Tag Archives: perspective

You Bet Your Sweet Ass I Would

In the here & now, ,

failure

It’s funny you know, the way in which our chatter back and forth can gently set me straight about things which have bothered me. It’s one of the most special things about the friendship and support that I’ve found in our little community – your perspective on things often changes my own, and when I’m getting chewed up about stuff, a wise word here or there gives me pause for thought.

Something Fleury said last week really resonated, when she was empathising about the gym instructor on the ship making me feel awkward about getting involved in the fitness classes. Fleury said you know if she’d worked for you, you’d have had a come to Jesus moment with her…you bet your sweet ass I would. And that got me to thinking.

I’d taken six lots of gym kit with me because I’d planned to work out every day. And when I didn’t, I found myself feeling a bit defensive about it…I just had this nagging feeling that I’d failed. Another good intention gone out of the window, you know? And that’s an uncomfortable place to be…my Asshole voice was all over it.

Anyone who’s ever failed at anything will understand how that feeling of not doing what you know you should do can put a real dink in your self-esteem. My failure to get into the gym and work out chewed at me all week, even with all the active stuff I was doing like climbing mountains and the odd waterfall here and there. It especially got to me when I was packing to come home and I had to move a ton of freshly laundered and mostly unused exercise gear back into my suitcase from the drawer where they’d largely been ignored all week.

That woman, the gym instructor…for all her golden limbs and rippling abs, she wasn’t a fitness guru to the stars, you know? She wasn’t some kind of world renowned personal trainer who could cherry pick her clients and charge them a fortune to help them sculpt the perfect body. She worked on a cruise ship, and she had one job. She was there to make me feel welcome, and included, maybe even inspired…well breaking news, she failed. She did a shit job at making me feel welcome and included because she was way too far up her own bum. Her problem, not mine, right?

I had one job too – to maintain a focus on my healthy lifestyle whilst I was enjoying myself on holiday. And despite giving the gym a wide berth, I did exactly that. She failed, but I didn’t. And once I’d gotten my head around that, I stopped feeling bad about ducking my work outs.

I wonder whether she ever gave me a second thought? You know, whether she ever wondered what happened to the fat blonde who was there knocking on the door as soon as she got on the ship, making noises about wanting to work out because she’d lost a bunch of weight and was in training for something or other…blah blah blah. I doubt that she did, in fact I barely made it onto her radar whilst I was stood in front of her but to be honest I don’t really care. I’m over it. I popped the balloon and let it go…she was a dick, The End.

Fleury’s perspective helped me to process all that…I might have got there on my own, eventually, but it’s awesome to be able to turbo-charge my thought process using a healthy dose of common sense from one of you who’s walked a mile in these battered old shoes and picked up a little wisdom along the way.

I didn’t fail.

You all make a difference with your comments and your insight, and I’m forever grateful 🙂

 

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Reframing My Perspective

Freeform thoughts, ,

perspective

I’ve always thought that perspective is a mystical thing. It captivates me how two people can look at one thing, whether that’s a picture, an object or even just a situation, and see two completely different things. And the view of the two people next to them would be different again. How can that even happen..? It’s like anything else to do with the human condition…an endless source of fascination. You may have come across this picture before…do you see the elegant young lady looking over the right hand shoulder of her fur coat, or do you see the wizened old lady with a pointy chin and sad eyes..?

I’m less clear what it says about us as individuals depending on which one we see first, but I do know that seeing both perspectives is easier when you’ve studied it awhile, or maybe if someone shows you a different way of looking at it. Some people can only ever see the one angle. And that’s pretty reflective of the way people see the world too. We’re all different.

My perspective varies depending on the way I’m feeling about two things; how much my eating is in or out of control, and how fat or skinny I am. I’m not talking about the picture now, I’m talking about the way I see things around me, and the way I interpret situations. I could look at the same challenge, and evaluate my ability to overcome it in two completely different ways depending on my perspective in that moment.

Let me give you an example. You all know I’m rooted firmly in this sweet spot where my diet is concerned, right? I’ve got a lot of skin in the game since my last bad food decision – I’ve been dieting for exactly four months and although I switched food plans, and I’ve done a little creative points allocation here and there to accommodate life, I’ve never stepped off the path. Not once.

And the fact that I haven’t, means I’m not likely to, you know? I feel strong, and as though I can go toe to toe with any food challenge which comes my way, and ace it. My four months’ worth of skinny choices is the anchor which is keeping me in the sweet spot. But let’s just imagine that this weekend I blew it, with the intention of getting back in the game on Monday.

Come Monday, I’d have no skin in the game since my last bad food decision…I’d be starting again with a clean sheet. No anchor. And without the anchor, my perspective on all of it is different. It’s much easier to think oh go on then…I’ll start again tomorrow…or Monday, yes that’s it I’ll start again on Monday.

