The last day I checked in on my Noom app… *sigh*… was Feb 9.
What am I doing? What am I waiting for? I enjoy my Noom app. I am enjoying reading the articles and chatting with my goal coach and learning about my body and metabolism and all the things. I’m enjoying reaching my daily step goals and seeing how much water I could drink during a 24-hour period.
I don’t enjoy being fat. I don’t enjoy huffing and puffing just from walking up one flight of stairs. I don’t enjoy looking at myself in the mirror. I don’t enjoy having to clean out fast food wrappers from my car all the time or teaching my son that Mommy has no self-control around food.
So what am I doing? To myself? To my family? To my life?
Breaking down this question in therapy has been exhausting because, frankly, there are so many “causes” of my poor lifestyle, not to mention so many excuses. What’s the difference?
The way I differentiate a cause and an excuse is what I have control over and what I do not.
There are many things that have caused or contributed to my unhealthy relationship with food: Childhood abuse, and the PTSD, Depression, and Social Anxiety that came along with it; deep, internal associations with food and the pleasure center of my brain, or, more importantly, food and the sadness center of my brain – i.e., I feel sad, I eat food; two of the medications I’m on for said depression and anxiety list weight gain as their number one side effect; deep, internal feelings of being worthless, unlovable, unwantable, undeserving of being healthy.
I have about triple the amount of excuses as I have causes: I have a 4-year-old clinging to me all day; I’m depressed; I’m too tired to meal prep after putting my little one to bed; I’m too tired to meal prep in the morning; I can’t afford a gym membership; it’s too dark outside to walk; etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
So how do I rise above the excuses, work through the causes, and get my butt off the couch and moving? How do I motivate myself when literally nothing motivates me?
I’m gonna keep slogging along until it gets better, that’s what. I am not finished yet. I am not giving up. It feels like I’m “re-starting”; my Noom coach calls it “continuing.” We all have valleys and we all have mountains. And I will get back on that mountain again, soon.
Because I want to. I need to. I have to.
Originally posted on SparkPeople.com at https://www.sparkpeople.com/mypage_public_journal_individual.asp?blog_id=6569087
Brokenness in the Beauty 