Still losing it....

One month ago I wrote that I was down 16lbs from my current starting weight, since January has passed I thought I'd update further. I've lost a total of 25lbs, but have gained back a few (total loss 21lbs) as I iron out my poor nutritional habits, and deal with some of the emotional eating I'd been doing.

I've recently read a book called Super Brain by Deepak Chopra, and a couple of doctors from the Harvard Neurobiological Department. In it, I have discovered a few things that has helped me in my goal. Over eating in particular is a habit, and emotional eating could be termed a habit too. In the book they described how one might move away from this mindset.

Two of the largest thoughts that I took away were these two.

Ask yourself why you're eating whatever it is you're eating, and then EAT what it is you want without further thought. Free yourself from guilt.

What they found, and what I had discovered on my own (since I had adopted a similar strategy a few months back prior to reading the book) was that if you ate what you wanted, but asked yourself why you were eating it, at some point you would become cognizant of the emotions that drove you to over eat. I had began doing this in June of last year, when I decided I wanted to start working on my weight. Asking myself.....am I really hungry, or am I eating this because I'm (bored, upset, trying to fill some other void, etc).

What happened about a month later was a shock to me, I've got my hand in a chip bag, and I'm getting ready to go into shovel mode.....and a thought popped into my head.... 'Um, why are you even eating this? You're not hungry, you're super duper peeved at your husband and the son of a biscuit needs to be freaking yelled at instead of you IGNORING what's going on'.

So for the first time instead of internalizing how upset I was by eating, I went and I let him have it. Did I mention when I get really angry I want to throw things? Who knew.

I've also been logging food and exercise activity at a different website, and after having burned 49,500 cals for the month of January, and 44,000 for the month of December and not really losing a pound, I came face to face with a stark realization that a friend had pointed out quite simply with the words - you cannot outrun the fork.

So...I went back through the food roster to see what foods were causing me the most issue. I knew I was eating 'okay' but what I didn't realize is that I had eaten another 25lbs worth of useless (junk food) calories in the past 6 months as well.

Which is why the weight hadn't been moving like it should have. So I've been working on a hit list of foods that I'd typically eat and seeing some great results.

I have been keeping track of photos, so maybe when I'm completely done, I'll post them here. They inspire me daily to keep going, who knows, maybe they'll inspire someone else enough to either keep going.....or get started.


Update: Not losing anything these days, but car keys and my mind.