The Mid-Century Me

Much has happened in my world in the last year and much continues to happen on a daily basis. We all have those times I know, when we feel as if God is testing us and we are sure we are failing at a rapid pace. That is where I am. Yes, there are things going on in my life that are causing me to have to re-evaluate who I am, along with just about everything I have ever done and.....*gasp*..... having to make a few changes. And I for one....don't like to change.

When I refer to change, I am referring to changing just about everything about myself from the inside out. That is, the way I think, feel and handle life as well as things such as my health and even my spiritual well being. These have been some huge realizations in my life and it has really made me think a lot about myself and just how much I need this.

Had things not happened in these last months the way they did and had they not been so earth shattering, I likely would not have been "forced" and yes....I mean "forced" to come to this place in my life. In the here and now though, the reality is, this might not be a bad thing. I had to come to some hard truths about myself and what I need for myself in order to continue moving forward.

It occurred to me, that we all have people and possessions in our life, that we truly love. So how do we take care of the people we love? We go out of our way to give them the best. We make sure their needs are taken care of and we show them every chance we get even in the smallest ways...whether its is making sure they eat right, helping them or simply by just wrapping our arms around them and telling them that we love them. And our beloved possessions? We all have at least one thing that holds some special sentiment to us and we treat it very special. We usually put it in a place where it is taken care of and we know that it will not be touched, broken or damaged in anyway. So if this is how we, or more to the point "I" treat the people I love and even the possessions I love, why does this care not trickle down to myself?

I am 55 years old and soon to be 56. Yes, I am a bit fixated on these numbers, not because I feel particularly old, but because that is a lot of years in my pocket that I have treated those I love and care about and even possessions much better than I have treated myself. Why do I not have equal love for myself? Why is my own health not as important to me? Why do I not guard my own feelings as closely as I guard others....and why is my own emotional and spiritual health not as important to me as my family and friends? Why do I treat myself in ways that I would never allow anyone to treat those I love. Even my possessions are better taken care of than I take care of myself and when you get right down to it.....that is simply just wrong. 

At 55, I am not old, but I am at the age where every working part I have is considered mid-century. Now we all know that even mid-century items, if well taken care of, can be even more beautiful and even more desired than the new "stuff" just coming off the line. However, mistreated, a mid-century item can need a lot of work, effort and even new parts to get it back into good working order. Yeah, I am the mid-century item that needs a bit of work.

When I was young, I treated my body like it was invincible and fluctuated between all out abuse and complete pampering but never did I really give myself what I needed. As I got older, got married and had kids, well I treated my body a bit better but I started sacrificing sleep, emotional needs and spiritual health for my family, friends and those around me. I learned to martyr myself and not say "NO!" only to find myself angry and resentful at the world because I felt left out and uncared for. Now mind you.....no one else made me feel left out and uncared for, this was simply the message I was sending myself because in the process of taking care of everyone else, I was not taking care of me.

Martyrdom is not all it is cracked up to be. While we are throwing ourselves on the cross for others, perhaps we are not being quite as Christlike as we think we are. I learned that in all my "doing for others," while forgetting to do things for myself like sleep, pray and eat right  that I wasn't always being as helpful and wonderful as I thought. In fact because I was lacking in my own personal life, I was creating holes that I was trying to fill by "fixing" others. In that fixing, I was actually controlling situations that I had no business controlling and I wasn't being all that helpful, at times robbing people of life experiences they needed to fix themselves in order to figure out their own lives.

So here I sit. I am mid-century and although I have most of my original parts, there seems to be a lot of rust and I might be a little worse for the wear, especially if I don't start treating myself as a loved and prized possession. Yesterday my blood pressure was 168/108. I have a BMI of 35 which is Obese II and I can't stand to look in the mirror. Does this sound like someone who loves and appreciates herself? It's not and this is where I am.

In the last few weeks, I have been taking baby steps in learning to do for me and take care of me. I am having to let go of just about all I have known or thought about before and open myself up to letting others do for themselves, staying in my own lane and minding my own business and focusing on my own health (both physical and emotional) and learning to not only know myself but to love myself. Trust me, it's a pretty tall order.

I started by making doctors appointments for myself. Apparently I have no problem making appointments for others or nagging them until they make their appointments themselves, so why can't I do the same for myself? I made up my mind to face the health fears I have at 55 and find out just what the realities of my health are, instead of worrying and living in fear to the point of not doing anything until it's too late. So far, the news hasn't been anything I didn't expect....lose weight, start exercising and start taking better care of myself. Big shocker! There are still a couple of appointments to go but whatever I find out....knowledge is power....right?!

