Day 12: Diet philosophy

Battling Demons with a Shovel

Yesterday, I promised you guys that I would share my amazing day with you today. So here it is...

As you can see from the picture- it snowed yesterday. My parents have a HUGE driveway, you can't even see the second garage from the picture. Well, before the diet, I would have woken up looked outside and said "WOW! you're going to have to call someone to plow the driveway. BUT this morning I woke up at 7:30am full of energy, looked out my window, saw the snow on the trees, and it all looked so beautiful. I made my breakfast, I told you about that yesterday, and then I went outside and decided to shovel it myself. I can't explain it, but at first it was just something I wanted to do, but as I started it became something I had to do! I could have easily just shoveled the front of the garage to get the car out, but somehow, I had some sort-of philosophical moment and that snow was like my weight. The snow flakes, which seemed harm-less, trivial, and appealing, had come to amass to what seemed like an unfeasible task. It was this way with my weight as well. The pounds did not come all at once. They came in with the food I ate that seemed so harmless, trivial and attractive, but had amassed to a problem that seemed too big to tackle.

This motivated me to "take on" that driveway, as if it was some metaphysical manifestation of my weight problem.

I began by shoveling around the edges, making a way for myself. Once I had done that, I shoveled to create chucks that were more manageable. I had to move one patch of snow before

I could clear the next patch- and so on. Maybe it was all the endorphins running through my body- I was out there shoveling for 4 hours- but I began to reflect and thought about shoveling the edges as making the decision to go on the diet, and choosing to find a way to get rid of the snow that had piled on the ground like the pounds on my body. Carving the way into the snow to make patches, made it seem more manageable and gave me the courage that I could do it. This was like the attack phase. Once I had clear areas to tackle, it felt like the different phases of the diet. When at first the task seemed impossible, I could see that I just needed to take each one on- one by one- literally, paving the way to my goal. So this is what I did. This is how I spent my first day on the Cruise phase. If you remember my post from the day before, I was talking about being more "active". Well I practiced what I preached.

I was out there with the rest of the neighbors with their fancy snowblowers keeping up the same pace. There were a couple of other people shoveling as well, but they had rather small driveways.

My parents have the largest driveway on the block as they are at the end of a dead-end street. Not only did I burn a ton of calories, but I was out in the cold, which makes you burn even more calories because your body has to burn even more to keep your body temperature at 98'F. 4 hours in the cold shoveling away my psychological flurries, I was done!

...And let me just tell you- it felt PHENOMENAL!!!

So here's the final picture- Yeah! I did that!!!