DrewsyVugs's Journal, 28 Apr 23

Good drop Drewsy!!! 🎉🎊🥳 

Thanks Lee-Erin! I seem to be lulling for some reason.. doesn’t make sense but then it doesn’t always have to. The big thing is my meals are not at consistent times and I know why. Especially late night dinners :( This too will pass… I’m not in a rush, besides I have made a lot of progress very quickly, and that may be what’s happening. I just lost the easy pounds? I am still losing over a pound a week, so I’m not complaining :) DV 

Progress comes like how kids grow…nothing, nothing, nothing, then 💥 a few consistent drops, and then nothing again for a bit. Keeping consistent in both the stalls and the drops is the key 😉 

Well it's progress no matter how you look at it!!! Just keep doing it and in no time you will be where you want to be . 🙂 

Hey, I can’t kick… it’s the first time south of the “wall” in 25 years — thanks everybody :) DV 

As always, your words are wise StomachMonkeys… It’s funny that you say that about CONSISTENCY and weight loss… Cravings and other unhealthy behaviours are identical to that too… Weight loss and temptations are two opposing forces that are more like oil and water than anything else? They always seem to try to mix with the worst kind of timing. You are going along just fine and all of a sudden, out of the middle of nowhere, a craving starts and you are not ready for it. If it happens at the same time your weight (or something else) is not behaving, it is so often that tipping point for a slip that we might even have to recover from. Even though I am totally experienced and wise to the patterns of addiction behaviour, I still have to catch myself from not going down the mental rabbit hole. It is those weak moments, when something is sucking all the air out of the room, that we have to double down and stay CONSISTENT. It is when we cave, just a little bit at a time — INCONSISTENCY — that we set ourselves up for a slip and possible relapse. It is that “little bit at a time, that is what you are talking about. If you not watching at all times, it sneaks up on you, and unless you are vigilant, it is only in the rear view mirror that we “might” see what happened… CONSISTENCY… set that bar high, because the latitude around it is fragile, and drops off all around you, like the deep end of the pool. Thanks for making me think. I have been very good about my avoiding my unhealthy eating habits, but I have to keep reminding myself, not just in the early days, but for many of us, forever… food dependencies (behaviours) can be every bit as persistent as a hard drug, and just as self-destructive… :) DV  

But at the same time, remembering that consistency doesn’t mean “perfection “. Consistency to me means doing the things you need to do to achieve your goals…MOST of the time. Nobody is perfect, and the worst thing we can do is make GOOD the enemy of PERFECTION. If you are good 80 percent of the time or better, in my mind, that is what perfection actually looks like. Not always good 100 percent of the time.  

That’s a really good point StomachMonkeys! For most of us :) and I am not disagreeing with you in the least, but in addiction, abstaining has a different interpretation of what perfection is! I am still waffling with what my problem really is. I am still pretty haunted by cravings and the temptation to relax a little? Is is an addictive behaviour, or is it just an unhealthy eating habit? If I give in and slip just a little, I don’t really learn anything. So “for me”, in the early stages of quitting a food, perfection is the only way I am going to figure out if the cravings go away or not. If it is an addictive behaviour and I can’t control it, then the craving will keep persisting and the only alternative (for me) is “perfection” in that I have abstain from it and similar foods altogether. Many of us live in denial of that understanding and suffer in their resistance to grow. I have a feeling, for some of us, quitting is going to be a lot easier with a hard drug that it might ever be with food. With a hard drug, you can quit it outright and remove all the people and temptations that surround it. You can free yourself from a drug. But with food, you can’t just quit eating. We are forever feeding those same nutrients into our system (salts & sugars for example) that trigger the unhealthy behaviour. Triggers are not just psychological, they can be physiological too… Because of my untreated ADHD, I had been addicted to many very difficult drugs to quit, and I have beat every one of them and I have never looked back. But, I think food is different for “some” of us. I still agree with you, perfection is not a reasonable goal in anything. All else we can’t forgive ourselves when we do slip and self compassion will always be the easiest path forward. But, for some of us, we just can’t get away with a kinder, gentler way!!! It is definitely not because we are not strong enough, it is because we are wired differently. For me, the only alternative to addiction is to abstain from that, and similar foods. To do that, I have to train my mind to be disgusted by those foods and attracted to dissimilar foods that are good for me. It is like near beer. For most real addicts, that is not even close to the right answer. That’s just playing with the trigger on the gun. That same trigger can be what happens every time we eat something. We might not notice it right away, but physiologically, it can trigger a craving and we never know why! Confusion is the worst kind of war that a person can wage with addiction… there can be no confusion if quitting is to succeed… Severe? Yes! But only in proportion to the problem — :) DV  

Perhaps i wasn’t quite clear with what I mean. Let me try to unpack a little more: Thers nothing wrong with having a target of perfection. What I mean by not making perfect the opposite of good is this: When we do have a slip-up, take it in stride. Accept that it happened. Look for triggers as to why it happened. But never get down on yourself when it happens. Because it happens to all of us. How we react to our slip-ups while striving for excellence is what I mean when I say 80 percent perfect. Not necessarily to intentionally go off the rails, but understanding that as long as you can stick to the plan the majority of the time, and bounce back quickly when we do mess up, that these little “blips” in our plan will be relatively inconsequential. If our “blips” are beyond 20% of out totals, then we may start to see some detrimental effects. But as long as we keep our good habits at a minimum of 80% while shooting for perfect, understand that we are in a pretty good place.