HOME OF THE FREE, LAND OF THE BRAVE!

So I've been on a break from this blog for two months...the bloom has been off the rose for a little while.  That's typical me...into something with all four feet and then cooling off.

Weight management, while never fun, has been less so these last four months.  I've managed to put some weight back on...about 16 pounds.

From a high of 379 to a low of 272 to a current weight of 288.


Learning to live "free" of overeating takes skill and determination and guts.  It's not for sissies.  It's hard as hell! 


Fighting a roller coaster of emotions and self-loathing and also not using food to buffer these feelings is a lifelong process...I will never "arrive".  I also do not have to give up...and while there have been days, I generally intend to learn the skills needed to prolong my life (and my quality of life) by continuing to manage my weight while trying not to beat myself up and/or quit because of consistent backsliding.


I just need to backslide in the other direction!

I have taken a little "rest" from writing the last couple of months as I haven't been as succesful in weight loss lately and I have been humbled some, I definitly do not have all the answers.  I was writing as if everyone was entitled to my opinion...which of course they are...but I got a little cocky.

It was a heck of a lot easier to write it when I was losing consistently and feeling so much better about myself.  That being said, most people who struggle with their weight have times of inconsistencies and weight gain, if not flat out failure. 

Writing from a position of weakness, could actually make it a better blog...I suspect many people will relate.  Finding that voice of hope and encouragement myself so I can write the way I wish to is the process I am currently going through.

I'm not sure how often I will have something to say, but as I do, it will show up here. In the meantime, if you are new to the blog, there is a wealth of information here already.

Living free from the tyranny of food, and being brave enough to write about it is now my goal.  Along with continued weight management  and ultimately weight loss!

God Bless the USA!

And thanks to my new friend Scott who nudged me back to this blog!

A CREATURE OF HABIT

I admit it I am a creature of habit.

 I buy gas at the same filling station and bank at the same bank that my folks did. I grew up with Skippy peanut butter and see no reason to try any other brand. (Except PB2! Boy that's good!)


I like a certain brand of shirt, and any shirt I buy must have a pocket! MUST!

I prefer Hanes to Fruit of the Loom,  and I used to prefer Chrysler products but Chevrolet may be winning me over. 

Maybe.

A GUEST POST ~ BY CORALEE KULMAN

From time to time I run across someone else's writing that just plain says it like I would like to be able to express myself.  Coralee Kulman has done this in this entry.  I met her (via e-mail) in a support group of newcomers to Overeaters Anonymous Online.  With her permission, I reprint her encouraging words that she shared in an "e-mail loop" from that support group:

Hello My Fellow Loopmates:

I have not been sharing and welcoming new members to our loops lately. I have
missed sharing my experience, strength and hope. It always keeps me focused on
the most important thing in my life -- my recovery. It has been an unusual
month and it could have ruined our Christmas. It taught me a great lesson. I
wrote this to help me understand. I hope it might be helpful to you also.


I FOUGHT FOR THE GOOD LIFE I HAVE


It is not the kind of fight you might think. Yet, that is what I did and now
after a month of “fighting” my world that had gone out of control, I now know
why I have a good life.

UN-BRIDLED BOUNTEOUS BINGING BEGETS BROAD-BEAMED BUMS!

Quick and easy answers.

That’s what I want.

Now.

I want the easy path to weight loss.

I wish to climb no hills to weight management.

Make mine smoooooth sailing please!

Where are the three easy steps?

What “one pill a day”(with fish oil of course!) brings me health, wealth, happiness and of course allows me to eat whatever I want, as much as I want and still have a sexy hunky body?

Where is the excercise machine that guarantees "hunk" results in 3 minutes a week or less?

Does anything in life worth having really come easily?

Ever hear of easy come easy go?

Uh huh.

Staying the course doesn’t mean eating through dinner and ordering dessert!

I'M HUNGRY - - - - FOR LOVE???

I am a lot thinner than I was.

Not to say I have "arrived"...I'm never going to not have to manage my weight until I stop eating...permanently.  But that's a subject for another post.

