Privacy is huge to me. What the heck are you talking about, you might ask. Have you even read your own book? This book is different from anything I have ever done before, and totally unlike me. I do not like to be the center of attention ever. I didn’t even want a bridal shower because I hate everyone watching me open gifts! I only allowed those closest and dearest to me, and still I felt on display. Grueling. If you are more of an extrovert you will probably find that so puzzling and strange. I generally do not like to talk about myself, and never in such detail about deeply personal things. But this book is a tool, and if it helps me reach my bigger long-term goal, then having my guts splayed out before the world for all eternity will be worth it…at least I hope it will. Privacy is critically important to me.
I have long thought that fame is overrated at best and is often a significantly negative occurrence in a person’s life. Famous people cannot go anywhere without being intruded upon, or worse. Even if those around them try to be discrete and respect their privacy, which is a big if, they are still always gawking at the person and maybe even their family members and friends. Years ago, I heard about something that Oprah Winfrey said about how she cannot even go out to lunch and eat a shrimp salad—I think it was a shrimp salad—without it making the headlines in the paper with photos of her taking a bite. This helped to validate my belief that fame, well, to be blunt, fairly sucks, and is not something I would ever want. Imagine having your photos taken whenever you go out in public just so someone can sell some sleazy future garbage can liner. It is like your life is no longer your own, but has become in some way, fodder for the rest of humanity to chew on. You may admire a person for their unique talents without infringing upon their right to live their own uninterrupted, harassment-free life.
When I have met famous people, I just treat them like people, because that is what they are! We are all just people, all 7.7 billion of us. If you see someone you admire, I know it can be challenging. You may feel like you know them and are therefore entitled to go up to them and talk to them. Please remember, you don’t and you shouldn’t. There is a time and a place for everything. For instance, if I ran into my favorite baseball player, Clayton Kershaw, shopping at the mall with his family, I would never intrude at all. I admit that I would do the quick sideways glance and think Wow! I knew he was a great guy! But never, never would I invade his space. Now if I see him at Dodger stadium, signing autographs on a day he is not pitching, well, that is a different story. Who am I kidding, I still wouldn’t ask for an autograph, but I’d want to and wouldn’t feel it was inappropriate in that setting. If I ever saw film director Martin Scorsese, my very favorite director of all time, that would be tricky, but I still wouldn’t intrude in his life in any way. Admittedly I would have a greater struggle not staring just a little bit. Bottom line, we need to always respect people and their right to privacy.
People can share what they want to about themselves, so while I value privacy, I also value the ability to disclose what I choose to disclose about my own life. But that’s my life and my choice, that does not mean the people who I have been on the journey with. I value their right to privacy as much as I value my own. You may have noticed that I only mention the others in this book by their title in relation to me, not by their name. This is not a tell-all book to hinder or hurt other people in any way, in spite of anything they did or did not do to me. Creating problems for others is not the goal. This needs to be a positive tool to help gain understanding and to learn how to make the necessary changes needed to flourish in life.
Sharing my story with others is with the hope that it will be beneficial for other people as well. There are other emotional overeaters out there. The more I think of this book being used as a helpful tool for a person who may be suffering, too, the easier it makes sticking with my healthy journey. I have tried to the best of my ability to make it clear how difficult this is for me. As an introvert it is even more so, but I am putting it out there, being vulnerable. Perhaps you may be able to share your stories as well. If you have been struggling with weight and have been successful in losing five pounds, ten, one hundred ten, whatever amount you have lost, share about it. If you are just starting your weight loss journey or your own healthful life plan similar to me, let others know. If you recently began having an active lifestyle, let others know about it. They may be interested in doing the same thing and just need a little push in the right direction. Your success story may be the encouragement that another person needs to get started. Thanks to the man I saw on YouTube, I was able to begin my life-long quest for good health. I am thankful that he shared. Maybe he was uncomfortable. Maybe he was embarrassed sharing his life with everyone. I’ll never know, but I know that I am so grateful to him for sharing his story, and I wish him all the best.
