Living Life all Intuitive and Everything :-D

What a busy and active weekend I had this weekend I'll tell yas. Yesterday we packed and loaded up 2 truck loads and 1 car load worth of our extra "stuff" that we don't use around the house to de-clutter for putting our house on the market. Thankfully, MIL had a huge storage room in her house, so it's safe and sound and accessible should we need anything in there. We even packed up all the extra clothes cluttering up our closets that we don't really wear. It definitely made a difference and our house is much more spacious now and will show better.

Today we went at it with the cleaning supplies and we scrubbed every single window to make them as crisp and clean as possible, and then I zipped off to hot yoga with Farm Girl and it was JUST the thing I needed and it felt awesome.

I'm embracing the Intuitive Eating thing better and better as time goes on. One of the really hard parts of going through this process is that weight loss has to be truly considered a "secondary" element to intuitive eating, so I cannot be thinking about food as a means to an end. And right now the really difficult part is that in the initial stage I'm actually not even supposed to be eating for health, but just to eat whatever I want whenever I want. Scarry right? This apparently is necessary so that I can get used to eating things that I may have normally viewed as "off limits" or only in truly limited amounts. This is a tough idea to get used to, but I do get why it's necessary. I once said years ago to a friend that I bet that if salad made you fat, we'd all have an obsession with it just because it was "off limits" and I think I was right to some degree and that was about 8 years ago.

The other hard part is not having any feelings of guilt about eating whatever I want either! Umm yeah, kind of hard to do that when the thought of eating it in the first place is so counterintuitive! But so far, so good! Last night we actually ordered take out from a local restaurant and I ordered my favourite meal, the "smothered chicken dinner" which is basically a baquette with garlic butter, grilled slices of chicken, peppers, onions, mushrooms and cheese, with fries and steamed veggies. I ended up only eating half because I was good and full after only eating half (it's a big portion). I've realized that by keeping a simple concept in mind (it's seriously so simple it's rediculous, but obviously something I was not thinking of up until this point) is that if I feel satisified or full, that's enough to eat because get this: if I'm hungry in an hour, I can eat again! OMG IMAGINE THAT!!!! lol What a rediculously simple concept that was absent from my approach to eating. I always felt that I've alotted a certain amount of calories for that meal, it's counted so I'm eating it, or it was a "splurge" meal and I might as well finish it etc. But by realizing in that moment that I can go back in an hour and eat if I'm hungry then and not feel any guilt toward it was enough for me to put my fork down and I was done. Period.

Huh???? Jeeeez what a mind warp this whole thing is. This is why it is a battle of the mind to win the weight loss journey even if you have all of the latest and greatest education on nutrition etc., we all know that it's the head part that's really the challenge.

So today's eats were totally whatever I wanted and it all felt great:

Breakfast: oatmeal of course! Toppings today were chocolate PB2, toasted almonds, a chopped date and some almond butter. Oh and 2 cups of delicious dominican coffee with cream and organic sugar

Lunch: The other half of the smothered chicken baguette, a banana, a few strawberries and an organic date square

Supper: Lean BM hamburger on an organic whole wheat bun with provolone cheese, sauteed onions & mushrooms, some slices of tomato, ketchup, mustard, relish and a greek salad with herb salad, red onion, cucumber, tomato, black olives, light feta, balsamic vinegar and tzatziki.

Dessert: 3 squares of organic dark chocolate (btw the Just Us Organic Dark Chocolate is really really strongly flavoured and has a major satisfaction factor with having only a few squares)

It was all delicious, satisfying and to me, shows that maybe I can trust myself after all? That's really the problem isn't it? Not feeling like you can trust yourself because you've relied for so long on external cues to tell you when and how much to eat to lose weight? It is/was for me anyway!