Breaking the Generational Cycle of UnHealth

One thing my son will likely not experience is being able to remember a time where his Mom was a "yo-yo dieter".  Because I made the decision to become Optimally Healthy back in 2010 when he was 5 years old, he now has a healthy Mom who will NOT "struggle with her weight" for his entire formative years and beyond.

This is his new reality, and mine as well.  I can honestly say "I USED to struggle with my weight, before I decided to create optimal health in my life!"  It is so freeing to know that I am not passing my previous dysfunctional relationship with food on to my son. 

The cycle is broken.

You see, I am 100% sure that I will not give up Optimal Health. 

Here is what my life USED to look like.
I am sad to say that I made my god my stomach, by orienting my life around the pleasures and the excitement of unhealthy food and dealing with the consequences of that.  I let food determine my emotions for the day.  If I was feeling blue or anxious or stress I'd turn to IT for comfort and a temporary "high".  It was my drug.  It was my idol.  Literally.  I'd orient my day around what and when and where I was going to eat.  And it had to be yummy. 

The times that I would have a glimpse of what I had become, and wake from a food-induced coma long enough to realize how unhappy I was and how dysfunctional and unmanageable my life had become, I would enter a "diet mentality" with zealous abandon.  I would psyche myself up for another round of deprivation from the food I loved, buckle down and hold my breath, anxiously hopping on the scale every single morning knowing that "it" would determine what kind of day I was going to have, an inflated (emotionally) day or a deflated day.  I was impatient to "get there" and "be done with this" and "get to goal" and I'd make elaborate charts about "if I lose this much per week starting now then this line says I should be "at goal" on such and so date...."

I had simply switched idols.  Instead of my stomach being my idol, I had made the scale my idol.  The scale determined my emotions.  The scale gave me permission to be happy or sad.  The scale determined my self-worth each day and I lived by that determination.  I was petrified of whether "today" would be the day I'd dive off plan and it would be the beginning of my rapid weight REGAIN, perpetuating the cycle of "lose, gain, repent, repeat".  I was distrustful of myself.  I couldn't understand how one minute I could say "no" to something "off plan" with steely resolve, but the next minute be putting a piece of cake or brownie in my mouth that I may have been left alone with.  It felt like multiple personality disorder!  How could I be "so strong" for a day and then, like Jekyll and Hyde, turn into this person who appeared to NOT CARE whether she gained weight or not?  This was NOT the person I wanted to be.  But I didn't seem able to figure out what to do about it!

My life looks so different today.  WHY?  Because I made the fundamental decision to create optimal health in my life.  I decided to become the version of myself which reflected my full God-given potential.  You see, I don't believe God called me to be a fattie.  I had done that to myself, by having unbalanced priorities and by not fully realizing or believing that I was capable of living a life of health and, yes, self-discipline.

I am so grateful to Take Shape For Life for giving me the tools I needed:
* The Medifast 5&1 Plan for the weight loss phase
* Dr. A's Habits of Health System as my guide for CHANGING my MIND
* The individual support of my most awesome Health Coach
* The Bionetwork of support of the Community (Events, Conventions, Trainings, Doctors, Nurses, Dietitians, Behavioral Therapists and Exercise Specialists that were available to me, even being able to talk personally with Dr. A at events)

And I am so grateful to God for giving us the free will to choose how we will live our lives here on Earth.  I choose to live it in a manner worthy of that which I have been called in the service of my family and my community.  I couldn't even BEGIN to do that when I was Class IV Super Obese and didn't even have enough mental energy to get through one day, didn't have enough emotional energy to give to anyone else, even my family, and didn't have enough physical energy to even walk to my car without huffing and puffing.

A new life.  A joyful life.  A renewed mind.  They aren't kidding.  An authentic life and an authentic me.  I have utterly transformed inside and out, and I'm not EVER going back into that dark cave of the diet mentality.  I am an Optimal Health Practitioner!  =)

Rinse and Repeat!