I may be the Poster Child for yo yo dieting. Struggled most of my life with self image issues, body dis-morphia, crap information and the innate belief that it all boiled down to self discipline. If I just had the backbone to say No. No to fast food. No to sugar. No to all things that just reinforced how weak minded I was, or so that's what I thought.
For several years I had started to see the connection with food addiction but quite honestly it was all fuzzy in my mind and when your "core truth" says to you daily that you have no will power, you are weak and you will never measure up, well then any effort to fit into my skinny jeans was really wrecked before I started. (BTW: I've never owned a pair of skinny jeans because I have never been what people would call skinny.)
About a year ago I was working through some major depression. My husband and I had gone through several health crisis for him, job loss and a whole other host of issues that had really pushed me to the edge of what little sanity I had left. I was hitting maximum capacity in all of my "fat clothes" and to the point where I just stopped caring what I looked like. Pretty much a "fuck it" attitude as I had too much on my proverbial plate to make myself a priority.
My Mom recognized that I wasn't in a good place. She sent me a link to a video called Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead and told me I should watch it. Well I didn't. That email sat in my inbox for about two weeks and I knew she was going to ask me if I'd watched it so it was gnawing at me that I needed to at least watch a bit so I could honestly tell her, yes, I'd watched it.
One morning my hubby was leaving for work at 5:am. I got up to make him breakfast and myself some coffee. Once he was out the door, I was wide awake so I made myself another cup of coffee with my favorite hazelnut creamer and I went back to bed and grabbed my laptop. Then I thought of that link Mom had sent over and thought now or never.
Sometimes the truth, your truth can hit you like a ton of bricks. You can kid yourself. You can make excuses but ultimately you can't hide from what is coming. Watching FS&ND hit me like a bitch slap out of nowhere. I watched and then I cried. The last 30 minutes of the film were spent sobbing in my bed and realizing that nothing was going to change until I changed. Everyone needs a Game Changer in their life and this was mine.
Once you "know", you can't "un-know". After a month of diving in head first I read everything I could get my hands on and watched a documentary once a week. I started talking about what I'd discovered on FB and posting what I was learning and suddenly friends were joining in. After about two weeks I felt amazing as in.....the fog of depression was lifting and although I still had much in front of me in terms of life problems, I felt that I could deal on some level. That was tremendous. Mental clarity is a beautiful thing and when you've been under the weight of poor nutrition, operating in that state of haze somewhere down the line that becomes your new normal. Then you forget what it's like to think clearly and have rational thoughts that are not driven by food addiction. It's the craziest thing but through this whole process, that is what continues to amaze me the most. Not to mention when I consider that there are more people like me that have had a poor diet for years and so they are suffering for all the above and in some cases health issues that requires heavy prescriptions and so on. Well you start to understand just where this crazy train is taking us.
Food addiction. Such a ugly beast. I grew up on C.R.A.P. food along with most of my peers. We were the generation of grabbing a Big Gulp and a bag of chips for lunch, eating fast food at every opportunity and celebrating all of life's ups and downs with ice cream, candy, sodas, chips and so on. If there was a processed product out there to try, chances are I not only tried it but I LOVED it! A Chemical Shit Storm brewing up ahead and I didn't even see it coming.
But now I knew, so knowing what I knew...I started Mother Juicer. Food addiction is such a beast that it messes with your mind. Once you stray from focusing on why you are on this path, it's so easy to fall off and go back to bad habits. We all need a place to be accountable. A place that demands that each day we look for new recipes, information to share, motivation to pick us up after a bad day and some forgiveness, for being human and not always getting it right. A place to connect with others who share the common struggle of trying to find their best health. There are so many great sites available, that Mother Juicer has slowly evolved into a great compilation of information that's out there.
The work is in putting that information into action and one year later, I have lost my footing. I have not regained all the weight I lost but I did lose my mojo a bit. So I'm now going to blog about this process. The good, bad and the ugly. Truth is when I'm in the zone of eating clean and juicing, I like myself so much better. It's not about the number on the scale either. I love getting leaner when I'm in the zone but my happiness comes for not putting chemical crap in my body and learning new ways to deal with stress in life that aren't sitting in my car working my way through a fast food combo meal.
Oh...Mother Juicer came out of an out loud commitment that I was going to be the Mother of all Juicers! A commitment that even if I was doing life's Cha Cha with two steps forward and one step back, that I would never ignore what I had learned.
Progress not perfection. So here I go again.
