One Step Forward and Two Steps Back

This title "One Step Forward and Two Steps Back" isn't just part of a routine on "Dancing with the Stars" it's life. 

In starting this blog I wanted to write about this new concept on weight and my life long struggle (there have been numerous writings on the subject).  So, when the idea hit me that fat is really just energy waiting to be harnessed that created an image of all these fat cells just wanting to express themselves as fulfilled energy.  As a person who has spent many hours and dollars in 'self improvement' seminars, workshops and weekends listening to inspiring leaders urging the group onto finding our bliss and living our best life ever (sorry, Oprah, you weren't the first with that expression) this seemed like a place where my little fat cells needed to travel.  So wouldn't it be interesting if I became the inspirational speaker for my own fat!

These fat cells and I have been together for a very long time.  Some have moved on to energy and other have joined... (I have spent most of my life looking like a human accordion.... fat - thin-ish - fatter - less thin... you get the picture).  Might as well use all those hours of self-improvement experience. 

When I started back in June it was working brilliantly my weight was dropping only through my thoughts of encouraging my fat to be energy.  Why hadn't I done this before?  As a person thinks so are they.  My new favorite speaker, Mike Dooley, has coined a phrase "Thoughts become things so choose the good ones" (By the way if you aren't signed up to his "Notes from the Universe" do yourself a favor). Things were moving along great for my thinking off my weight and then that 'voice' started in.  (It was also the voice that suggested I forget about writing this blog because I was a self proclaimed Luddite and didn't really have much to say anyway).  The negative energy kept pushing me back into my old patterns of life... I've been on an ice cream binge extraordinaire...I've been believing that negativity and going back toward my old way of life.  (Many years before hearing about Dr. Phil I always suggested to friends "And how is that working for you?"... I've got the annoyed friends to prove it).  How was that working for me?  Badly.

But the negative energy was keeping me from my new ideas that were working to put me back onto a more familiar path.  Then I conjured up another analogy (I got a million of em) I'm driving this bus of my life and this energy, negative or otherwise, is just the fuel but I get to set the GPS and drive the bus.  Those negative thoughts are backseat drivers.  Sometimes that 'little voice inside' can give some good suggestions - don't go down that road because there's construction, you need to stop for stamps or don't forget the ice cream.  But that's all they are - suggestions - some of which we programmed ourselves as children.  That is a whole other topic but if you created these protections as a 5 year old that would mean we're still making some decisions from that perspective but would you let a 5 year old drive your car?  No.  Then why are we letting a 5-year-old drive our lives?

So after the sadness of going back on what I'd originally set out to do I chose to change course and go in the direction of what I want and how I want to live my life.

Even though I had to take those two steps back sometimes that's all you need to get a running start.