Now I am working to focus on me and leave other peoples problems to them and God. That's right, you can't control someone else, so why should I make myself sick over someone elses choices. I have to keep telling myself...."It's none of my business." By not worrying about others, it does free up time for me to focus on ME! Sound a little narcissistic? It's really not. In fact, it is almost the opposite. I think I have not focused on me for so long, because I was afraid of finding out who I really was. Maybe I would find out that if I focused on myself that I would have to hop down off that cross and see people, myself and the world in general differently. Maybe.......I was scared! 

While I have a very long way to go before I am polished up and ready to put myself on the showroom floor, I am starting to take the necessary steps to take care of me. I need to start viewing myself as truly loved by me. Each step I take in bringing myself back to life needs to be a labor of love whether it is the dreaded exercise or the eating right or by simply just saying "No" with no excuses to anyone about something I really don't want to do. I need to start asking myself "What I want?" and more importantly "What I need?" Those questions are a lot tougher to answer than you think.

What I am learning from all of this, is that as I start my journey back to Trim Healthy Mama, I am viewing both it and myself differently. This time, as I make my meals I don't view it as something I am doing "to myself" but "for myself." Just this simple thinking turns a chore into a gift and it truly makes a huge difference. Also, by doing all of this for myself and giving myself time to focus on me and my needs I am finding that I am losing my urges to binge eat. For me, binge eating always happens when I feel out of control and usually, I feel out of control because of someone elses issues. I can't control them into doing, acting or being like I want, so I feel out of control and the only way to gain control is to.....apparently mistreat myself with a tub of Rocky Road. Now though, I don't feel so out of control because I am minding my own business, focusing on my own issues and finding that I have a lot better chance of controlling myself instead of trying to control others. Of course, there are always those things that even in our own lives, they are simply out of our control. What do I do then? I hand it over to God and most importantly.......leave it in His hands. 

Now as I eat, as I exercise, as I focus on the moment and even as I pray, I am doing it all with the same love for myself that I have been showing others for years. It is a gift I am giving to myself. It is my hope too, that with this new found understanding of just how worth it that I truly am, that this love affair will continue for another half a century. This means that moving forward, most of my actions from losing weight to dealing with others will be done with my best interest and love of self at the heart of it all. The best thing though is....when we love, like and accept ourselves, we are so much happier and when we are happy, we want others to be happy and this will definitely show, in all we do. 

One Second at a Time

I have learned many lessons in this last year. In fact, I have probably had more life skills training in the last 8-12 months than I have had in all the other 54 years of my life combined. You know the biggest lesson I have learned? I don't know me at all. In fact, much of what I thought I knew....I really didn't.

That is a strange statement to make with all the years I have lived. You would think by this time, I would be approaching wise...but I am not. In fact, I realize that my wisdom in this life is very limited. And all that sage advice I have given others? I am beginning to think that it was complete and utter BS. That's right. Most of that advice was unsolicited and therefore fell into the category of none of my business. That which was asked for, was me saying to them, what I would actually like to be true in my world but was not. So yeah....BS. 

And NO! I am not being self deprecating. I am being totally and 100% honest. That too is something new to me in the respect that I have spent a great deal of time lying to myself and probably lying to others based on the lies I told myself. Again....not self loathing, just a good dose of honesty.

So, we have established that my wisdom is limited and I haven't got a clue who I am or what I want to be when I grow up....and you know what? That is perfectly okay. It's not about what I don't know, but rather it is about what I know that I don't know and that I acknowledge I don't know it. Confused yet?

These last few months have put me on a journey that I had no idea I needed to go on, nor do I think I even wanted to go on, but I was left with no choice. It was either face life and the reality of all that is my world or spend the rest of my days in denial and misery.

One of the most important things I am learning is that I have spent my entire adult life doing for others so that they might see me as "good enough." What the hell? What is good enough? Who is the measurer of "enough" and why am I holding myself to a standard that I am not even sure exists? I have literally made myself miserable trying to get people to tell me I was good enough, when the only one that really mattered was the person staring back at me in my mirror. WOW! That was some deep and complex realizations.

Another thing I have learned is that I have been waiting for someone or some thing to make me happy. Again....what the hell? I have handed over complete and total control of my life to some non-existent entity. The reality is, there is no one or nothing out there that has the power to make me happy. The only one that has that kind of power and control is......wait for it......ME! And again....WOW! The control that I have been searching for all of these years has been right  here all along.

