting yourself on a very strict diet just to prove mother-Lizzie wrong.

When do parents start having a better relationship with their children? In my experience, it is when the child realized the parent does know some things and should be listened to because they can provide valuable insights and when the parent realized the child needs to make her own decisions about the life she wants to live.

The same with mother-Lizzie. She makes good sense when she pipes up that the guy in the elevator seems too creepy to ride with. But her alarmist stance about food shortages (you'd better eat that last few bites...who knows when you will get the opportunity to eat this again!) isn't serving you well.

Don't fight Lizzie. Learn to understand what she is telling about food -- BUT then take the extra step of evaluating her thoughts to see if they hold true in your day and age.

And remember -- ultimately YOU write your own future -- one decision at a time.