Out of My Discomfort Zone

Still in Hawaii, and still loving it. Beautiful day after beautiful day pass here, full of activity, living, and usefulness. I'm truly happy here.

BUT THAT DOESN'T CHANGE MY NEVER ENDING BATTLE WITH FOOD.

I was doing really well. Mostly raw. But the last couple days I've let slip and last night I was served breaded fish and rice pilaf from a box and ate it. :(((( I'm slowly sinking back into garbage mainstream eating because THAT is what my in-laws think is healthy and acceptable! It's not! Maybe I'm overreacting. It actually wasn't the last couple of days, it was just the one meal. But the temptation has been there for several days which is almost as bad! Maybe I should just let it go... just one meal of questionable food... But I can't. It's like giving an alcoholic a bottle of wine!

I've worked so hard to fight my eating disorder, and constantly fight my lifelong dietary programming that tells me to stuff my face with factory produced rehash that is not real food. It is my responsibility to protect myself from packaged food industry and it's commercially brainwashed minions in the masses. I know. But it's hard having it in my face every day. This is even worse than when I was fasting and sticking to my diet in months past while still cooking for my kids. The food is even worse, and people are serving it to me almost constantly.

I've fought back by offering to make dinner. Serving fresh salads, veggie dishes, and steamed or grilled fish or chicken, or making sushi and soups. They love my dinners... but I think their cravings and bad habits freak out and kick in and then they fight back with fried foods, starches, and boxed meals... cereals and cookies... pasta pasta pasta. /sigh... :(

I need to get out of here. I'm more physically active than ever. This should be great for me, but my body needs beautiful food, healthy food for radiant, glowing, health and beauty. My body needs to be not only my temple but my sanctuary!

bah.

damn people are violating my sanctuary. I need better security. Gotta put in some cameras and alarm systems. ;)

Sorry about all the fussing. I'm just upset I'm dealing with this at all.

And the result:

I'm water fasting today. I'm thinking about fasting all week. What does that mean? I am shutting down and going back to the only thing I know I can do to battle my ED and that is my other ED. Am I relapsing? Regressing? Or am I just honestly hitting a reset button to recommit to the healthy pattern I've successfully maintained for a while? I don't know. I do know that I don't really trust myself. I also know that I can't talk myself out of it.

As this is my journal I must be completely honest and say that I'm punishing myself for what I ate for dinner last night. Breaded fish and pilaf. My penance is one full day of "Hail glass, full of water" and two days of "Our juice fast, thou art heaven..." My brain knows this is not the best example of behavior. My husband would probably insist on a different course correction. But he's not here. He's been gone for 2 of 3 weeks we knew we'd be without him this month. So oh well. Ideally I should be eating healthy, I know that. And I have been most of the time. Obviously I've slipped though and that is absolutely unacceptable. We all know I'd rather err on the side of starvation than on the side of poison/gluttony.

I'm sure this is just temporary. I'll get my day of water and couple days of juice fasting out of the way, feel better, and go back to enjoying my bowls of sunshine. Fresh fruit right off the trees in the morning, gorgeous green salads in the afternoon, and vivid vital veggies in the evenings! Yay! Yup, that's what I'm going to do.

NO PILAF EVER AGAIN! I REPENT!

-----Comments-----

Kazehana - I definitely agree on the importance of fats. Thats why I figured I'd stick with the naturally oily foods like salmon, avocado, and olives. I always opt for butter over margarine. Oh and I didn't give up oil entirely on my salads but I am trying avocado oil... so I get some of that every day. Besides my salads and sauces, I'm not getting much oil though because I'm not cooking much. No butter because I haven't been eating anything that cooks in or uses butter. I'm an avocado junkie though, so I'm probably ok on the oil front. :)

Drinking Air and Eating Sunshine

Hawaii has been good to me.

Staying in someone else's house makes it difficult to stick with the rhythm I want/need my life to follow. However, being here on Maui, influenced by the sun, sea, sand, and stars (Yes, you really can see them here.), it is so much clearer who I am and how I want to live. I'm more driven to do things the way I think best. My motivation is limitless.

\\ Rainy Day Today //

I love the storms here. Wet, windy, and... warm? And another thing I love here is that it gets dark at night. Out in the middle of nowhere paradise, there are no street lights. It's wave-your-hand-blindly-in-front-of-your-face dark. :) Mmmmm happiness.

I've been reading one of those books I listed the other day. Raw Food Life Force Energy. I'm still fascinated by the science of energy passed through the food chain, and the book does go into some of that. But eventually I think the book departs a bit from science and into a more "new age" intuition and philosophy without so much evidence. Which is fine. It's good to hear other perspectives and learn what good there is in them. I'm not so sure about aligning my diet with specific "vibrations" but I am interested in getting as clean and close to a natural source of nourishment as possible and all the benefits one can receive from such a lifestyle. I've begun to skip around a bit, but I'm still reading. It's a pretty cool book.

EATING SUNSHINE

I've taken to making as much of my meals as possible out of sunshine. :)

Sunshine = foods recently picked... fresh, raw fruits and veggies with as little man-made influence as possible.

For example:

Breakfast today was lemon mint tea (using lemons off the tree and fresh mint), a green salad, and a bit of smoked salmon.

I admit the smoked salmon is not perfect, but it's pretty close to raw and feels pretty light. The salad is my bowl of sunshine though. Everything fresh and bright, recently picked and still full of sunlight. I feel great eating my sunshine. I also tend to eat a lot of fruits right off the trees. Papaya, passion fruit (usually eat 3 or 4 a day here), guava, and tree ripened bananas from the back yard. I don't tend to eat bananas, but I think the sunshine factor in a banana right from the tree outweighs the peril of the calories. I've had a fair amount of avocado too.

What I've cut since I've been here (in addition to the processed foods, breads, cereals, canned goods, milk, most cheeses, red meat etc. that I already don't eat or only have on rare occasion) is oils. I know, I know... omega3 yadda yadda... olive oil is good for you blah blah blah. I do know all the support for it. But I'm going back to my own common sense, which says that during the millions of years of our evolution there was no olive oil flowing across the land for us to collect and spill over our salads. We didn't evolve ingesting such large servings of oils. And since we're water based life forms, I question what the oil coating in our digestive system does to us. I'm trying to skip it. I'll eat foods that naturally have oil, like salmon, avocado, and olives. Yum yum... especially the olives. :) My fave. But nope, dripping and pouring oil... No thanks.

So again, time will tell how well this works for me.

The goal of course is to be lean, strong, and glowing radiantly. I am still carrying around too much weight. This book I'm reading talks about that too. Overloading our bodies and how to let it go. I need to let go of at LEAST another 20 lbs of overload. I also haven't been able to track my weight since I've been here. I hope getting back home to my scale in about a month will tell me something I want to hear. :)

Until then, I'll listen to my body, get natural and get simple.

And I'll post as much as I have time to in case it does work out so that everyone knows exactly what I did to get to the goal. My goal, your goal... a skinny, healthy goal.

Hearts to all! <3

175 Days to My One Year Skinniversary

Not officially skinny yet. I know. But the day I snapped and changed my life completely and uncompromisingly is the day I call my Skinniversary. I look at it like a birthday, or maybe a rebirthday. I'll never forget the day. April 26th, 2010. I almost feel like it's more relevant to me than my birthday.

I'm really looking forward to my Skinniversary. I think it may end up my favorite holiday, seeing how I progress every year.

Just my thoughts for the morning.