Finally, I have lived in fear for the last 18 years. Tis' true. From 2000 to 2002, just about every fear I had at the time was realized. I had a premature, special needs child that hung between life and death, I lost my husband and I lost my mother. Since that moment, I have spent all of these years waiting for the other shoe to drop and often living with self-fulfilling prophecies. Yep.....what the hell yet again?!

Fear has become my way of life and integrated itself into just about every breath I take and every decision I make. There is nothing fearless about my life or me as a person. It is all fear-based and even just saying that makes me feel sad. What a waste of 18 years that I can never get back.

The good news is, you can teach an old dog new tricks and this old dog is learning. Yes, acknowledgment of my past behavior and the acceptance to know that I can't go back and change a thing but I can learn from it and move forward are amazing realizations. That is why these last few weeks I have done my best to take only learning moments from the past and leave the rest behind. I forgive myself for every moment wasted in fear, for every time I allowed myself to feel less than or not good enough and for every time I turned my power over to someone else or even nothing at all. It has been somewhat freeing, as if I have been climbing out of quick sand that all but devoured me.

I have also realized that along with having no control over the past, I also have no control over the future. It is very easy to fall into fearful thinking when you try to control that which hasn't even happened yet. I have given myself way too much "imagined" power over things that I know nothing of. I cannot predict the future and therefore giving it too much thought puts me into a power struggle where I truly have no power. In that battle....I will always lose. 

What I can control is the here and now. The moment. So I am taking my life back, one second at a time. For one second I can focus on the present. For one second I can put fear in my rear view mirror and be grateful for what I have instead of worrying about what I don't. For one second, I can look in the mirror and ask myself what "I" need right now.....and for this second....that is exactly what I am doing.

These are all pretty hefty realizations and they have come fairly fast. Granted, they may have been a bit forced as I was out of other options, but it seems that they are steering me on a whole new path I have yet to go down. They are changing how I think and how I focus my time and effort. They are making me take stock of what I have and not worry about what I don't and they are making me live in the moment, leaving the past and present to take care of themselves.

So why I am writing all of this on this particular blog? Because this blog is/was designed to help me to help myself not just be a healthier me, but to be a better me body, mind and spirit. That is what I am doing.

Today, I decided to let go of a fear and go on a walk. Now this may sound funny to you, being afraid of going on a walk, but it wasn't to me. It had been since 2016 the last time I went on a walk. At that time I was going 5 miles 3-5 times per week. Since that time though, I had let myself go. I wasn't eating right and I had gotten next to no exercise. I was literally terrified that I would get 10 feet down the street and that I wouldn't be able to catch my breath or that my legs, heart and body in general just wouldn't be up for.....exercise. This morning though, I knew that the only way to find out if my fear was real or exaggerated was to simply....do it. I gave myself the goal of 1 mile and I took off. Guess what? My breathing was fine. My legs, heart and body were fine and not only did I go a mile, but I managed 1.71 miles and I felt fine. The added benefit was that being out lifted my spirits and gave me some much needed time with nature and the present. 

As I walked, I was able to open my mind to what was going on in the moment. I did not allow myself thoughts of anything that happened before the walk or anything that "might" happen after. I stayed strictly in the moment and enjoyed the early fall morning. The air was humid and not a leaf moved. The ground was dotted with moisture from an early morning shower and everything felt clean. The trees were still in full green splendor and the grass was luxurious and soft with all of the recent rains.  I enjoyed seeing the fall flowers that were feeling safe enough to start blooming in the absence of the heat and the cloud cover and grayness gave my soul just a twitch of fall longing.

While enjoying the moment, I was also able to ponder the many reasons I have to be grateful in the here and now and as I listed them in my head, I realized that regardless of anything else, I am blessed. I also realized that what I have is enough and who I am is enough. It was a pretty good feeling for an early onset of fall morning.

Where is this all going to go? That is a question that I have no answer for. Anything past this moment is unwritten and therefore subject to surprise, change and the twisty turns that make life so interesting and unpredictable. The future is also not my business. My business resides in the moment and how I can make those moments count to learn about who I am, what I want and how I am going to get there. And I will take this journey.....one second at a time. 

My Truth and the Lies We Tell Ourselves

Soooooo.......let's just pretend that almost 18 months hasn't gone by since my last blog post here. *Poof* forgotten.

Lies! I've talked about them before and likely, I will talk about them again.

Usually the biggest lies we tell ourselves are about ourselves. With our own body image it is really hard to be honest sometimes, especially as we get older and our bodies change. Truthfully though, I have always had a warped image of my body and therefore been a damn good self deceiver when it came to.....me!

