Making Goals

It's Labor Day weekend here in the U.S. and it's a busy one for me -- no surprise.

I thought this past week things were "magically" coming back into place for me, but it's not happening as fast as I'd like. While I'm now beginning to catch myself in disordered eating and often talking myself out of gorging, eating seconds or thirds, what have you, it's not all the time.

I'm still caught up in a lot of mindless, emotional, and dysfunctional eating. Even after all those years of restricting and learning new behaviors, it's scary how fast I can return to the old ones and how normal they still feel.

And boy am I feeling the weight gain. I'm staying away from the scale, partly because it's the IE thing to do, but also because I'm terrified to see how much I've actually gained. I have a doctor's appointment at the end of the month and I know they'll weigh me then, so I'm forcing myself to wait.

The diet mentality would lead me to believe that if I start dieting now, by the end of the month I could probably knock a lot of this off. But I know where that would really lead me -- back to the diet/binge cycle.

What I need to do is get back to my routines, get some structure back to my life. Now that we're getting back into the groove of school, it's time.

Here are my goals:
1. Get back to walking at least four days a week.
2. I'll be doing my yoga class on Tuesdays and a Pilates class on Fridays. I want to try to do two other strengthening/toning sessions on my own at home each week.
3. I pretty much have all the binge foods out of the house. My goal for the month is to keep them out. I'm not banning all junk food, etc. But I'm going to either limit them to eating out (ice cream, dessert at a restaurant, etc.), or bringing home a single serving.
4. I'm going to get back to reading some kind of IE material every day, whether it's one of my books or one of my Internet IE resources.
5. I'm going to get back to blogging more regularly -- if not every day, every other day. It's too easy to fall into mindless, unconscious behavior when I'm not checking in with myself.
6. I'm also going to get back to reading my favorite blogs. I feel like such a bad Blog Friend by not checking in and commenting to those people I've really grown attached to. Again, my apologies.

That sounds like a big list, but a lot of them tie into each other. You'll notice that other than #3, there's no talk of counting calories or fat grams, banning foods, i.e. a diet. I know that #3 will be the most difficult, because this past week as the binge foods have been disappearing I've noticed myself walking around the house in a panic that I don't have something to gorge on. That's really not good. A real sign of addiction/compulsion. And something has to be done about it. I have to sit with this anxiety, break it apart and get into the reasons behind it. It won't be pleasant, but it has to be done before I find myself at a doctor's office reading 300 on the scale again.

I'm heading off to church shortly, then a bunch of us are heading to Johnstown for the Folk Fest. It's a lot of music and yes, food. But at least we'll be walking around and not sitting at a picnic table shoveling food in our gullets all day. I'll let you know how it goes.