A healthy heart.

I've been reading through Henry Cloud books lately. He is a well known speaker, author, psychologist, general bad ass christian guy that keeps things very real. In this world, that's rare. In christian circles, it seems to be even more rare.

Is it ok for christians to admit to struggle? Yes. Do we practice that? No.

I am about halfway through his book "Safe People" and it's fascinating. He has this way of breaking down relationships that will make you nod your head in relief and be reminded that you are not crazy.  I wanted to share this. Read this list slowly, his list of the "Interpersonal Traits of Unsafe People" as follows:

1. Unsafe people avoid closeness instead of connecting.
2. Unsafe people are only concerned about "I" instead of "we."
3. Unsafe people resist freedom instead of encouraging it.
4. Unsafe people flatter us instead of confronting us.
5. Unsafe people condemn us instead of forgiving us.
6. Unsafe people stay in parent/child roles instead of relating as equals.
7. Unsafe people are unstable over time instead of remaining consistent.
8. Unsafe people are a negative influence on us instead of a positive one.
9. Unsafe people gossip instead of keeping secrets.

While this is not an inclusive list, I think he pretty much sums up the traits that can turn any relationship bad quickly. How many times have you been an unsafe person to someone else? I was SHOCKED to take a personal assessment of how many times I have done any of the above things to someone else. Now that doesn't make us unsafe people, it just means we are prone to treating each other in unsafe ways.

Healthy eating ultimately leads me to a healthy heart. And a healthy heart wants to be healthy in every way. This is a big part of that. It's not enough to work on the outside when the inside needs attention. I am taking stock of the food I eat. The work outs I do. But now, how about the thoughts I have? The way I treat others? The things I share? The things I keep private?

Still waiting for My Fitness Pal to develop an app to include my mind intake and my emotional intake. A healthy heart is a lot more than proper calorie intake.

-Liz

The B word

I was at a work event last night. It was a silent auction for charity. All was going great until I realized the food situation. You guessed it. The B word.

Buffet.

I have never set foot in a Golden Corral. Thankfully. But when I see a buffet, even hear the word buffet, my mind starts to spin. And last night it was definitely filled with questions. What will they have? Is there anything I can eat? How big are the plates? Will people go back more than once? What about dessert, is that a separate line? If there is salad, will they only have ranch as an option?

The B word makes me feel all the feelings.

I had this moment. And it's embarrassing, but I am not too ashamed to admit it. I saw someone's plate who had returned from the buffet and I think I was staring, drooling, and maybe even had a little chin quiver going on. This lady was double fisting a plate of chicken fingers, chicken salad, meatballs, cheesy something or other and another plate of cake on top of pie on top of banana pudding.

And so it was one of those defining moments. Do I throw my goals out the window momentarily to take a plunge into the B word, or do I find a way to let the moment pass and make healthy choices?

I passed the chicken fingers and the meatballs and the cheesy something and luckily found a vegetable tray and shrimp and some chicken salad that wasn't drowned in mayonnaise. And if you don't struggle with food, it's ok that you are shaking your head and judging my overreactions. But if you do struggle with food, you can relate to this situation. An alcoholic at a bar. A drug addict with some old friends. A food addict in a buffet line.

Will it ever get easier to make food decisions in social situations?  My big take away from last night is to just pause. To use my brain and think about my goals. These small decisions make a big difference in my heart and in my waistline. So I have to think if I keep choosing the right way, this too shall pass.

"Know what you're worth."

My friend asked me last week "Are you still doing your blog?" Yes and no, was my response. I told her that I felt like I ran out of things to say. But the truth is, I need to expand the conversation.

A few weeks ago I started driving for Uber. Since the night time is my worst time for eating and staying on track, I thought this would be a good way to make extra money and help me to not eat Sour Patch Kids while watching excessive amounts of Bravo TV.

It's been really crazy. The people are hilarious. I tweet all the funny things they say and do (you should check it out). Occasionally, I have poignant moments with my Uber riders. Like last night.

I was driving two girls in grad school into downtown Raleigh. They were both in "friends with benefits" relationships with two guys that coincidentally, blew them off last night. In typical Uber fashion, they asked me for advice. And I said "The best advice I can give you is to know what you're worth. You have to teach people how to treat you."

