Taking Care of Yourself - First

An integral part of my own weight loss journey was my involvement with the plan’s on-line community. I received a lot of encouragement and support from others who were on their own journey and I developed some great friendships. I know that some of you reading this are also involved with your own on-line community groups, and I want to encourage you to continue, but to also be cautious. From time to time, I’ve watched weight loss support groups develop into something that’s not particularly healthy, becoming a place where everybody freely shares their struggles (which is good), but there doesn’t seem to be a fire in anybody’s belly to actually get to goal. When that happens, people can slip into being enablers, with everyone stuck in the mud together and commiserating over how hard it is in the mud and how they want to get out, but there’s nobody there who’s out of the mud and able to help pull them out. This morning I want to encourage you to surround yourself with people who are staying on plan and moving towards their goal. That’s not to say that no one can ever share their struggles, because the beauty of an on-line community is that we CAN share, but when everybody around you is struggling, it’s easy to adopt a mindset that thinks that it’s OK to cheat because all of our friends are cheating, too.

This isn’t the time to try and fix everybody else’s problems, because we do so at the risk of never taking care of our own. I didn't eat my way to 260 pounds because I enjoyed a good meal - there were some deeply-rooted issues that resulted in emotional and binge eating, and part of my journey was finally addressing those issues. That took a lot of time and work, but it was work that had to occur to bring the healing I needed, healing that released me from the bondage of my emotional eating and has enabled me to stay at my goal weight AND be able to help others who are on their own journey.

I'm not saying for a moment that we shouldn't care about each other, because we do care (and I care - very much), but we need to surround ourselves with people who are committed to getting healthy and who will spur us on to do the same. When I was losing weight, I pulled away from some topics and ALL controversies on the that occurred on my on-line boards and I refused to get pulled into any of the drama because I knew that wouldn’t help me stay focused. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about the people involved, but I knew that negativity had the potential to pull me down; I was very protective of the kind of interaction I allowed myself to be drawn into.

While you're losing weight and trying to get healthy, you also need to surround yourself (as much as possible) with people in your face-to-face world who are supportive of you. If you have a good friend who continues to try and sabotage your weight loss efforts, then this may be a time to set firm boundaries with that friend or choose to limit your time together. It's OK to be selfish right now (yep, this nice Christian woman just told you to be selfish!). You need to do what you need to do to get to a healthy weight. I'm urging you to set yourself up for success and limit your exposure to anything that might threaten to get between you and a healthy weight.

This is the time to stay focused and make sure that you're putting on your own oxygen mask first, before you try to help anybody else. If you do that, you will have the strength you need and you'll be in a position to reach down and help somebody else.