My children are all adults now. They know about my struggles with weight. They also know about my healthy life plan and how hard I am working to achieve my health and weight goals. Yes, I have told them, but now is the time to also show them. I am showing them the way to make better food choices by making them now for myself. For some of their young, impressionable years I made poor choices, mainly for myself. I always provided many good, healthy food options for my family, but there was too much junk available as well. Although my guilty pleasures were tucked away in my stash drawer, it wasn’t fooling anyone. If anyone wanted a sweet, they knew exactly where to look. I walked into my office one day when my son was just three years old to find him sitting at my desk with a big, chocolate-smeared grin on his face! He just said, “Hi Mommy” like it was totally okay to do that. I had to laugh!
When I was a newlywed, I was in the middle of a health food phase. I received a lot of pushback from some of my new family members. I wanted my little family to eat wholesome, nutritious food and that was somehow upsetting to others. Maybe the implication, from their viewpoint, was that they were not eating healthy enough, I don’t know, but it was never about anyone but my immediate family. I was doing my best to set a good example. It was an unfortunate time and ended up being a mess. Although I do have to laugh that one of the dishes I made for us was a millet loaf. It was pretty good and healthful, but I did get teased for feeding my family bird seed!
During the majority of my youngest daughter’s life I wore size eights to tens, which are average sizes. It wasn’t until she got to be about eight or nine years old that the stress once again became difficult for me and the weight started to pile on. By the time she was eleven, I was wearing size fourteens to sixteens. Before that, during her lifetime, food was not much of an issue. I had a decently good system regarding food. She has always been self-limiting regarding sweets and she only eats till satisfied. I have never once seen her overeat, not even her favorite ice cream. She was also never forced to eat anything or clean her plate. The answer is: Force feeding, overstuffing, and controlled feeding (cleaning their plates). The question is: What are three things that can cause children to have issues with food that can lead to being overweight adults? If we want our children to grow to be healthy teens and adults free of eating disorders, we need to provide them with a variety of healthy food choices, let them help select items to put on their plates, and not require them to finish everything or to eat more because that didn’t seem like enough to us. We also need to model good eating habits. Kids will imitate what you do; they barely hear, acknowledge, or remember much of what you say to them.
Every country in the world has special foods, and many are used for special celebrations. That is what people do. Food is important. Many cultural traditions are passed down by the eating of traditional foods. But one observation of traditions in the United States is that we include a lot of sugar in our celebrations. The United States consumes more sugar per capita than any other country in the world. On average, each person consumes about ¼ of a pound per day. That is about twenty-five percent higher than the second highest consumer of the sweet stuff, Germany. Sugar is in almost all processed foods. It’s everywhere. Think of a special holiday or celebration and I’ll bet you can name at least one high sugar item that goes with it. For example, Valentine’s Day: chocolate candy; Easter: giant baskets of candy; 4th of July: apple pie and ice cream; Halloween: bags and bags of candy; Thanksgiving: pumpkin pie; Christmas: cookies, cakes, pies, puddings, and candy; birthday celebrations: cake and ice cream. Now if those were the only sugar items consumed for the celebration, well, maybe that wouldn’t be too, too horrible, but the dessert is just one part of the sugar overload. There are also party favors largely consisting of sugar items, the drinks are almost all sugar laden, and the excess and surplus of the candies from these holidays lasts forever. One dentist I know decided to personally pay his young patients to sell him their Halloween candy! He would then donate it to organizations that send items overseas to soldiers.
As a former sugar addict, I can tell you that this sugar excess is detrimental to our health. It is so ingrained into our culture that it almost feels mean to not have these treats readily available. But what is the cost? I put out a table for Halloween this year for the little trick or treaters and had good size party bags with about 20 snack size candy bars and individually wrapped prepackaged cupcakes in each bag for each child. This excess was because I knew that many people were not going to pass out treats this year and I didn’t want the kids to feel disappointed, but still, that alone would have been enough candy for any child. We kill each other with kindness it seems. We all know that kids basically throw away the non-sugar items that people try to pass out in their attempts to give healthier options. I can see the problem, but I don’t have the answer. We desperately need to reduce the amount of sugar that is consumed on a daily basis, and then the sugar items on special occasions won’t be that bad and they will be more of what they were intended to be: a special treat. When sweets are a daily occurrence, how special is that? And when our treats are sweet, some of our foods are sweetened, and our drinks are sugar-filled, well, our kids don’t stand much of a chance of being their healthiest selves, and our nation becomes more and more obese.
