V Is For...Very Interesting

I'm still finished with that challenge. It's just that I had something to say, and it happened to fit in the challenge's parameters. It's a coincidence.

This is day 7 of me not being on a diet and meaning it. My brain is finally starting to believe me, just a little bit. And an interesting thing is happening. Today, I stood in line at the grocery store and thought about buying a candy bar. And then I turned to look at the magazines and forgot all about the chocolate until I was walking to my car. How did that happen??

This is my theory, and I'm crossing my fingers and toes that I'm right. My subconscious knew I would buy a candy bar if I wanted to. It knew I would buy one WHEN I wanted to. I wasn't feeding it some ridiculous story about this being the last hour I was going to allow myself chocolate until next month, and then only a mouthful.

I think that every time I told myself I wasn't going to eat badly any more, my silly subconscious BELIEVED me. Believed me and panicked. Every day for years and years. Foolish, foolish subconscious. Or foolish, foolish me, for doing that to myself for so long.

Maybe it's just a fluke. But I hope not. I may never lose weight, but today I ate 1/4 cup of watermelon sherbet for dessert. I told myself that I might have a bowl of Boston Red Sox Fenway Fudge ice cream later, if I wanted to. But guess what? I don't think I'm in the mood.

Q Is For...Quotes

Q Is For...Quotes

Specifically, quotes about happiness.

This is something I need to work on.

I only have one pair of pants that fits well. It's been like that for years. I know that if I just lost 15 pounds, I would have an entire wardrobe of clothes. So I only allow myself the one pair, and I wash it a lot. I either wear my pajama bottoms or squeeze into something uncomfortable while I wait for that one pair of pants to dry.

If I forced one of my children to wear the same thing over and over until they looked prettier, it would be considered abusive. I've been planning to lose that weight for a long, long time, and it hasn't happened. I still want it to. I still plan to do it. Deep in my heart, I hope that weight loss is a side affect of happiness. But, in all my soul-searching, I'm finally realizing that trying to beat myself into good health is backfiring. It is making me miserable AND I'm steadily gaining weight.

So, here are a few quotes from The Happiness Project about being happy.

• The belief that unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish is misguided. It's more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly lighthearted, yet everyone takes the happy person for granted. No one is careful of his feelings or tries to keep his spirits high. He seems self-sufficient; he becomes a cushion for others. And because happiness seems unforced, that person usually gets no credit.  -Gretchen Rubin

• What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.-Gretchen Rubin 
• When I find myself focusing overmuch on the anticipated future happiness of arriving at a certain goal, I remind myself to 'Enjoy now'. If I can enjoy the present, I don't need to count on the happiness that is (or isn't) waiting for me in the future.
•  ... one flaw throws the loveliness of [everything else] into focus. I remember reading that Shakers deliberately introduced a mistake into the things they made, to show that man shouldn't aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed can be more perfect than perfection. -Gretchen Rubin
• Life isn’t about waiting for the storms to pass, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain. -Unknown
• A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires. -Paulo Coelho
• Our happiness depends on the habit of mind we cultivate. So practice happy thinking everyday. Cultivate the merry heart, develop the happiness habit, and life with become a continual feast. -Norman Vincent Peale
• Happiness will never come to those who fail to appreciate what they already have. -Unknown
• I have been running so sweaty my whole life, urgent for a finish line, and I have been missing the rapture this whole time.
  Of being forever incomplete – Alanis Morissette
• Exercise for sanity, not vanity. -Gretchen Rubin

This one is from Hungry For Change:

• Whatever you hold in your mind on a consistent basis is exactly what you will experience in your life. -Anthony Robbins

D is for...Diet

Definitions from urban dictionary

a four-letter word that often leads to deprivation, frustration and, ultimately, failure 

n. A food consumption pattern lazy people take up in the place of regular exercise in order to lose weight  

A form of torture, hence "Die" with a "t" 

The statistics are in, and I would weigh a good 30 pounds less if I'd never been on a diet. It's true. Some people are terribly passive-aggressive about things like diets, even diets they put themselves on. I'm not certain how many of these people actually walk among us, but I know there is at least one...me! I gain an average of 5 pounds every time I put myself on a diet.

Diet books warn people that this might happen. They say something about how if you lose weight quickly, you'll lose muscle instead of fat, and when you inevitably go back to your old eating habits, your metabolism will be lower, and you'll gain weight back--more than before. But me? I'm efficient. I simply skip all those interim steps and move right to the "gain more than before" part.

That's the beauty of being over 40. I can look back over the past 2 decades and see exactly what I've done wrong. I hope that means I'm done with all those shenanigans.  I still think it would be nice to be drop-dead gorgeous, but being healthy enough to enjoy life has finally ousted it from the number one spot.

That's why I love this book:

It's a book about filling your life with eating routines that add joy. Most of the book is recipes, and I've only tried a few--the gingerbread straws and the biscotti. The important part is the story of her journey to a diet-less life. It's harder to copy than I'd realized, but it's worth it.

The A-Z Challenge

A Is For American Pie

B Is For...Blue

C is for...Carriage Roads

Making My Health A Priority: A Success!

I weigh more than I've ever weighed in my life, and I'm tired all the time. However, I startle myself with the things this old body of mine can do sometimes. I've been swimming since October and on Thursday....

I swam a whole mile! 

My original goal was just to keep moving in the pool. 

It took a couple of months before I could swim freestyle for half an hour without stopping. 

My latest goal was to add some interval training.

It was my husband who suggested I might be able to swim a mile. 

And I did!

Ironman Triathlon, here I come!

The End of the Challenge

This 31 Day Challenge has been awesome for me. Granted, I only did maybe, um, 10 of the posts, but I learned a lot of great things from it. Here's a few:

 1. I want to write to my kids, but this blog isn't the way to go. I couldn't even get them to look at it! And a lot of the things I wanted to say were not really "Hey World! Listen-to-me-talk-to-my-kids" things. They were Write It-In-My-Journal things. So, because of this post, I've begun writing in my journal again. I only give myself about 2 minutes a night to write, and I don't allow myself to go over. This gives me 3-6 lines a night of thoughts about my day. For 2 weeks now, I've been at 100%. It's a whole different format than the old "Write 10 pages once a year" that has been so successful for over a decade now.

 2. I still want to keep this blog. In that very first challenge post  I made a list of things I wanted to write about in this blog. Here they are:

• I'm shelving any writing projects that aren't already well underway. The ones that I truly care about will get my attention until they are finished. 
• I'm making my health a priority. 
• I'm going to turn my house into a home. 
• I'm going to strengthen the relationships with the most important people in my life--my family. 
• I'm going to find joy in the things I love to do.

I thought about doing it the way I see so many people blog--you know what I'm talking about Mojo Monday, Top Ten Tuesday, Works For Me Wednesday...but that isn't me. OK, cute titles for the days of the week might be me, but sticking that tightly to a schedule can't be me. Not if I'm going to be busy doing all the things on that list up there. Two or three random days a week is more my style.

3. I do want to be part of the IWSG. It's a great group, and I don't post on The Prosers on Wednesdays. But I CAN DO IT HERE!

Ta Da! 

Stay tuned for my first "Making My Health A Priority" post.