Saturday, June 5, 2010

There are Rocks in my Socks!

When I was a girl, we had a book in our home library called, "'There are Rocks in My Socks!' said the Ox to the Fox." When my grandmother would come over, we would beg her to read it to us, because when she read it, she would get tickled, and we would all laugh so hard, we were hard-put to finish the book.

I hadn't thought about the book for a long time, until this week, when I discovered that my son had been putting rocks in my purse. He loves rocks--mostly pieces of cement and hunks of asphalt at the moment--but apparently he's been loading the stowaways from various parking lots into my purse when I'm not looking, and they've all been congregating at the bottom of my pocketbook--leaving me to wonder why the doggone thing was getting SO HEAVY.

I wish the explanation for my weight-gain last Sunday was that simple. After a week of less than ten flex points, lots of exercise, and a dropped point, I managed to gain almost two pounds. This is the most weight I have gained in a week during my entire time with Weight Watchers. Mentally, i knew it was probably girl stuff, but that did not make me feel a bit better about it. If it was just girl stuff, shouldn't I have experienced it about 5 other times?!

Of course, I was being unreasonable with myself. Instantly, I slipped into an old mental mishap-a very unhealthy one--the habit opposite of emotional eating. This habit is the one that says, "Your best was not good enough; you obviously must not have been honest with yourself about what your best was, and dishonesty deserves to be punished." If that looks irrational written down--that because it is. I am finding it extremely helpful to see some of these wrong thoughts in black and white, so bear with me.

So what did I do? Did I acknowledge the good work I had done that week? Did I exercise a little self-forgiveness? Noooooooo. I put myself in bootcamp. I dropped another point way too soon. I denied myself ANY flex points, which meant i didn't eat cake or ice cream with my son at his birthday party, which seemed to send me into an emotional nose dive. I made myself exercise in excess when i was exhausted--all because I felt guilty over a gain of 1.8 pounds.

Evidently, I still have some mental roadblocks to overcome, but that's o.k. because that's what this journey is about for me. It's not just changing my dress size, it's changing my mind's eye. How I think about food, activity, and myself is not a fad I can give up next year when I've tucked the receipt for my skinny jeans into the file cabinet--it's a lifelong practice of right thoughts that lead to right choices.

This week is not a failure if I learn something from it, and as fortune would have it, I just realized a bit late that this is the week that I'm supposed to be replacing a bad habit with a good one. I wish I had realized this fact earlier, as thinking about it might have saved me from a week of self-imposed "bootcamp;" however, I can still make up for lost time by replacing the bad habit with a good one.

I resolve not to do this to myself again. The next time I suffer a set-back on the scale, I will not impose unreasonable boundaries upon myself as punishment. If indeed, poor habits were responsible for the set-back, I resolve to change them, but not to with-hold from myself nourishment or rest. I will stay on track, but I will not make myself run suicides for the next several miles!

So there. I resolve to keep my resolution--even if I go to Weight Watchers on some Monday morning in the future and find myself facing something like the following:

"There's a Whale on the Scale!" says some gal to my Tail.
"a jiggly ol', piggly ol' biggly 'ol gal!
At watching her points, the girl must have failed,
And at midnight her fridge, she must have assailed,
For yes," says the gal, "there's a whale on the scale!"

1 comment:

  1. I get this, my friend. Every ounce gained has to have its own logical explanation. Trouble is, I don't understand all the intricacies of my body. Just taking an NSAID can make me retain fluid. Sometimes we just need to keep pluggin'. :)

    Btw...I think you should write a Seuss for dieters. How fun would that be? You're off to a great start. What a hoot!

    ReplyDelete