Now bare with me as I start pointing fingers. I am fully aware as an adult where the fault lies with my diet, exercise and health in general. However, I didn't just frivolously jump on the bandwagon that led me here. No, I was shamed and in some ways, forced into it.

As a very young kid, I was a picky eater and very skinny. I was tiny from my head to my toes. I even had a dentist tell me once that I had the tiniest teeth he had ever worked on. I remember still wearing a size 6 little girls long after my friends were in size 8's and 10's. I was not a food lover and spent many an hour sitting at the table long after everyone else was through eating, because I wouldn't eat my food. Then, my mother who was also very thin and who had always had the metabolism of a hummingbird, got a divorce. That divorce did us all in I think.

My mother began to turn to food as comfort during this time and her once active lifestyle was replaced with what I now believe was depression. She began preparing large fattening meals and supplementing with fast food. After she put on about 20 pounds and started feeling physically like crap (mom had Lupus and a good diet is crucial to Lupus survival) she joined Weight Watchers and took it all off in 6 weeks. As far as I went, I had taken a liking to homemade bread, cinnamon rolls, scalloped potatoes, pizza and hamburgers and yes....I put on some weight but mostly my metabolism was still pretty good and my weight was more puberty related.

Looking back, had my mother just changed all of our diets over to more of a Weight Watchers mind set and not focused so heavily on weight, scales and body image, I might not ever have gone down the road I did. The icing on the cake for me though(no pun intended), was my mom taking me to the doctor for a physical and the doctor telling "me" not her, that I had put on 5 pounds in the last year but that I hadn't grown any taller, therefore if I didn't go on a "diet" right now, I was going to be "fat!" Yep! My self image was pretty much in the toilet at 11 years old.

From that moment on, I was on a lifelong journey of self-love vs. self-loathing, binge eating, diet pills, laxatives, anorexia and obesity. I judged myself the way I felt the world judged me and that was by how I looked. This was validated by peoples attitudes toward me based on my weight.

During my high school years, I was not skinny by any stretch, but I was not fat either. At that time in society though, the world worshiped "skinny" to the point of no butt and no boobs. Now you could get by with the bigger boobs if you had a tiny waist and butt, but if you had a voluptuous figure at all, you were "fat!" Since I was only 5'1", I had no waist, but I did have boobs and a butt and because I wasn't bikini body, waif thin.....I was viewed as and talked about as fat. Then, my senior year in high school, right at Thanksgiving I got sick. I couldn't eat for about a week and being young and having a decent metabolism, I dropped about 10 pounds, which was a lot for my tiny body. Then my mother got sick and we thought she had heart issues. The worry and stress over that caused me to drop another 5 pounds. Then I got a crush on a guy at school. My obsession with him caused another 5 to come off. By the time I went back to school after Christmas break, I was 20 pounds down and it seemed that everyone noticed it. Guys who had never given me the time of day suddenly found me "interesting" and girls suddenly either got friendlier or meaner depending on whether they found my new weight loss a threat or not. Even my parents were noticing. Suddenly my dad was "proud" of the way I looked and was taking me out to buy brand new clothes, something he never did before.

There was a problem with all of this though. I was still me and I still liked scalloped potatoes and hamburgers and once I was no longer sick, worried and infatuated, my appetite was back and I was hungry. When I started gaining back the first 5 pounds, I panicked. I liked thin me and I wasn't going to give it up. That is when I took out stock in laxatives. The fact that I have any colon left today is a miracle as I would down literally boxes of laxatives after I ate. It worked but one of the nasty side effects (aside from the obvious) was that taking that many laxatives dehydrates you and dehydration caused me horrific migraines. At the time I didn't realize the correlation, but now I know why I spent the last half of my senior year literally in agony all the time with migraines. Apparently though, the number on the scales was worth ALL the side effects of the laxatives.

It wasn't long before I found myself completely addicted to my scales. I would literally weigh myself 8-10 times a day. I had no understanding at the time that your body weight fluctuates throughout the day and therefore I would panic if I weighed half a pound more in the evening than I did in the morning. By this time, laxatives were not enough for me and so I began not eating at all or eating very minimally. The pounds were dropping and people were telling me how great I looked by I was literally starving. I wanted to eat so badly, but each morsel that went into my mouth I felt guilty about. Peoples admiration for how great I looked was worth everything to me.....including my health, so the starvation continued.

