Like many people I piled on the pounds during lockdown. Recently I’ve taken more decisive action to turn things around and get back to a weight that feels healthy and so I started to change my eating patterns in the hope that the scales would be more favourable.
I’ve been working on it for a little while and this morning decided to check my progress… Two minutes later and I was checking the scales were working properly, changing my stance in the hope that I could lose an extra pound by standing on one leg, and growling at the absolute snails pace progress of it all.
It hurt, I’ve altered a lot of things in my diet and felt many hunger pains along the way, to what appeared to be no avail. I stomped around my bedroom muttering things like ‘well what’s the point’, ‘why is it so hard’, ‘scientifically it just doesn’t make sense that I wouldn’t have seen changes.’
And of course, I made it mean a tonne of things about me. ‘I’m lazy, I’m not committed, I’m unhealthy.’ Those brutal gremlin stories that only lead me to feel un-inspired and un-energised.
But after I while, and a bit of reflection and consciousness about what my gremlins were making up about the situation, I realised it was only data, and I could do what I wanted with it. We instantly make things around us mean something about us. We lose a job and our gremlins say it’s because we’re not intelligent enough, we have financial challenges and our gremlins say it’s because we’re not worthy of stability or comfort, a relationship ends and our gremlins make it mean we’re not capable of love.
Our gremlins take a situation and twist it right up to leave us feeling less than enough. But we can choose to hear a different story.
We can thank our gremlins for their opinion on the situation, ask them to move aside, and then invite self-compassion in.
Once I tapped into my own self-compassion I realised I could do what I wanted with the numbers on the scale in front of me. And with that, I was able to establish how to move forward.
If I am not heading back to my healthy pre-Covid weight then I obviously need to re-evaluate the steps I’m taking. Simple as that. It’s an opportunity to tweak my approach. It’s an opportunity to try again. It is NOT an opportunity for my gremlins to find another way to beat me up. I am going to use the data as fuel to get creative and try new approaches to getting back to health.
Looking can hurt, initially. When there is something in our life that feels unbalanced or like it needs to change it can be tempting to avoid exploring it because that initial realisation can be hard. But trust that with awareness, and a bit of consciousness around your gremlins, there are always creative ways to move forward.
With love as always, Hannah and Team Bird
Image by Andrew Small https://unsplash.com/photos/EfhCUc_fjrU