Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

This quote reminds me that big resolutions don’t really help me.

It reads:

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people who are convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another.

• Ellen Goodman

This is VERY applicable to me at this New Year’s Resolution time. I used to set New Year’s Resolutions and decide on life-changing diets and exercise regimes at this time of year. Over the last year, I have learned that the only New Year’s Resolution that has ever helped me was resolving to get my butt to an Overeater’s Anonymous meeting. All the other ones just sent me on the pathway to a binge.

I’ve learned that my eating disorder has TWO facets: bingeing and over-exercising. I would set up a restrictive diet and a strict exercise plan and then I would binge after a couple of weeks of restriction. I used to think that the restriction part of the cycle was the cure to my bingeing, but I was wrong. It was part of my disease.

This New Year’s Resolution is just ONE thing: I devote myself to the greater good. Whatever that entails, I will follow it. Eating healthy and exercising moderately is part of the greater good. Helping other people is part of the greater good. Being a better person emotionally is part of the greater good. THAT will be my question to everything I think of: Is this part of the greater good? Am I helping myself and others with this action? If not, I won’t do it. If so, I’ll do it to the best of my ability, asking for help when I fall short.

Let your only New Year’s Resolution this year be a dedication to the greater good. You will be shocked at the outcome compared to former years.

Overeater’s Anonymous does not endorse anything on this entry or blog. I speak only of my personal experience and not for OA as a whole.

I saw this quote today and it made me think about my eating disorder.

It reads:

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

• Robert Frost

As far as my binge-eating disorder goes, I had A LOT of education about it. I read everything I could about it, but that didn’t stop me from bingeing. No matter how much I learned about it, I couldn’t stop my bingeing. Education helped me realize that it was a disease, but it didn’t help me cure it.

That’s because there is no cure…

They have yet to really find out what causes bingeing and how to cure it, so until then, the only option that I have is Overeater’s Anonymous. I have found some semblance of recovery with them and I cling to them and the precepts for dear life, because my life truly DOES depend on them.

Also, because of all my research I did trying to cure myself, I can hear about the eating plans of others without losing my temper or self-confidence. What works for others may or may not work for me. It doesn’t bother me if someone has a different plan than mine because I realize that this disease attacks our brains differently. Each of us abused different foods, so each of us have to have different food plans to recover.

Robert Frost is RIGHT! Education DOES help me from losing my temper or losing my self-confidence, but it never helped cure my disease.

Overeater’s Anonymous does not endorse anything on this entry or blog. I speak only of my personal experience and not for OA as a whole.

Next week, it will be a year. I have lost sixty pounds in a year, which is just barely over a pound a week. I’m still not at a healthy weight, but I’m closer than I’ve been in a long time.

I just want you to know ONE thing about this year.

Change takes time. Be patient.

Whenever I tried to lose weight quickly, it just ended up in a binge. When I gave myself time, it came off. Whenever I tried to boot up my exercise, I just ended up injured and bingeing. Don’t try to hurry this. Be patient and give yourself the time you need.

This is not an entry filled with low-calorie recipes. This is not an entry about tips and tricks for avoiding unhealthy food.

This is an entry about family.

You see, holiday eating is hard because we have more contact with our family. If you have unacknowledged pain of the past, holiday eating is hard. If you have mistakes that you haven’t apologized for, holiday eating is hard. If you have resentments that you haven’t released, holiday eating is hard.

If you want to make holiday eating healthy, deal with all the debris of your personal and family life. If you want to make holiday eating healthy, apologize for your mistakes. If you want to make holiday eating healthy, forgive your family members and acknowledge your part in the disagreements.

Until you do that, healthy holiday eating will always be a difficult challenge.

Original Image via: Helpful Hints for Healthy Holiday Eating

This quote is so helpful when you are dealing with other people in the Overeater’s Anonymous program.

It reads:

Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.

• Benjamin Franklin

When you sit in a meeting, you hear a lot about other people’s vices. They are GLARINGLY obvious to you. I’ve talked about this before here:

• Starling Fitness – An Understanding of Ourselves

Those vices that you see in others are vices within yourself that you need to work on. It’s part of the old principle:

If you spot it, you’ve got it.

If it makes you mad, you got it bad.

So when you are in a meeting or talking to another member of OA, remember that when they share and you get bugged by their vices, those are YOUR vices that you need to work on.

The flip side to this quote is the searching for virtues. Everyone has a good side. Everyone has an asset. FIND those assets in other people. TELL them about them. There is no wholly bad person on this planet. Every person has something good about them. When you are talking to other members, don’t mention how to fix their vices. Use their share to fix your own vices. When you talk to them, tell them about their virtues that you have noticed.

This is how we lovingly deal with each other. This is how we heal. This is how we recover.

Overeater’s Anonymous does not endorse anything on this entry or blog. I speak only of my personal experience and not for OA as a whole.

For the past four months, I have been working on a meditation book for atheists. The twelve step programs are so god-heavy that it’s really hard for atheists to recover. I wrote this book to help others through this process. You can see it here:

• Twelve Step Meditations for Atheists by Laura M. – Kindle Edition at Amazon.com

• Twelve Step Meditations for Atheists by Laura M. – Paperback Edition at Amazon.com

I am so grateful to Overeater’s Anonymous and I truly believe they saved my life, but at the same time, I wasted ten years trying to solve my eating problems on my own all because I knew that twelve step programs are very god-oriented. I am here to tell you that it is possible to find recovery without losing your atheism. If you are avoiding going to OA, AA or any other twelve step program because you don’t believe in god, stop it. Go right now. Find a meeting and get yourself the recovery you deserve.