Good advice for those two girls, right? Better advice for me.

The past two weeks something shifted in my brain. See, I have always equated relaxation time with food. Hand in hand. At the end of the day, or at the end of the week, food is my reward. If I am going out to dinner with friends, I focus on the dinner not the friends. If I am watching a movie, I focus on the snacks, not the movie. If it's a birthday party, I wonder what kind of cake we are having and not how old the person is turning.

Food is my addiction, so it does enter into every part of my life. For the better part of the year I have been falling in and out of my addiction. Good days and bad days. Tossed about by the wind. Or my day. Or my mood.

So two weeks ago I decided to restart. For the hundredth time. I decided to realize what I'm worth. I am watching food documentaries, and eating clean, and started with a new trainer, and weighing in, and doing all the things that I know brought me success when I started.

When in doubt, start over. I am not going to flirt with disaster anymore. I am focusing on my worth, and knowing that I am worth it. And I will stop and smell the donuts, but not devour them.

-Liz

Peel the onion.

Ultimately, there comes a point in any blog about weight loss where the blogger just...stops.

Something happens where you reach that goal, or you get tired, or you lose that sense of wonder because the process turns into a grind and you run out of things to say on the subject.

This hasn't happened to me. But it is the end of the beginning.

The onion has peeled for me. About ten times over. My weight has never been just about calories. Or pounds. Or pants sizes. It is much deeper and much more difficult. And I have come to realize that it will never be over. Because we never stop growing, never stop struggling, never stop trying to be better.

So we peel the onion.

The beginning was basic. Work out, eat right, lots of accountability. Results. The middle has been terrible. Back surgery. Neck surgery. Less accountability. The newness wore off. The excitement waned.

It's in the middle when we give up. When most of us move on to something else and put away the thing we struggle so badly to overcome. Instead of peeling the onion, we throw it away because it's too much. It has become too raw, too emotional, too hard.

I now realize why I am allergic to inauthenticy in myself and others. Why I hate it when I see it, and can't stand it when I do it myself. But I also realize why it's so damn hard. Being authenticly me is HARD. It is the peeling of the onion. It is the ripping of a band-aid. It is the breaking down of protective barriers we spent our whole life building.

So even though this blog has a lot of entries about weight loss, I want it to be much more. I want it to be deeper than that. I want to continue to peel the onion and work through what's beneath. It has been full of pain, joy, pauses, progress, and all points in between. But as Henry Cloud says, "Change happens when the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of doing something different."

Peel that onion, world.

Why being open hearted is the best thing and the worst thing all at once.

I had two friend dates last week with amazing ladies that I love. On my first friend date, we were catching up and she said "I loved your blog about blogs being stupid" to which I replied "Yes, but I realized that by calling blogs stupid and experts irrelevant, I have now set myself up for being an expert about experts and that makes me irrelevant."

On my second friend date, my friend asked me how I was doing. I told her I was doing great to which she replied "Oh, come on, I read your blog."

Ouch.

This is why being open hearted is the best thing and the worst thing all at once.

I used to wonder why people have limited relationships. Why people guard their hearts so tightly and don't let others in. Why small talk prevails at parties, why we are more honest over text than in person, why authenticity is so hard to find.

I don't wonder that anymore.

Keeping an openhearted account of my life and struggles with weight and acceptance has opened me up like that guy in Operation. I put everything out there in the hopes that it would help other people. And it has. But at the same time, I put everything out there. And when everything is out there on display, things get scary. Things get emotional. Things get harder than ever.

I feel like I am walking through fire instead of around it. And when we choose to face demons head on like that, it does get scary. So there are nights when all I want to do is hibernate at home with Netflix. There are days where it's hard for me to reach out to anyone because I feel like I am in survival mode.

I am working on perspective. And fighting the urge to be less open hearted. Just like that guy in Operation, my insides are on the outside right now, There is notable pain in living an authentic life, and that's why I understand the need to keep people at a distance now. I understand the need for small talk and texting and guarded hearts. For most of us, it is just too damn painful to be the guy in Operation.