I geuss you can say that I was under the false assumption that by getting thinner and healthier my demons would otherwise give me time off for good behaviour.

Wrong.

I'm still just a mixed up little boy inside, who wants to:

A. Solve all problems with food.

B. Deny having any problems by eating food to forget about them.

C. Refuse to understand my fears and bad feelings and drown the incessant clamoring of a poor self-esteem, feelings of inadequacy, feelings of loneliness, and forgetting the tough parts of growing up by eating.

D. All of the above (and): "BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!!"

Yes I'm sure there is more...but I'm a guy, be patient, just to admit I have feelings is a BIG step!

THE TYRANNY OF THE TWOS OR WHEN WILL JUST “ONE” OF ANYTHING EVER BE ENOUGH??

Last night I had the first hamburger(s) I’ve eaten in 204 days. It’s plural as I ate two burgers (but only on one bun!!) so I saved lots of evil, dark and nasty bread calories!!



For as long as I can remember whenever I would order fast food, I would always order two. Two hamburgers, two slices of pizza at the pizza by the slice place, two breakfast egg sandwiches…you get the idea.

The one exception was “Taco Tuesday” at Taco Johns® back when you could get two tacos for 99¢, then at lunchtime I’d buy EIGHT tacos for $3.96! (See my theory was that on taco Tuesdays the hard shell tacos were a little bit smaller so I needed more to fill me up!


Eight almost did it.


Now about last night…

Our church sets right across the street from our local community college and we as a church have tried to be good neighbors to them. For the last several years we have participated in a “welcome back cookout” for the students. Last night our participation included grilling almost 250 hamburgers for them. In which I participated by cooking for a brief time, to relieve the real chefs of our group.

Now I love to grill, probably a “guy thing” but I find it fun. Our next door neighbors have a big holiday cookout in their backyard each Memorial Day and Labor Day that includes anywhere from 25 to 50 people on average. (This has been going on for 44 summers!)While I have always been happy to cook for the others, since I’ve been watching my weight, I have decided that I will definitely man one of the grills to keep busy and focus on serving others rather than serving up too much food for myself. (If anyone ever decides you can acquire calories by inhaling, I’m sunk!) That strategy worked well on Memorial Day and on this past Labor Day Monday.

48 hours later I find myself in front of the grill again at the college and this time the burgers are shrieking out my name and DEMANDING I eat them!!


Knowing that I would be participating in this cookout last night I tried to prepare for it. I ate plenty of fruits and vegetables during the day so as not to starve myself. I had both of my protein shakes and I took in extra low-cal protein during the day to appease my hunger pangs. I drank about 3 ½ quarts of water during the day and I ate one of my “meal replacements” just before I went to cook so I wouldn’t feel hungry.


These are strategies that I have learned to use to battle overeating and they have been quite successful in my war against fatness.


But not last night.


Now my weight loss mentors would say that it is perfectly alright to eat the occasional burger….and it is! I had even allowed in my eating plan for the day to eat one if I wanted to.

In years past this cookout saw me eating 4 or 5 burgers throughout the course of the evening and when hot dogs were also offered, a few of them ended up in my tum as well. Several home made baked goods and bags of chips also wheedled there way in. Oh it was a “grand’ time let me tell you! Was I there to help cook or to eat a bunch of food? (Hint: While it was a nice cover story to say I was helping cook for the students, it was probably mostly always about the food.)


That’s kinda hard to admit to myself.


I’ve spent a lot of years building a “nice guy” persona and now I realize that in this case, being a nice person really didn’t have much to do with why I was there. It probably falls under the category of killing two birds with one stone.

I cooked for the students, and got to get “stoned” with too much food.


Man what a trip!








I had allowed for the possibility of ONE hamburger but I was COMPELLED to put two patties on the bun.

So what is different now? Big deal you had two hamburger patties! Well, it’s the “tyranny of the two”. If left unchecked, the small snowball at the top of the mountain becomes a formidable killer at the bottom.

