I’ve had a few lessons these past weeks on accepting what is. First, I thank you for your patience as the web server was giving us a few problems staying clean and we needed to switch vendors. That was a tried and true time of patience and accepting what is. I was unable to post while everything was being transferred over to the new server. All is well now and you shouldn’t be getting those Trojan messages anymore.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am trying out a diet plan just to see what my body would do and whether this is something I would recommend to people. The program is designed to be 21 days with an option of going up to 42 days. I finished my 21 days last week but decided I wanted to see if my body would let me get to a specific goal weight and then maintain it. So far, I have lost 14 pounds. The nice thing is that it was all the unnecessary fat and not muscle or essential fat. What I’ve learned the most from this process is the art of radical acceptance.
This process has become a bit of a science project as well as a psychological experiment. It is interesting for me to see what my body can do and how clean it has become. I have a lot of energy even though I am on a very restricted caloric intake. The most interesting part of this experiment is what my mind is doing. It was as if it wanted to adopt a “it’s not enough” attitude. I was perfectly happy at the weight I was when I started. I had lost about 35 pounds the previous year and was maintaining my weight within two pounds for awhile now. All of a sudden, it was a pound of weight loss per day and my mind just took off running. If I gained a half pound, I thought, “something must be wrong!”. It was immediate judgment. I had a justification for why my weight went up. I see now how people can get so far ahead of themselves and then be disappointed or frustrated when the results aren’t happening as fast as they would like. I understand how easy it would be to just stop it all and tell myself that it isn’t worth it if my body isn’t going to cooperate with what I want it to do. After over 30-years in the fitness and wellness industry, I now truly understand why people aren’t successful when it comes to diet and exercise.
It all comes down to this idea of radical acceptance. It is the ability to accept what is, regardless of external forces. I was completely able to love and accept myself at my starting weight. As soon as I saw a little bit of success, I had an expectation that it would continue all the way through the 21-days. The materials all said a .75-1.o pound weight loss per day. Even when I went back to the science of what I know, I still didn’t have an acceptance of the magnitude of what I was doing with my body. Did you know that one pound of fat equals 3500 calories? In a seven day period, that would be either a 500 calorie burn through exercise or a 500 calorie reduction in diet or a lesser combination of both. On average, I would tell a client to possibly expect one pound of weight loss in a week if they followed a stringent diet and exercised seven days at a high intensity.
I teach that behavior change will only come when we have a full acceptance of our current situation. That is what keeps us in the present moment. I had that. When I lost 35 pounds last year, I had no expectation of weight loss. I only focused on my health and getting the Candida out of my body. This experience is different as it is a diet plan with the intent of allowing the body to get to a weight and then maintaining it. My error this time around was in creating an expectation for myself, which puts me out into the future. When I’m in the future, I can’t be present in my life today.
I’m always learning something.
I’ll keep you posted as to my mental state!