Encouragement

Monday will be the 5th consecutive session with my new RD. No major weight loss to speak of, but I've finally stop gaining weight.

In today's mail I found a photo copy from the book, "Eating Mindfully". On the bottom she wrote, "I read this and thought of you. Hope you are having a good week". C.H.

The words really speak to me, enough that I wanted to share them as well:

Stay the Path and Keep Walking
"Fall down seven times, get up eight" is a Buddhist saying about resilience, persistence, and the ability to bounce back. If you read biographies about the lives of successful millionaires, their stories are remarkably similar. They all had a series of dramatic setbacks or "failures". For example, Milton Hershey, the founder of Hershey's Chocolate, went bankrupt several times before making his fortune. The only quality that set such successful people apart from others, and contributed to their eventual success, was their ability to accept loss, feel the pain, learn from the experience, and jump right back up. In a similar way, mindful eating takes practice, and, in the beginning, you may not always succeed. However, if you keep trying to eat mindfully, you will succeed.

As Buddha said, "A jug fills drop by drop." In other words, mindful eating is a continual journey that requires an enormous amount of persistence. Potentially, healing your eating habits could be a lifelong activity. Also, be aware that regardless of how well you master mindfulness, it will be impossible to escape an unintentional bout of mindless eating, or the occasional lapse into old eating habits. The doughnuts at work, the pizza ordered in, or a food that induces guilt feelings will temporarily tempt you back into non aware, self-indulgent mindset. When you realize what you have done, don't fall for the "Oh well, I've completely ruined it anyway" attitude.

Expect the occasional "out of the blue" mindless eating test, and consider it a challenge. It will happen. If problematic moments didn't occur, this would actually be a bad sign. Sometimes, you need to eat mindlessly to reestablish contact with mindful eating. Mindless eating will remind you of the benefits of controlled, aware eating. Think of the mindless eating as stepping into a pothole in the road. Tell yourself to keep walking. Think about it as if you were stepping out for a walk with a general, not specific, destination in mind. As the Buddha said, "If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking."

Skill Builder: Let Accidental Mindless Eating Go

If you "slip up," be kind to yourself and let go of it. Don't focus on the past regret, or guilt. Most importantly, don't try to push the mindless eating incident away. This is nonsense and goes directly in the face of mindfulness. You slipped up. It happened. Accept it and let go of it. You can use the experience to mindfully examine each sensation and to start again from this moment forward. You may have several, even many slips on your path to mindful eating. Just pick yourself up whenever it happens, and keep on walking.

-Eating Mindfully, Susan Albers. Pages 150-151