Archives

Taking Time to Heal

Mar3

It is important to take the time necessary to heal the pain in your life. It’s hard to be patient in this new world where we want everything to happen now.

Hurt can come in the form of physical or emotional pain. Healing takes time and requires patience and trust. If you use food to cope with your pain, the pain will increase as the consequences of your actions present themselves.

Overeating only adds to the problem and causes you to see time as the enemy. Living in the moment and dealing with life’s upheavals as they come along will make it easier to let the pain run its course.

Daily life doesn’t stop because you overeat or feel shame or embarrassment about your food addiction. Life goes on with or without you.

You are too important to let time pass you by. The consequences of addictive behaviour take time to heal. You may want to set a time and say it will all end when that time arrives, but it may not work out that way.

One thing that is important to remember when you’re making a plan is that whatever else it may be, it has to be something that works for you. It’s all for you.

You do your part and let time do its part. Take time to heal. Make time to live. Food addictions and addictive behaviour of any kind isn’t planned.

It is what happens when we don’t have a plan. What is the simplest plan you can make so you can avoid being caught in the trap of your addiction?

Focus on each moment giving it your full attention with no distractions and no judgments. Observe and be present.

Show up for your moment and time will take care of the rest.

Love and Food Addiction

Sep22

There is a reason people are addicts. No one chooses an addiction, especially a food addiction. Why would they?

Obesity runs rampant in the United States because it has become so easy to eat unhealthy foods. The quest for instant gratification flies in the face of honoring these bodies we wear from the time we are born to the time we die.

Fast food is easy, not as cheap as it used to be but still cheap, over-processed, and unprepared to provide the body with nutrition.

Fast, over-processed food is not meant to provide you with nutrients. It is meant to taste good and fill you up and that is what it does.

There is no energy involved. In fact, most people feel like sleeping after they eat at a fast food restaurant.

There is no love in fast food. It is salty, often greasy, full of fats–that’s why it makes you feel full temporarily–and it ruins your health.

Where is the love you used to taste in homemade pot roast with mashed potatoes made from real potatoes and fresh vegetables that we didn’t call veggies and say you had to eat them because they were good for you?

Food is supposed to be good for you. Food was once a way to express love.

But something happened along the way. Instead of enjoying all the tastes, flavors, and sensual feelings a meal once provided, food has become a tool to stuff down feelings and pretend it’s okay to be alone, ignored, and undervalued.

Food doesn’t feel good anymore. And most of the time, it doesn’t make those eating it feel the pleasure or nutritional benefits food is meant to provide.

This is particularly true for people with a food addiction.

Food addicts are missing an important, life-enriching nutrient from their daily lives. It’s not food we hunger for. It is love.

Love is the feast that fills you up but not out. It fills up your senses and tames your wildest hungers.

I am not talking about sex. I am talking about love. Without love, one can not overcome a food addiction.

With love, you can. It’s as simple as that.

It’s Never Too Late to Be Great! ®

When You’re Ready to Leave Your Addiction Behind

Feb15

One of the real challenges in the fight to overcome an addiction is leaving your old life behind.

Food addiction, drug addiction and alcohol addiction have one thing in common. You have to leave a big part of your former self behind in order to move through your addiction and get on with your life.

I don’t drink except for a sip of Newcastle Brown Ale every now and then, and I have never “done drugs”. Getting drunk or high never appealed to me.

My parents didn’t drink or smoke or do drugs. Maybe that had something to do with it.

When I was growing up, there were lots of jokes about drunks and Jesus, people walking into a bar or driving off the side of the road. Every comedian told jokes about drunks.

No one joked about drugs but they weren’t popular then, and of course, alcohol wasn’t really perceived as a real drug.

I laughed along with everyone else when my brother did an imitation of our banker who we saw inebriated on more than one occasion. The impression was so hilarious and true to life that I would laugh until I cried. Forty years later, it’s not so funny.

I don’t know any jokes about drugs or drug addicts.  Lots of things that seem funny when you are under the influence lose their comedic value when you live sober.

Why can’t there be a place where you can go and specific things you can do to end your addiction once and for all? Then you could just leave your addiction behind, walk away and never look back. If only.

I can’t compare my food addiction to the horror of a drug or alcohol addiction, but I can see some parallels. As I move forward spiritually in my life, it becomes more and more necessary to leave people from my past behind. If you want to leave your addiction behind, that’s part of the deal.

When you make the commitment to begin recovering from your addiction, you have to give up the life that went with it.

You can’t go out with your former drinking buddies. When you do, you feel bad because there is nothing to say. You don’t fit in anymore.

I imagine it’s the same with the people you used to get high with. I can’t go out with some of the people whose company I used to enjoy. When I’m around them, I eat things that defeat my efforts to live healthy.

Being around them makes me want to eat. It makes me become that person whom I no longer wish to be. I am becoming someone else now and I like this me better. They don’t.

If I put myself in stressful situations, I know I will respond with food if I seek support from certain people.

Even though I have to leave my food addiction behind every day, it will continue to pop up. Sometimes I will win and other times I may not. Recovery is ongoing. I’ve learned to be okay with that.

If change is to occur, however, I cannot surround myself with people who will not allow me to change, no matter how much they love me or I them.

If your support team makes you want to overeat, get drunk, or get high, you have to leave them behind. That’s the only way you will be able to leave your addiction behind.

Do what you have to do. Make new healthier friends. Move on. Don’t ever give up.

It’s Never Too Late to Be Great!