What if…

March 11, 2013

what-if

What if we stopped counting… carbs, calories, fat grams. An end to the distinction between good and bad foods. Ate food to nourish and satisfy us in the quantities our bodies are asking for. No entering foods in your journal and doing calculations in your head if you are allowed an item. Eating food without guilt or shame.

What if we stopped worrying… what insignificant people in our lives think about how we look or choose to live our lives? Stopped thinking we’re being judged all the time and then making ourselves feel bad about it. We stopped with the thought “what would people think?” because it doesn’t matter in the quest to live our life authentically.

What if we moved our bodies how we wanted to… without prescribed plans, stopwatches, and a list of “what other people do.” We would run, jump, swing, dance, or do anything else our heart desired that felt great for our body and soul. We didn’t feel the need to prescribe to the next crazy fitness trend and instead embraced the power our bodies have every single day that allow us to move how we please.

What if we stopped measuring… our pounds, our inches, our miles. We stopped comparing ourselves to each other and to charts on paper. No clothing size would have a negative connotation and instead just focused on what makes us feel freaking fabulous.

These things could be incredibly frightening or incredibly freeing. For people like myself who are recovering from binge eating disorder (BED), or who have battled a lifetime of yo-yo’ing  could take an inch and go a mile (or ten). Or perhaps we would learn how to practice patience, love, and acceptance and learn how to actually listen to our bodies instead of all of the voices telling us what to do, how to be, and what to look like.

This is all off the cuff and just a bit of a rambling post, but these are questions I think about often. Sometimes it comes up when things are great and other times when things are bad. The problem is that my indication of “good” or “bad” times comes by a weight on the scale or a recent accomplishment of how well my numbers for my last meal stacked up against my plan. We wander around trying to live our lives with distorted minds and skewed perceptions of personal failure and success.

How do we break this and learn to listen to ourselves more, and others less?

  • http://www.FitandFreeEmily.com Emily

    I think about this, a lot. What would it be like to just wake up and be “normal”. To not be constantly thinking about calories, when to eat, when/how hard to exercise, how many pounds to lose, etc.

    I tried really hard to embrace Intuitive Eating (it is a fantastic read), but ultimately I knew I wasn’t ready for that kind of “freedom”. It’s so hard coming from a past where, when presented with total freedom with food, I binged. BED is so engrained in my history that it’s hard to feel “free with food” with out thinking freedom = no control. Does that make any sense? ;)

    I love these little stream of consciousness posts, Em. They always prompt me to look deeper.

  • http://twitter.com/debslosingit Debra Wilson

    I always marvel as people who can eat and just stop when they have eaten enough, but not too much. People who do it naturally, and still succeed in managing their weight day by day, year by year. Every day is a struggle for me to stay on track and not overeat, not binge, not lose my mind when trying to make good choices. Every day I wish I were someone who didn’t have to count, journal, and report everything to myself and to my blog for the sake of accountability. Maybe some day I WILL get the hang of it and I can stop obsessing over every detail, but that day will be long in coming.

  • http://twitter.com/CindySleepSpin Cindy Corliss

    I wish all of those things. I think if I wasn’t thinking about calories/miles/macros I might enjoy life a bit more. And maybe love myself a bit more. I’ve wasted so much time worrying about how I look, that I’m missing so much of my history and I can’t ever get that back.

  • http://twitter.com/lindyc13 LindyC

    I love your ideas here…I agree we need to focus on more than just numbers. Recently I have been thinking about how I feel after a meal. I know I feel healthiest and best when I make nutritious choices and don’t over eat. I am trying to remember this at the beginning of every meal. With working out I never regret a day moving more…even when it’s hard I try to remember the “after feeling”.

  • jules joyce

    Dang kindle. Hopefully third time is the charm you are singing my current song. As you know I said good bye to big girl bombshell recently and started a new blog for just these reasons. After a year and a half of intense treatment and recovery from my own BED. I am like the 2 yr old learning to walk. Gentle curvy yoga and following my old trusty artist way path of morning pages. Artist dates and weekly walks teaching me grounding and the gentleness to hear my own wise voice above all the outside noise. It slowly allows me to feel the happiness and joy I have outside the scale and stereotypes. You can have all the what its just give yourself permission and take the first wabbly step. Emily you have so much going for you and as someone once told me……someday I hope you believe in yourself half as much as I believe in you

  • http://twitter.com/danceliftrun Tiffany Jorgensen

    Yes, yes, yes, THIS! I don’t have an answer to your question, but I’m definitely trying to find one for myself. Tracking, counting, measuring, following, new-this-thing, new-that-thing… it all just adds to the stress that I’m trying to get out from under in order to just take care of myself. One thing I have found helpful is to back away from some of the groups I so desperately (or so I thought) wanted to be a part of. I still find value in them in small doses, but at the end of they day it’s just a comparison rabbit-hole for me.

