You know that expression, “You have too much on your plate”? Well, did you ever notice that when you have too much on your plate, you tend to put too much on your plate?
This is one of the big challenges for people with food addictions. Overwhelming stress, or the illusion of overwhelming stress, makes us eat for no other reason than we don’t know what else to do.
Stress has a way of making us think things are worse than they actually are. When we react by overeating, the stress gets worse because first, it doesn’t solve the problem and second it adds a second problem of becoming overweight.
Oddly enough, it seems like the larger your body gets the more invisible we become. People don’t notice us in positive ways and the fat is easy to hide behind. The truth is that we are only hiding from ourselves.
Things that happened in the past are in the past. They can’t be changed. Now is different. Anything can happen in the present moment, which is the only moment we have control over anyway.
If something in the past made you feel small and insignificant, then why not change things? We are responsible for making our own changes, no matter what, so why not be bigger than our food addiction?
I was thinking about this after I had been to a Seal concert. Seal is a great performer but I noticed something in this particular concert that I’d not noticed before. Throughout every song, his arms were outstretched most of the time.
As he sang with his arms wide, it gave me a sense of freedom, of being larger than life. As we left the concert, my friend and I serenaded each other with our favorite songs, none of when even vaguely resembled Seal’s performance.
As we sang and laughed, we stretched out our arms wide and spun around like children. It was a fabulous moment. In that moment, we were as big as the world with no worries, no troubles, no thought of food.
It was like being in a different world, one in which we were noticed and admired. Some people even applauded.
It didn’t matter what we did, or how we were dressed or whether or not we could sing worth a hoot. We were being our true selves in the best of ways. What a blast!
You are bigger than anything that will ever happen to you. Stretch out your arms as wide as the sky and spin around. Just for a moment, be your own true self. It’s positively addictive.