My kids still talk about the junk foods that I would never buy that they got from friends. I always packed nutritious lunches and snacks for them for school, but there are parents who packed all pre-packaged, over-processed, high sugar content, nutrient depleted junk for their kids’ lunches. There was a bit of trading that went on and my kids didn’t always consume their healthier foods. You can only do what you can do. Kids will be kids. But I did try. A high school friend of mine whose father is a doctor ate different from most of us. She just didn’t seem to want or need sweets. One time I saw her get a milkshake. That’s about it. I still remember it to this day because it was so shocking that she even had that! We hung out for years! We did everything together; we even went to Hawaii together where we survived on granola bars and yogurt. One milkshake! Most of us ate junk all the time. When asked about it she just casually mentioned that she didn’t grow up eating sweets and they weren’t anything she gave any thought to. I was shocked. Her family did not make a big deal out of it and she did not have rules about it, she simply never watched the consumption of sweets while growing up so it wasn’t a part of her life at all. Wow. There is a lesson there that I wish I would have recognized long before I had children of my own.
We need to consume nutrient dense foods in high amounts and significantly reduce foods with added sugars. Since I now rarely eat sugary foods, and never candy, I can tell you that even a small amount of a dessert now seems rich and sweet, and a couple of bites is more than enough. Sugar addiction, or whatever you choose to call it, can be reversed. When I was getting off candy, I initially used ice cream as a substitute. Sounds weird, but it worked. It is still sweet, but not overly so, and I only had it every once in a while. It wasn’t just sitting at my desk beckoning to me. I weaned myself off the high amount of sugar I was consuming gradually at first, then I eliminated all sugar from my diet for 30 days during my Whole30 diet experience. I threw out all my candy stash. I read every label and didn't eat anything with any form of sugar. I didn’t even eat ketchup! And that did it. That thirty-day reset made a huge difference for me with my sugar addiction. The small amount of added sugars that I now eat doesn’t seem to bother me; it was consuming items that contained sugar as the main ingredient that caused me the most problems, namely candy. Start reading labels and you will be shocked to see just how much sugar you and your family are consuming. Since I use MyFitnessPal to keep track of my caloric intake and nutrition, I always know just how much sugar I am putting in my body. Almost every day I have a surplus of sugar grams available for consumption that go unused. I don’t miss it at all. I feel like I have a fighting chance now. I do not want to end up with diabetes, heart disease, cancer, a stroke, or other diseases just so I can overeat and consume too many sweetened items. And the perk of giving up the sugar is that all foods taste better to me now.
By modeling a healthy diet and by increasing movement and activity in my life, I hope I am setting a better example for my family, and one that they will imitate. I will always have healthy foods available and casually limit special treats to special occasions. Also, I am going to make sure that I do not overdo it anymore with sugar items as gifts. When my daughter was deep cleaning her room last summer, she brought out a container that still had all of her Christmas stocking candy! It isn’t that she didn’t like the items, she just never felt like eating them and then forgot about them. Yes! She hasn’t seen me eat candy for the last couple of years either. I can’t say there is an absolute correlation here, but it is promising. No matter what though, I haven’t been able to entice her to try my eggcellent veggie breakfast dish yet but give me time! This is going to be the first Christmas that I am not going to put any candy in the stockings. Will there be a mutiny? I doubt it. Maybe just the chocolate oranges because that is a special tradition…the marzipan pigs, the canes, the kisses…where does it stop? We’ve been doing so many of these candy items for so long that they all seem special, but are they really? Going to have to give this a bit more thought. I love our traditions and my daughter didn’t eat them anyway! Okay, maybe first Christmas with just a few special candies in the stockings and that’s it! No. I asked and my kids said that they do not want any candy either. The support feels great! I’m so proud of them.
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