Before I was given the weight loss skills I am putting into practice now I would have considered eating the two patties as a major defeat. Especially in the light of the precautions I took leading up to the event. A defeat like this, had I not been coached well by my mentors, could have tipped me back into giving up the idea that I can overcome, with God’s help this thing called morbid obesity.





So I deconstruct the events of yesterday. I try to look at it without a sense of guilt. I attempt to learn from this stumble and will talk with my weight loss mentors for steps I can take to avoid it happening again.

I forgive myself, and I don’t ever let the words “give up” come into play…ever!


I am not on a “diet”. I am learning skills to eat healthily for every day of the rest of my life. Putting these skills into practice will ultimately reflect on the scale the way I want it to.

One is enough. 

 ENOUGH IS A FEAST!

 Hmmm, that sounds like another blog entry for the future!


So, yeh, some heavy thoughts that once again lead me to move toward lighter living.

A GUEST POST

My doctor, Steve Gordon is on a one year sabbatical and is writing about his doctoring and travels in a blog called Walkaboutdoc.  Here's how he describes his blog:

"I’m a family practitioner in Sioux City, Iowa. I’m going to leave my job of 23 years. For the year that my non compete clause remains in force, I’m going to go to a lot of places, and so far I don’t have much agenda. The Australians call it “going walkabout.”

He has written many interesting posts since he started and I asked for and received permission to share this entry of his on my blog.  I've included a link to his blog at the bottom of this post and I highly recommend checking it out for some entertaining and informative reading!

If you've read my blog much you've run across Dr. Steve before, he's the doctor that crossed the line of professionalism and became my friend when he told me concerning my morbid obesity: "Charlie I love you and want you to get better." Words that were just the right thing to compel me to do something about my weight...tho it still took 9 more months and being stuck in a snowdrift to get me started! (See my page: "How Did I Get Here?")

Thanks Dr. Steve!!

The stress of success can make life a mess.

Some people think their life is a mess

For some it is, I would guess

Things go bad to worst

If first things aren’t first

Because everyone’s bound to have stress.


In the last twenty-four hours I’ve talked with three friends dealing with problems related to success.


Some people stagnate because of fear of failure, but at least as many freeze up because of fear of success. Those who do get over that fear and find success realize it wasn’t what they thought it would be.


As a person’s time becomes more valuable, taking vacation becomes more and more expensive because of opportunity lost. Thus leisure time gets neglected, in general, in direct proportion to income.


I once took a vacation with a Wall Street wizard who made a great deal more money than I did. I watched with alarm at his purchases made to go fishing, and I finally said something. He replied, “When you go on vacation, take it out of your wallet, not out of your hide.” I didn’t understand what he said for a long time, but now I do: when the biggest cost of the vacation is the lost income and productivity, don’t sweat the smaller expenses.


A lot of people have asked me about dealing with stress in the last week. I give the following advice:




» Put first things first: those who fail to meet their needs for eating, sleeping, and human relationships will burn out.


» Do away with nicotine, caffeine, and alcohol: they murder sleep.


» Don’t let the negative moments spoil the neutral moments, and above all don’t let them detract from the good moments.


» Write a list of good moments, and add at least one per day.


» If worry keeps you up at night, schedule a twenty-minute worry session between supper and bedtime, and write your worries down.


» If worry still keeps you up, get up and read your good moments list. Or study a language.


» If recurrent negative thoughts keep running around in your head, put a rubber band on your non-dominant wrist. When the disturbing thought recurs, use your dominant hand to pull back the rubber band twelve inches, then let go (it’s called self-administered aversion therapy, and it works if you do it).


» Between supper and bedtime, write for twenty minutes. Start with the worst thing that ever happened to you. When that’s done, write whatever you like. Nobody has to read it.


» Take what steps you can to solve the problems that you face, and do your best to avoid the insoluble problems.


» Exercise. (Except that most of my stressed friends are getting plenty of exercise.)


» Don’t expect full effect of the program for six weeks.


So be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

http://walkaboutdoc.wordpress.com/