Taming the Lion

There was a great analogy that was posted on the MyFoodDiary forums: Addiction is like a roaring lion. Addicts who use tobacco, alcohol or drugs have to slam the door to the lion’s cage and walk away to recover. Food addicts have to open the cage and pet the lion three times a day for the rest of their lives. I’m certainly not saying that food addictions are harder to handle than drug or alcohol addictions. But there is something uniquely difficult about an addiction where you can’t just avoid the trigger completely. You have to eat. You can’t just walk away from food. You can’t draw that clear line. There’s no monitoring needed – the solution is very clear: DO NOT DO THAT. This is not the case with food. With food, you...

Posted by on Jul 24, 2009 in health | 0 comments

Life getting in the way of health

It seems contrary to say that life could get in the way of health. If you are truly living a healthy lifestyle – wouldn’t health just be a part of life? That would be nice, but I think sometimes I continually battle to live that healthy lifestyle, and obstacles are always in the way of that. It is always a constant challenge. I have to accept that sometimes, living a health lifestyle doesn’t mean living it every second of every day. I am human, sometimes I lose focus, get distracted, have other priorities I need to deal with. And yes, that sometimes means forgetting about the “diet” (Sorry – not diet – HEALTHY LIFESTYLE!) The past week has been a perfect example of life getting in the way of health. I had two social...

Posted by on Jul 22, 2009 in health | 0 comments

My love hate relationship with exercise

I have never been a gym-rat – nor have I even remotely liked exercise. Whenever I “feel the burn,” my instinct is to cry and quit and run home. However, I did want to live healthier – and you really can’t do that without fitting some level of exercise into the equation. Last year, when I got serious, I joined Curves. That was fine for about 2 months. But it quickly got old. Yes, at least I was changing machines every 30 seconds or whatever it is – but it still got old. I tried bringing my own music or books on tape to listen to from my iPod. Didn’t help. At the time, I was doing Jenny Craig. I started Curves in April 2008, I started Jenny Craig in May. By September, I’d lost 15lbs. I was sick of Jenny Craig and...

Posted by on Jul 12, 2009 in health | 1 comment