Two Months Down, Ten to Go

Happy Sunday!  I can hardly believe this is the last day in February - the first two months of 2010 have really gone fast! 

So how's 2010 going for you so far?  If you do over the next ten months what you've done for the first two, where will you be on December 31 of this year?  I'm asking because the reality is that the next ten months will fly by, just as these last two months have done. 

Many of us started January by breathing a sigh of relief that we'd turned the page on a year that didn't quite get us where we hoped we'd be.  We vowed that the good intentions we didn't follow through in 2009 were a thing of the past - 2010 was a new year, a new decade, and we squared our shoulders and made new resolutions.  This time, for sure, we weren't kidding - we were going to do this . . . 2010 was our year!

So how's it going so far?  I hope you've seen great progress in the last two months and continue to incorporate healthy habits that will not only bring you to your goal, but also maximize your chances of staying at your goal.  I know that's true for many of you - keep up the great work!

For others, I know that those resolutions of January 2 are a bit wobbly right now.  It's not that you don't have good intentions, and it's certainly not that you've decided you don't want to lose weight, because you do.  The problem is that life keeps getting in the way.  There's been stress, you've had to travel, your kids are driving you crazy, the dog developed a case of fleas in the middle of winter . . .  Honest, I'm not diminishing the reality that many of you have already faced some pretty challenging things this year - sometimes life just happens and when it does it threatens to undo the best of our intentions.  The problem is that life has a way of continuing to happen.  Things come up, if not every day then at least every week, and there are always reasons to not stay on plan "today."

But what if life keeps happening in March, April, May . . . ?  I'm guessing that you don't want to be right where you are twelve months from now, right?

For me, an important part of this program was learning to change how I related to food.  During the almost 11 months it took me to lose 126 pounds, life definitely kept happening and there were any number of events, big and small, that could have sent me running to food for comfort.  Thankfully, one of the things I learned was that food was incapable of comforting me; food couldn't relieve my stress or do anything other than provide nourishment when I was physically hungry.  It was absolutely worthless when it came to meeting a single emotional need.  The emotional eating I did in the past was throwing food down a bottomless pit - an emotional black hole.  No amount of food could ever fix the problem and once the binge was over, it was replaced by frustration, anger at myself, disgust, self-recrimination, and a feeling of overwhelming defeat.

The reason I'm addressing emotional eating is because I'm guessing that if you are struggling to stay on plan, emotional eating is the reason.  It may be emotional eating disguised as something else (it has a sneaky way of disguising itself), but when you peel back the layers, that's what you're most likely to find.

I write a lot about making choices, and that's true even for emotional eating.  There is always a moment, however brief, when we make the decision to eat or not to eat.  Sometimes it feels like eating is an automatic response, but it's always - always - ultimately our choice.

So if the past two months aren't representative of how you want the next ten to go, today is the perfect day to chart a new course.  It won't be easy, but very few things worth having come easily.  It certainly will be worth it, and I can promise you that a year from now you'll have no regrets. 

It's a new day, with new challenges and new opportunities.  Choose wisely :-)