Happy Earth Day!

Geez, how time flies when one is busy - or it gets nice outside and I don't feel like sitting in front of my computer! Hallelujah! Sunday was the most wonderful day. I spent a good 4-5 hours outside. It was so refreshing, even if the majority of the time was spent cleaning up dog pooh in the yard!

Food has still been a challenge the past couple weeks. In speaking with Doug last week I realized that not only do I use food (the actually eating) to distract or numb me from dealing with what's at hand but the obsession about food - prior to eating, figuring out what to eat (or what I should or shouldn't eat) is a form of distraction in itself. So even if I'm not eating to distract, just the act of obsessing over food choices and following my meal plan is nearly doing the same thing. The obsessing feeds the anxiety and makes it much more difficult to stay with my meal plan.

That was in an interesting realization to me. It seems there are so many layers and just when I think I understand, there's another layer beyond that one. You'd think this wouldn't surprise me anymore.

In order to help reduce my obsessive thinking about various topics (food, body, etc) one of my assignments this week was to allow myself one hour per day for that behavior. For instance, a few days ago I allotted 4:30-5:30pm the time to obsess/worry/ruminate and then I had to plan an activity to take part in right after so that I wouldn't be able to carry on with those thoughts. So the activity was yoga.

Unfortunately I have been too busy the past few days to put this into action but I've also been too tired and busy to obsess. The couple days I did do that practice, there was a relief to it. When I noticed myself obsessing or worrying I just told myself that I can continue that thought between it's scheduled time and it just sort of floated away. By the time I got to that scheduled time, not all of what I'd been worrying about was on my mind anymore. I think this is an excellent exercise I hope to keep integrating into my life until I have less and less obsessive and worried thoughts.

Today was my first body image group session. It's a ten week group based on a book called The Body Image Workbook by Thomas Cash. I was SUPER nervous going in. As we went around the room introducing ourselves most people mentioned they were nervous too. One of the things we did today was to use five colors (Orange = Love, Yellow = Like, Green = Neutral, Blue = Dislike, and Red = Hate) to color a diagram of our bodies front and back indicating how we feel about the various parts of our bodies. Major major anxiety here for me. Upon completing our diagram we, of course, had to share with the group what our person looked like. The majority of my diagram was red and there was no orange at all. I got teary explaining this to the group. Ugh..first day and I'm already crying. I absolutely hate crying in front of people, which is sorta funny cuz I'm such a crier!

This new group is going to be difficult but the women in it seem like really intelligent, strong, supportive people so hopefully I'll be able to absorb some of their strength as I don't really feel I brought much of my own. I sorta felt like a little kid in there today, sort of weak, insignificant and not grown up enough to be able to share maturely. I'd guess that there are other factors at play today in how emotional I feel. New group, work is chaotic and super stressful this week and I am pre-menstrual. I suppose I should chuckle a little at how the timing of things work out, when you think you barely handle anymore...you usually get pushed even further.

So with that I think I may head home (I'm at my desk at work - did I mention busy at work??) and crawl up in a ball and fall asleep or have a beer and then curl up and fall asleep.