So how cool would it be, if we could re-frame our perspective and use that to wrestle control back over what we do and how we feel? I was reading an article a few days ago about re-programming cellular memory as a way of reducing anxiety, and I wonder if we might be able to bend the concept a bit and see whether it would work as a tool in our collective kit-bag.

Go with me on this one ok?

Imagine it’s a Monday, and on the Sunday you’d fallen out of the naughty tree and hit every branch on the way down, I mean I’m talking big-time naughty…full english breakfast, big old sunday lunch followed by sticky toffee pudding, and then crumpets with lashings of butter for tea. So it’s Monday and you wake up feeling like crap knowing you blew it yesterday.

What if, you could lay there and walk your way through yesterday in your mind, but substitute the memory of those naughty meals with skinny choices. If you were able to imagine how those grapefruit segments in natural juice tasted so sweet and sharp on your tongue at breakfast time. How the lean fillet steak and light-roasted vegetables tasted at lunchtime, and how you weren’t really hungry at tea time so you had a nice skinny latte with a couple of crackers later in the day.

How effective do you think that would be, with a bit of practice, in terms of re-framing your perspective on how well the food plan is going, and how strong you are?

I’m curious, as to whether it might work. I mean, we’d need to exercise caution…if it works, the asshole in my mind would be all over it, encouraging me to throw caution to the wind today because tomorrow I can fool my head into thinking I’ve been good and we wipe the slate clean. But as a concept, for emergency slip-ups only it might be worth a shot, as a way of getting our head back in the game quickly.

What do you think..? Shall we have a go..? First one to slip on a banana skin over the holidays gives it a shot and reports back so the posse can pick over the bones and decide whether it’s in or out of the toolkit?

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Missing The Old Me

Freeform thoughts, ,

cake

I have a friend – a really good friend as it happens – who told me this weekend that she misses the old me. It took me a bit by surprise actually, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about what she meant. Don’t get me wrong, she sort of explained, and I sort of got it, but I guess it hit me again about the way my changing perspective on stuff is affecting those people around me.

So we were trying to arrange a shopping date, which is something we usually do a couple of times a year. January sales are fast approaching and we’re normally limbering up by now you know? The way those days normally go is this – we meet up and head straight for coffee, talking each other into some kind of badass cake whilst we’re at it, after all it would be rude not to. We then make a serious assault on the shops, talking each other into buying frivolous things we don’t need, before heading somewhere amazing for lunch or afternoon tea where we generally linger over a nice bottle of fizz. Or two.

The number of bags I stagger home with largely depends on how fat or skinny I am at the time, but whatever diet I’ve been on in the run up to our shopping date, I can’t ever remember a time when the diet of the hour wasn’t suspended in honour of the occasion. One of the things that we’ve laughed about most over the years is how easily we are persuaded by each other to be really wicked.

We egg each other on, you know? Find excuses as to why the other needs this or that, which removes all guilt associated with whatever the purchase happens to be.

We’ve all got friends in different buckets, right? I’ve got friends I go to who I’ll know will be on my side no matter what the situation, because…well they always are. They tell me what I want to hear. Then I’ve got friends who tell it me straight, and if I’m being a diva, or if I’m in the wrong, boy do they let me know. I’ve got friends who try to talk me out of stuff, and friends whose counsel will invariably be hell yeah, go for it.

I select who I’m asking the advice of depending on the answer I want to hear…if you’re smiling right now, you know exactly what I mean. And whilst very few of my actual friends know I write the blog, if you’re one of the ones who does, and you’re reading this, you’ll also know exactly which bucket you fall into 🙂

What I think my friend is struggling with is that the dynamic of what we do might be changed forever if I carve out a whole new set of rules. She’s used to me being the one telling her that the double chocolate fudge cake can’t have any calories in it because it’s laid on it’s side so obviously they’ve all leaked out. That if we want a second bottle of wine that’s perfectly fine, because after the first bottle your body is so busy processing the alcohol that anything we eat doesn’t count so let’s order a large portion of that and make the most of it…I’m that friend in her bucket.

I’m not the sensible friend, or the one who holds the mirror up and makes her accountable…I’m the one who knows the answer she’s looking for, and finds a way to make it ok. And she does the same for me. She’s responsible for a fair number of those black and white boxes on top of my wardrobe…always mad keen to give me a little push in the direction of a fuck it moment when I’m wavering, finding reasons why it would be a disaster if I walked away.

So she knows we’ll still laugh together, and shop together and there’s no chance in the world of us not getting up to mischief together…it’s what we do. But she was astute enough to know that this is more than just another diet. There’s a genuine step change in the way I’m trying to manage my relationship with food, and the days of us working our way through the cake menu in whichever coffee shop we land in are probably over. I’m glad she was honest enough to come right out and say how much she’s going to miss that.

So am I, as it happens.

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