Circling the Drain!!

Circling the Drain!!

Hello!!! No I haven't cashed in the chips...given up...and gone back to my crazy overeating ways! I did not want to post until I was ready....so here goes! ;)

Have you ever felt like you were circling the drain? Like you are being sucked in by a black hole and there was nothing you could do about it? That is how I felt a couple of weeks ago...let me start from the beginning.

If you remember I stopped weighing myself because I was becoming obsessed with the number, I was measuring my self worth according to what the scale read, so I took a break, relying on my new found "self respect and self love" to carry me though for a while...I wanted to get back to why I started this journey. Every morning I got out of bed, ran my 2 miles did my weights as usual, but I noticed that I was making a few too many reckless choices with my eating...this put me back into the cycle of guilt over my choices with food. Which made me question how far I had really come on this journey, had I really made any progress at all? Was I slipping back into that black hole that I had lived in for so long?

So now I am teetering, almost ready to cash it in...give up because I don't love myself enough to be "perfect" when it comes to making food choices! Just then I check my email, I had sent in a tape to be a contestant on The Biggest Loser a year ago, and they wanted me to come for an interview and bring somebody with me! Wow! Now I am thinking this is perfect, cause I am circling the drain, ready to just give up once again...this is exactly what I need, someone to lead me in the right direction cause I am so lost!

I ask my daughter to go with me, she is about 80 pounds overweight and needs this desperately too. At the interview I learned a lot, about myself and her. I learned that I am a stronger person that I ever knew, but I am also the person who is primarily responsible for my daughters weight problem. She said that she does not want to even try because she has seen me be extremely successful only to go right back to where I was. She doesn't even want to try because she saw me fail!!! Hello Guilt!!

At that moment my heart sank, I had hit an all time low point in my life, not only had I allowed myself to become a victim but I had brought my daughter with me! Our children have enough to overcome with outside influences, do they really need the people who are close to them giving them a front seat lesson on how to self destruct? We are suppose to be the ones that protect them, love them, show them they put themselves before anyone else. I officially failed, I thought I was a pretty 'ok' parent but at that moment I realized that my lack of self respect had transferred straight down the line to her.

I immediately left there and tried to have my first official binge eating frenzy in 5 months, but the strangest thing occurred, I could not do it, believe me I tried! My body said, "no you have had enough" and my head said, "you are NOT going to self destruct, you are worth more" For the first time in my life I did not turn to food.

Over the next few days, I realized some very important things..
1. I do love myself more than I ever have, making the commitment to exercise every day is an indicator that I have put myself first.
2. I can't go back and change the choices I have made in the past, I can however make better ones in the future.
3. We are all products of our environment, example, when something bad would happen my mom would bring me home a bag of  Double Stuff Oreo's and we would sit down and eat the whole bag together to take away the pain. I could choose to blame her and play the victim but I don't. We all have been in certain circumstances at times in our lives, but we can either learn from it and rise above it or choose to live the rest of our lives playing the role of the victim,  doomed to repeat history. Choices...we all have choices to make and ownership to accept.

In the end when I took ownership for what I had done, and realized that my daughter must do the same and make her own choice to move forward and not play the role of the victim I felt better about the situation. I also knew at that moment that I was not ready to cash in the chips and in fact I was not circling the drain, actually it was just the opposite, I had found that I did in fact have a little glimmer of light inside me, a faint flash that cared enough to still workout every day and would not allow my head to talk me into a good old fashioned binge. Instead I faced the problems head on and persevered. It's a good feeling to look down that black hole instead of darkness see a gleam of light and I know with time and love the light will get bigger and bigger ;)