And this is why being open hearted is the best thing and the worst thing all at once. And it's been a lesson to me to be more careful with people, because I have a feeling I am not the only one that is operating this way.

Operating. Get it?

Why blogs are stupid.

There was a time in my life where I thought I knew everything and I was really wise and sharing new ideas with the world that would revolutionize everything.

I looked at Facebook today and post after post after post was like an accident I couldn't turn away from. Advice about parenting. Advice for 20-somethings. Advice for how to get rich quick. Advice for how to be a better Christian. Advice on how I should feel. Advice on how I shouldn't feel. Advice for how to change the world. Advice for how to lose weight easily (which never works because if it did, we would all be thin).

Advice. Advice. More advice.

This is why blogs are stupid. And why I never wanted to have one. I don't know everything and I'm not wise and I don't have any new ideas.

We live in a really dangerous time where people grab on to an idea and worship it. Most of the time, it's our emotional connection to the idea that does this to us. And when we find this idea on social media, we are desperate for connection, so we latch on to something without really thinking about it or questioning it or asking the people we trust and that know us what they might think about it.

For example: I am 38 and single, I don't really have a demographic. But on Facebook, all my friends and peers are posting about weddings and kids and family events. But if I measure my life against theirs, I will always fall short. But we measure how we are doing all the time against all this advice on Facebook. And we always fall short. 

Probably because no one ever posts their struggles on Facebook. We post the best versions of ourselves. We don't upload photo albums highlighting the dark moments of the soul.

Comparison...in a word...sucks. The only way I know to not make my blog stupid is to make it honest. And honestly? This has been one of the darkest years of my life personally. Two back surgeries in one year has derailed the one thing I've been focused on, and losing progress in my health pursuits has been nothing short of heartbreaking. It caused a domino effect of loneliness in me that I am still trying to get a hold of.

Honestly? I am tired of people giving advice. And I am tired of pretending I have advice to give. What I need more of is the "yeah, me too" spirit that the world lacks. The admittance that we are all unsure and that we just don't know. That we are doing the best we can. That we are in it together and don't have the answers.

If this stupid blog helps you be open, it worked. If all it does is make me look like I have some wisdom that no one else does, it failed.

I am learning how to reach out and trust people again. And it's not easy. But it's how I begin to be healthy again. Every day is a choice.

As my dad used to tell me, "Make good decisions." So today, I will. And today is about all I can handle!

Don't censor your heart.

I do believe there are obvious times in life when you have a conversation with someone and you immediately realize that it's important. And, if we could all get on the same page with an idea, revolutionary.

I just got home from a quick trip to visit my family in Pennsylvania and had a conversation with a friend of mine about relationships. And it got deep really fast once we came to the conclusion that every single person on this earth has to make a choice about whether or not we are going to censor our hearts.

You know when you get to that point in any friendship or relationship where it gets risky? Where you realize you have let a person in past the point of comfort and arms length and safety? Where they know your inner workings so much that it's either going to be the greatest thing ever or the worst thing ever?

That's the point where 99% of us censor our hearts. Some of us do it seasonally, some of us do it always. But all of us do it sometimes.

I certainly don't think we should become an open wound and a bleeding heart to every person that we meet. But I do think that we spend our whole lives looking for that person that will love us the way we love them, and care for us the way we care for them. The problem, however, is that while we are looking for those few people, we get a lot of bruises and broken bones in the process.

Break-ups happen in friendships as much as they do in relationships. And they can be just as painful. But what my friend and I talked about is, we all have the choice, when that happens, to either censor our hearts and live in a bubble, or get back out there again and risk injury at the chance of finding the people that will care for us as much as we care for them.

It was an important conversation for me because it reminded me of two things: that I am not alone, and that I am not crazy. And it also reminded me to not censor my heart. To not fall into that trap of being a people pleaser and be someone I'm not to win the approval of anyone.

Oh and just a reminder: you are really great. Especially the uncensored version of you.

(bonus cool points if you can name the 90's singer that sings about the subject of this blog in her epic debut album.)

-Liz

Also: listen to this song. It might be the soundtrack of your life, too.

Working the burn pile at my parents' house.

Burning s**t down.

Hopes and dreams in paper lanterns.