I was never a true bulimic simply because I hate throwing up. I could never force myself to throw up no matter how much I tried. What I could do though, was drink until I puked, which I got very good at. My friends and I would go out to the bars and clubs and we would drink. I drank a lot....at least for my size....and every time I would end up puking sick and hungover. The weird thing was, I never liked alcohol. To this day I am still not a fan, but back then, drinking was a means to an end and each morning after a night out of drinking and then throwing up, no matter how bad the hangover, I was on the scales checking to see how much weight I had lost.

Eventually I couldn't stand the drinking anymore or the laxatives and I started to gain a few pounds back. Panic again began to set in and then I learned of a doctor who was an osteopath, who practiced over the state line. He was pricey as you had to pay out of pocket (can't imagine why he turned none of this into insurance). You would go in and get blood work done and then he would give you diet pills. Phendometrazine and something else, along with a vitamin. Yeah....that vitamin helped a lot. Looking back, the doctor was criminal for giving me, a 5'1" girl who weighed 100 pounds soaking wet, diet pills....but he did. 

The diet pills in my mind were the answer to all my prayers. By taking the pills, I was never hungry. I could literally go without food for days without the pesky side effect of hunger. I would eat something unhealthy like a bag of chips, a candy bar or a burger every couple of days just to keep from keeling over, but other than that....nothing. I was literally starving myself to death. I don't think I cared though because the world was giving me "positive" feedback. I say positive loosely as in my warped brain, my mom being worried about my weight loss and people telling me that I was getting "too thin," were positive. Even my dad told me I needed to eat more, where as before when I was heavier and healthy, he told me I looked like a "hog." No one had ever told me I was "too thin" before and I loved it.

It wasn't until after I met my husband and he convinced me that he found me beautiful regardless of how I looked, that I started to get a handle on my eating. By handle, I mean I began to eat regularly and not worry about the scales. Then after I had my middle son, the weight grabbed a hold and didn't want to let go. I did get back down to a healthy weight after he was born and then I found out I was pregnant again. During this pregnancy though, my body had changed so much and I put on a lot of weight. Following my youngest son's birth, the bottom fell out of my world and then the next three years I dealt with the NICU, losing my husband, a hysterectomy, a special needs child, a teenager grieving and going wild, losing my mom and full on depression caused by anti-depressants. (Yes....I said caused by anti-depressants and that is another story for another day).

My weight kept climbing and my energy was declining. I felt horrible all of the time and my doctor just kept wanting to put me on more anti-depressants and anti-anxiety pills. I was in a limbo of exhaustion, hunger and frustration. Then as I was sitting in his office one day, I read an article about hypothyroidism. Everything in the article spoke to me. I knew this was my issue and when I finally got called back I told the doctor what I thought. I literally had to argue with him to get him to test me, but low and behold, my thyroid was so out of whack and so slow, it was helping to contribute to everything else that was out of whack in my life. Once I started Synthroid and weaned myself off of all the other unnecessary crap, I started feeling like a human again. That being said though, by this point my metabolism was so slow and my eating habits were so bad, that for the next few years, food was my friend and my weight climbed.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine talked me into starting a food program called Trim Healthy Mama. She had actually started trying to get me to do it two years prior, but I am a hard sell. I really believed that I would always be overweight and that fat and unhealthy were how I would spend the rest of my days. Doing THM though, I learned I was wrong. In three months I lost about 30 lbs and I felt amazing. I was healthy and I was actually happy and never hungry. I did well for quite sometime and then..............

This is where I would normally throw in a multitude of excuses as to why I quit taking care of me such as......a child on drugs, another child's impending surgery, almost losing my house, almost losing a grand child and the list goes on and on, but the TRUTH is......I just gave up and let life overwhelm me. It was my fault, my choice and although I might be able to blame my start on this unhealthy path on others, my current issues are my own fault. I obviously know how to live healthy, I just made the choice not to.

So the other day I had to go to the doctor for a tick bite(another fun story for another day). My blood pressure was a scary 154/114 and my weight was....well let's just say......not pretty. What the heck was I doing to myself? Why was I doing it? Was I not worth better?

Body image and the lies we tell ourselves about our body, our health and our eating habits can literally kill us, especially the older we get. So here's my truth. I am not perfect, but I am definitely a worthwhile person. In the big scheme of things, I still have some good years ahead....if I stay healthy. I have health problems that would be made so much better if I lost weight. I don't feel good about me, the way I look or how I feel. I want to lose weight. I know how to lose weight, eat, not be hungry and be healthy......and most importantly.....I am worth everything it takes to do it. I deserve to be the very best version of me I can be! And that folks is the truth!