Choosing Health Behaviors is Hard - and Totally Worth It

Oct 20

Last weekend, I wanted to move my body and use so much energy, that every ounce of fat and grease, every calorie in that golden brown bagel, would be used and not thought of, for a second, as something unhealthy.

That is how I like to view food.

It has taken me a long time to get to that place. Where I am comfortable to eat what I want, without guilt and fear that I will be fat after I eat it. It has taken years of digging and understanding that my relationship with food actually has nothing to do with food at all. It has to do with myself. My obsession with controlling my food was very similar to how I wanted to control my own life. Because there were so many aspects that I couldn’t control. Things that had hurt me in the past.

It ended up having very little to do with how many calories I was eating. Or the grams of protein, fat and carbs that I used to measure. Nothing to do with the “fat gene” that I was thinking I had. How much water I was drinking… supplements…

It was a delicate dance between me, my food and my relationship with myself.

Changing a health behavior is hard. It does not happen overnight. It can take years even. But when it clicks, when you have put in the work to acknowledge it and start to turn the wheels to mend it, you will see how this challenge actually relates to so many more areas in your life. It is like a big lesson that you could never learn out of a book.

If the change was easy, it wouldn’t be worth it. It’s the process, the journey of it all, that makes it so important and incredible. It’s usually hard to look at. It’s the thing that you do not want to do. You want to push away, ignore it and make up a million excuses why you shouldn’t do it.

But what if you did it, pushed through that initial resistance, and you were happier? Can you even imagine that?

Last weekend, I woke up and didn’t need coffee. If you know me well, you know that coffee is my vice. Definitely my drug of choice. But it was an exceptional morning. My body was content in this little cabin off the grid in Maine. It was run by a generator. But I couldn’t figure out how to turn it on. The cabin was in the middle of the woods, down a dirt road, by a stream. The water was pumped into the house from the stream. I had to bring my own water to drink.

I sat in bed, listened to the rain and closed my eyes. I took deep breaths. And felt grateful.

I went downtown to have breakfast. I bought myself a bagel sandwich. Garlic and onion cream cheese on a sourdough bagel with tomato and spinach and a hazelnut coffee.

I got in my car to hike a mountain, that I never ended finding. I hiked 3 miles down a trail that was actually for bear hunting. I sprinted 3 miles back to my car in the pouring rain.

My dog and I drove in a huge circle almost to Canada and experienced the most beautiful fall foliage I have ever seen.