T-minus Two Weeks and Counting!
It’s getting down to crunch time. My competition is two weeks from tomorrow! I have barely eaten any solid food this week, and what I have eaten has been mainly salads. I am trying to eat as many greens as possible, and of course the easiest and best way to do that is with Green Smoothies!
My Green Smoothie this morning was very different than usual. I have to start cutting down on sugar, so my beloved fruit is going to go by the wayside for a couple of weeks, except for post-workout smoothies of course. So this morning I made a ’savory’ smoothie, and it turned out to be pretty good! I used a tomato, cucumber, celery, 2 shallots, a garlic clove, a carrot, juice from one lemon, a bit of ginger, Trocomare seasoning salt, and red chard for my greens. It tasted a lot like a marinara sauce or a V8. I actually enjoyed it. Weird. It wasn’t that many years ago that I would barely eat a vegetable at all, and how my tastes have changed!
I am going to a backyard barbecue tomorrow hosted by some of our dear friends from the Lake Murray Power Squadron. Well, that is, if we don’t get blown away by the impending thunderstorms. I was thinking of how to handle all the questions from people about why I won’t be eating anything there. I am sure they think I am depriving myself. I was thinking about that and I came to an interesting conclusion:
Am I ‘deprived’ of the foods that everyone else is enjoying? That depends. It is my choice to feel deprived or not. If I go around saying, “Oh, I CAN’T eat that” or even worse, “I WISH I could eat that”, then yes, I would feel deprived. But I don’t. I CAN eat any food I want, any time I want, any where I want—I have complete control over what I eat and nobody can take that away from me. But I CHOOSE to eat only the foods that will propel me toward my goals of vibrant health, ridiculous wellness, and amazing fitness. I am powerful because I have the power of choice. I choose to live from a place of power, not deprivation.
I can ‘cheat’ if I want to. I can eat the SAD (Standard American Diet) foods if I feel like it. But I choose to eat foods that help me reach my goals; not foods that tear my body down, stress my precious hard-working internal organs, blood vessels and glands, or cause me to store toxins in unwanted bodyfat. And the crazy truth is, I don’t want to! I understand that the SAD ‘food’ (not food by my definition!) is a powerful addiction on the level of illegal drugs or cigarettes. I get that. But for the life of me, I can’t understand ingesting something that I know is going to have an adverse effect on my body. Knowledge is power. I KNOW what’s in those things, and I KNOW what they do to the human body. I just can’t do that to my body. It’s the only one I have, and it’s already been through too much suffering from my former diet.
But if I decide for some reason to eat a food that doesn’t move me toward my goals, then I will savor the food, enjoy it, and purposely live in the moment of the experience. I refuse to have a negative food experience. I will then move on and eat whatever I want from that point forward, without feeling guilt or beating myself up. If you’re going to cheat, by all means, enjoy every minute of it and then get over it! The worst thing you can do is say, ‘well I failed, so I might as well eat _____ too.’ You are then headed for nutritional destruction. For example, as you all know, at Christmas I ate my mother’s incredible German Chocolate Cake. It was amazing, as always. I savored every bite consciously, and enjoyed it. Now, six hours later, my body let me know that it wasn’t happy with my choice of food and I became quite ill. But I don’t feel a bit of guilt. I chose the experience, and I chose the consequences of the experience as well. You cannot have one without the other.
So anyway, I plan to have a great time at the cookout, enjoying the company of my dear friends and having a great time. It’s not all about food anyway. It’s about friendship and love. Who cares what I eat, and who cares what they eat? (Other than I want them to be healthy!) We ARE what we eat, yes, in a physical sense. But our relationships are not defined by food. They are defined by love and respect for others. And that is nourishing to the soul!
Being Defiant in the face of barbecue,
Christy
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