No god required.

Overeater’s Anonymous does not endorse anything on this entry or blog. I speak only of my personal experience and not for OA as a whole.

I truly believe this is true:

It reads:

The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf.

• Shakti Gawain

The “taking risks on its behalf” part is difficult, especially when the reward hasn’t surfaced yet. You need to be persistent and keep on taking those risks for the universe and it will reward you. The reward might not be quite what you were expecting, but every time I have put myself out there, the rewards have been worth it.

What risks could you take today that would get you where you would like to be?

• Eating healthy
• Exercising a little bit
• Being nice to strangers
• Being nice to people you know
• Being nice to the people who hate you
• Work on your dream, even if it’s just a little bit
• Learn a new language, just five minutes a day
• Give a little extra effort in your job

None of these seem like risks when you look at them, but they really are.

• When you eat healthy, you skip the bingeing, starving, purging or treats that you normally would have had.
• When you exercise, even a little bit, you might be sore the next day.
• When you’re nice to strangers, acquaintances or enemies, there is a very real risk that they will be mean to you back. Do it anyway.
• When you spend time on your dream, even just a little bit, you get that much closer to achieving it or failing. It’s the risk of failure that makes most people do nothing instead.
• When you learn a new language, you open up a plethora of possibilities, from job opportunities to travel. The only problem is that it’s HARD. Risk the hard to experience the rewards.
• When you give a little extra effort on your job, you risk no one noticing, or, even worse, they’ll expect it out of you from now on. Just keeping doing that little extra, however, and you will find yourself in a much better position than before.

EVERY positive action has a risk, but they are worth it. Maybe not in the way you’re expecting, but you WILL be rewarded for your risks. So take them!

This quote really helped me when I was accepting the fact that my eating is disordered.

It reads:

Acceptance is not submission; it is acknowledgment of the facts of a situation. Then deciding what you’re going to do about it.

• Kathleen Casey Theisen

Last year in October, I came to the stark realization that my brain was BROKEN and there was never going to be a cure for this hunger I have all the time. When I watched The Skinny on Obesity, I realized that I have ZERO control over my eating. Here are those videos from the University of California here:

These videos left me in a pretty hopeless state. I realized that I was going to be hungry all the time and that there was nothing I could do to fix my brain.

After a year and 59 pounds lost, I am no longer hopeless. My brain is still broken and my unnatural hunger kicks in at times, but my life is much more calm now because of Overeater’s Anonymous. They also believe that disordered eating is a disease that is currently incurable. This acceptance of my problem has helped me so much over the last year.

For so long, I refused to accept that I had a disease. I refused to accept that I couldn’t control my eating. Somehow, that made me feel like I was giving up. I thought acceptance was a cop-out. It was a way to pass off the blame on my broken brain.

Instead, it has freed me to take action that has worked when everything else did not. My brain is broken. I’m going to be hungry and want to eat at times when I just don’t need food. In fact, I can’t trust my hunger signals at all because they are almost always wrong. Accepting this helps me devise ways to work around it, with methods like Re-feeding.

Accepting that I am sick and will probably never see a physical cure in my lifetime has helped me get 59 pounds closer to a healthy weight. It has done what nothing else has been able to do for me for the last ten years.

If you are feeling like you just have NO control over your eating, then get yourself to Overeater’s Anonymous and get a sponsor. That simple statement has literally saved my life this year and it can save yours as well.

Overeater’s Anonymous does not endorse anything on this entry or blog. I speak only of my personal experience and not for OA as a whole.

A funny thing happened to my thinspiration Tumblrs and RSS feeds. They turned into naked ladies and food. I don’t know what happened, but instead of inspiring images to help me stay on my program, all I see now are naked ladies and food.

Now, my biggest question is this: Did they change or did I? I used to see pictures of healthy, nearly naked women and get inspired to exercise. Now, they just look like porn to me. I used to see pictures of food and think that I could use a new recipe to mix things up. Now, they just look like food porn to me.

Did the nature of the photos change or am I different somehow? I don’t know, but all of my favorite Tumblrs are useless to me now…

Original Images Via:

• Fitness, Health, And Confidence ?
• Feel Good Inc. — beautifulpicturesofhealthyfood: Submitted…

I saw this quote and it made me realize that it doesn’t take a HUGE effort to get healthy and stay there.

It reads:

It is just the little touches after the average man would quit that make the master’s fame.

• Orison Swett Marden

It doesn’t take grueling workouts or starvation to get to a healthy weight. You just have to KEEP GOING. It’s the Christmas season and it’s the time when everyone quits their healthy diet and exercise and proceed to gain ten to fifteen pounds. If you just add those little touches to your masterpiece, you wouldn’t have to face grueling workouts and starvation in January.

DON’T QUIT right now. THIS MONTH is the “little touch” to your program. Just like that extra effort that a master painter would make to her work, this is your little touch to your program. The average person quits during December, but keeping up with your eating and exercise routine is the difference between you and the average person. It’s what will make you a master.