  • http://twitter.com/SushiJammies Heather H

    This is exactly what my #mindfulmarch experiment is all about. I’ve stopped tracking calories entirely and instead started keeping a journal of how food makes me FEEL. So far I’ve learned that while I crave sugar I feel crappy when I eat it, my body really loves walking, and I’d ideally skip dinner in favor or bigger lunches and more substantial snacks.

  • Fiona Jesse Giffords

    Weight loss is often called as lifestyle change. So you have to adapt the processes to stay fit and healthy and to lose weight. There always a good sign for every hardwork.

  • thechimes

    ahhhhhh … yesssssss. this is the post i’ve been wanting to write for so long and have been writing long and rambly posts instead. i couldn’t quite figure out what i wanted to say. I’ve been stripping away all of these things one by one. First I quit counting calories. Second, I quit weighing myself. Third, I quit tracking how many miles or how fast I was running and just started enjoying myself. I actually thought of this post while running last night (well my own version of this post) but couldn’t think of a catchy title, so I didn’t write it. :) well said!!

    • thechimes

      PS my last two rambles were about listening to myself and not others. I quit reading most of the blogs that I follow for now because I need to focus on what I want to do and how I want to move my body and how I want to eat, not what others recommend to look hot and be fit. I am fit (comparatively to most), but I’m not where I would like to be, but I think where I would like to be is something I’ve gleaned from where others are (I’m not going to ever be a fitness model, but I keep wanting to look like one).

  • Veronica Holtz

    YES! I’ve been chanting this almost word for word in my head for a few weeks now. This no sugar challenge has got me thinking: Why do we look at the nutrition panel (calories, fat, sugar, etc.) and not the INGREDIENTS!? Why do we even look at things that have such labels?! I forget where I heard it (probably Food Matters or Hungry for Change) but this guy (a physician, I think) told his children, “Don’t eat anything that is advertised. If it was something you truly needed, they wouldn’t have to advertise it!” Brilliant!

    • Kristi Mout

      i tell my kids that all the time!

  • http://www.facebook.com/erica.z.hunt Erica Zamsky Hunt

    For me a spent a lot of time dealing with this. My therapist asked me about a years and half ago…what would happen if you stopped counting poitns and caloires…I looked at her like she was crazy! But I did it. For an entire year no points nothing, worked out when I coudl and you know what…I stayed exactly the same weight maybe up a bit at one point and lower another. It taught me that I can maintain my weight and that food doesn’t have to control me. Now I have decided I need to get back to eating healthier and I am working on loosing some weight but I know that if I start to get too wrapped up on the whole weight loss deal I can always take a break and life won’t end!

  • http://twitter.com/24to30 Samantha @ 24 to 30

    I think about this a lot too. What if I had been born average size and never had to give a thought about calories or working out of if a regular store would have something that would fit me. What the heck would I spend all my time thinking about?? My husband, for example, never even gives it a second thought. I’m not there though. I HAVE to count calories because I never learned about portions or healthy foods. I HAVE to worry about working out becuase I have so much weight to lose. I wish it didn’t require so much brain power and worry from me, but for now it does I guess. I do need to work on not worrying about what others think though, because as you said, what does it really matter?

  • http://www.joyweesemoll.com/ Joy Weese Moll

    The thing is, we’re living in a damaged environment. Big Food spends lots of money to engineer food that will trigger all of our instincts to keep eating and on psychologists and marketers to give us the message that more food than we need is somehow good and normal. The Hardees’ bill board I pass on the way to the library says “Eat Like You Mean It.” That’s a slogan that would have worked for me in the past. It doesn’t now, but only because I’ve put in place a huge number of structures and tools and techniques to keep me out of that marketplace. One of those tools is planning my food the night before basing the decisions on an exchange plan. And that feels liberating! I’ve liberated myself from the “eat more” culture that I live in. Sure, those seem like extraordinary means, but we live in extraordinary times.

  • LHA

    Decades of dieting and going up and down over and over and over have taught me that
    “dieting” leads to weight gain eventually. Like many others, I have tried every diet, every eating plan, every exercise fad…….and never found lasting success. However, it has not all been in vain. I have learned that I tend to eat more when I am contemplating going on a strict diet. I have learned that am very prone to binge after I have deprived myself of food too strenuously. I have learned that weighing, measuring, counting and recording every bite that I eat makes me want to eat more. I have learned that stepping on the scale more than once a month makes me binge eat if I don’t like the number I see. I have learned that obsessing about food, dieting and exercise does not in any way help me lose weight.

    For me, I almost don’t have any choice except to try to eat sensibly, stay away from the scale and do those exercises and activities I actually enjoy and feel good about. Anything else is just keeping me fat. This was a great post and I have a feeling it has struck a chord with many long time dieters.

