Be Healthy, Eat Healthy

Some of you may have noticed the Weight Loss tracker on my side bar. I have been using My Fitness Pal to help me keep track of my calories and weight loss. The weight loss is not accurate at this point because I put in my weight after I had lost 7 pounds. So the total should really be 11. I just haven’t taken the time to fix it.

I am trying not to focus on the weight. This is hard for me because every diet I have ever been on has been about the weight. My first experience with a “diet” was when I was 8. My mom took me to Weight Watchers. I still remember that feeling of something was wrong with me as I sat in that small room in the back of a grocery store and listened to some lady talk about eating liver once a week and eating cottage cheese and pears for dessert. I was 8. Dessert was a cookie or candy, NOT cottage cheese.

I know my mother had good intentions. She was over-weight as a child. Her mother cooked yummy fried food. A treat for them was bread and sugar with a glass of whole fat milk. By the time she was 11 she weighed 211 pounds. She worked hard to lose that weight. She did not want the same for me so she did what she thought was best, she took me to Weight Watchers.

But Weight Watchers is all about the food. At least the program I learned growing up was. There were little charts with boxes to check off which food you ate that day. There were certain foods you couldn’t eat. It was very restrictive. And everything had to be measured. You want mayonnaise on the sandwich, you better measure out a teaspoon. This was before the era of fat-free or even low-fat food. If we wanted a treat we went to the Slimmery down the road and got some wierd ice cream dessert.

It was never about health. The program has since changed and it is better, but it is still all about the food. Foods are given a certain amount of “points” and depending on your weight and activity you have a set amount of points you can eat. So all day long I am thinking, “how many points is that?” Food is no longer enjoyed but a chore. Counting points and keeping track of them is trying after awhile. And I get a lot of points when I start WW because I weigh a lot. While on the program on time, I would eat candy bars (Snickers, they satisfy) at the end of the day to finish up my points. I still lost weight, but it wasn’t really healthy.

This time is has to be about health. As I am getting older (that is different from old) I realize that I have to take care of this body God has given me. Being over weight has so many health problems that come with it. Not only physical but mental. My back hurts, I have acid reflux at night and don’t sleep well and there was this sharp little pain in my side that is probably my gall bladder yelling at me. Even just losing ten pounds has helped with some of those problems.

And then there’s that whole thing about why I eat. The mental aspect of dieting. Most of the time I am shoving something into my mouth it is not because I am hungry. It is because my children are not listening to me or my husband is not doing what I would like him to. It is a control issue. I can not control other peope, but I can control what I eat. Instead of not putting something into my mouth, which would make me anorexic, I eat to soothe my stress. Food was my friend. And trust me, I see how wrong that is. Instead of turning to my Creator, I turn to food.

The other day I was stressed about something important like 6 loads of laundry to do. We had a teen activity that weekend and there were some leftover Swiss Cakes rolls on the counter calling my name. I literally walked over, picked that sweet little cake up and looked at Larry to please stop me from shoving this entire package down my throat in 2 seconds flat.

He gently removed the cakes pried the cakes from my hand and told me to step away. I didn’t really want ot eat those cakes. I have built up this bad habit for many years and it may take awhile to break.

So this time it will be different. I say to myself several times a day “Be Healthy. Eat Healthy.” And so far it is working. I am focusing more on changing by bad habits and turning to God for my help.