  • Kristi Mout

    love this

  • Caron

    When I first heard of intuitive eating, it sounded very plausible. I read an entire book devoted to it and knew in my heart it would not work for me. I think if this would work for us, we would not be battling our appetites and weight as we do. We would be like my daughter who eats anything she wants in tiny portions and never has a weight problem. :)

  • http://twitter.com/goingloopy Going Loopy

    I think that for me, the first step was realizing that my relationship with food was more of an addiction than a nourishment issue. Of course, my attempt to “cure” it involved a lot of restriction and feeling bad about myself. I don’t think that trying to be more active or eat more healthful foods are bad things at all. But I think that in order for those things to be truly useful, they need to come from a place of self-love instead of self-hate. When you are killing yourself at the gym and counting every bite of food and still getting frustrated because the scale won’t move, that’s not loving yourself. That’s beating yourself up. It comes from the place that says that everyone needs to fit into “straight” sizes, that you can only be beautiful if you’re thin. That’s such bullshit. And it’s so, so hard to get to that place. I think for me, I stopped with the dieting and the exercise because I felt like I would never achieve that “skinny” me that I had in my head. But I look back now and remember that when I was doing those things, my immune system was stronger, my injuries healed faster, my blood pressure was a little lower (it’s still not high), I *felt* good. I just didn’t feel emotionally good because I thought that *only* losing 50 pounds (instead of 150) made me a failure. I need to go back to the gym and focus on eating things that don’t come out of a box.

    Emmie – by any stretch of the imagination, you have done wonders for yourself. Your post on how you felt after returning from NY was incredibly self-aware. I hope you continue to focus on how good you feel overall. You are a beautiful person.

  • Shawnie

    Love this post. Like many of the commenters, I’ve been advised to “quit dieting”, “quit counting”, “listen to my body” etc. I’d love to do all that! The problem I struggle with is my “body” (or head, or stomach, or insecurities) tell me to eat the unhealthiest food possible in great, great quantities and not to worry about exercising. I’ve (mostly) read several of Geneen Roth’s books -she’s a huge advocate for “not dieting” and have always loved the theory, but I struggle with implementation. What am I supposed to… _do_? I hate that I think about eating/not eating, good/bad food, should/could/would, hating my body/being okay with my body CONSTANTLY. I just want to switch off those parts of my head and just BE. And BE…healthy!! Keep pondering, rambling, girl. It helps to read this from others.

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  • linda bartlett

    Yoyo dieting has been going on for me all my life until I started to eat 6 small meals a day and the weight started to come off!! and best of all stay off!!! Apparently I had messed up my metabilism through yoyo dieting and the small regular meals re-balanced it!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=543659163 Deborah Cook

    Emily, I’ve recently tried to get rid of the ‘shoulds’ and ‘ought tos’. I’ve spent WAY too long with rules and regulations governing the way I view food and exercise (and my body) and the way I deal with them.

    I’m not ‘there’ yet, but for the first time am not counting calories. I’d like to say I’m trying to make healthy decisions etc – which I am… but I’ve finally freed myself up to do what feels right for me. Someone on my blog called it ‘intuitive living’ – which is perhaps true.

    Having said that I do – of course – hope it results in lost weight… *sigh*

  • http://twitter.com/JoinJeff Jeff Carroll

    Not only was this a great read, the comments alone are worth reading! You definetely struck a chord with many people. Keep up the great work!!!!

  • Sexy Heffer

    It is a work in progress. My problem is my eyes are bigger than my stomach OR I worry about storing food (in my body) lol I always think I better eat more now so i’m not hungry late! What a terrible way of thinking. I am continuously trying to be more mindful of not doing this! I have been getting better at it!

  • Mitch Shapiro

    We could do all that if we could get the garbage out of our lives. The constant barrage of advertising (aka brainwashing) of convenience foods, designed only to make money for manufacturers, containing low cost high calorie (often harmful) ingredients doesn’t help. Combine that with a lifestyle that puts us in a chair, couch or bed for 20 hours a day while the other 4 hours we are driving or taking elevators or escalators. The way to get our lives back is to get educated and start making better choices. Better choices leads to a better life. Thanks for a great post. By the way I believe you would enjoy my wife’s book Lose It For The Last Time. It happens to be a very approachable way to a healthy lifestyle. Keep up the good work!

  • http://www.facebook.com/x.ladycosmonaut.x Angelica Florine Steele

    I think about this stuff, too. Sometimes the answers to life’s questions are so simple, but then something makes it complicated. We just have to keep on the good fight and keep on truckin’. I hope some day I have this mindset of not worrying. <3

  • The Frugal Exerciser

    If you live in a third world country then you probably would not have any problems but in the US it is virtually impossible not to do something. This society is too food toxic.

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