The Best Advice Anyone Ever Gave Me

I walked into the room not knowing what to expect and I definitely wasn’t expecting to hear the best advice anyone ever gave me.  My insurance company had randomly assigned a psychologist on the sole basis of her being an in-network provider. I had only been to therapy a handful of times before this and it wasn’t very productive.  Desperate times called for drastic measures, so I decided to give therapy another try because my family desperately needed help.

Little did I know that within minutes, I would be receiving the best advice anyone ever gave me.

When My Stress Level Was At Its Peak

Something happened to my healthy beautiful baby boy when he was about 18 months old.  He lost speech and eye contact. He also became very irritable, impulsive, and aggressive.  The aggressive spells were scary.  It seemed impossible to believe that a little boy could try to strangle his mother or chase her around the house with a butcher knife, but this was now part of my everyday reality.  To make the situation even less bearable, he didn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time which meant we were waking up 3-4 times a night. I was exhausted, defeated, exasperated, broken-hearted, and scarred.

The Best Advice Anyone Ever Gave Me

I liked the psychologist at first glance. She was kind, confident, empathetic, a good listener, and spoke intelligently. I noticed tears dropping from her eyes a few times as I told her my story, so I knew she understood the severity of my situation and had empathy for it.

Mid-session, she leaned in and asked what I was doing to take care of myself. I looked at her with disbelief. Did I really make my husband take off work to watch my son and drive 45 minutes to talk to her about this? I needed help with my son’s behavior, not myself.

To this day I am incredibly thankful that I was too exhausted to get up and walk out of the room.

She must have noticed the way I was looking at her or saw the tears gushing from my eyes. She quickly said, “Please just listen to this example.  If you were on a plane and the oxygen masks came down, you would need to put yours on first.  Otherwise, you might pass out or not be strong enough to help your children. You need to take good care of your mind, body, and soul so you can pass it on to them.  Your children need you at your best. ”

“When the well is dry, we know the worth of the water.”   – Benjamin Franklin

And When I Finally Took The Advice

It took me years to take the wise therapist’s advice and by the time I did, I couldn’t remember her name.  If I could, I would have written her a thank you note filled with gratitude and respect for the best advice anyone has ever given me. Her words not only changed my life but more importantly to me, changed my children’s lives.

Taking time for self-care made me a happier Mom overall and I became more able to give my children quality, positive time and energy and most importantly my best self.  I quickly noticed my son’s behavior got better too! I know my kids noticed a difference in me and hope I am teaching them by example to take great care of themselves when they are parents.  After all, we all want our children to be happy and take great care of themselves, don’t we?

I hope and pray that my circumstances were more severe than yours are or ever will be.  Either way, the message is the same.   There is nothing selfish about self-care.  As a matter of fact, it’s one of the best gifts you can give your family.

I hope you do something amazingly restorative for yourself today!

Cheers!

Tanya

 

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Why Haven’t I Lost Weight?

 

Today I awoke baffled and began reflecting on two blogs I wrote a few days ago titled Why and the Pursuit of Ketosis- Day 4.  After reading those blogs, my inner Sales Manager would have hired me for the position of Successful Dieter in a New York Minute.  So, why haven’t I lost all the weight?

I quickly decided that there must be more to this weight loss journey than just eating a specific number of calories daily, exercising, and weighing myself.  Hmmm.  Exasperated by this sixteen-year journey, nothing came to mind.

I thought to myself, “What question would I ask if I was interviewing a potential new hire? I know, I would ask them to walk me through the times in their life when they had gained substantial weight”.

The Freshmen 32:

Well,  there was this one time in college……  I walked into my Dad’s house expecting to go for a bike ride or breakfast.  Instead, he was standing very firmly at the top of the stairs.

“You are going to break up with that guy today,” he said.

I had been dating my high school-turned-college boyfriend for well over three years when my Dad caught wind that he had done something most Dad’s wouldn’t approve of.

Within a second we were in a standoff.  My Dad’s forehead was so red and veins I didn’t know he had were popping out of his head.  And then he calmly said, “If you continue to so much as talk to him, you will not see another dime of my money and that means no college tuition.”

A week later the letter saying my college tuition hadn’t been paid came in the mail.  I had days to come up with the money or I would need to withdraw from the semester!

I made an appointment with the financial aid office.  Being the only child of a man who had the means to easily pay my tuition,  didn’t help my case with the financial aid office.  Luckily the financial aid counselor had a big heart and found a way to help me out with a fraction of my tuition.

Within days I had three jobs.  I had already committed to rushing a sorority and continued full throttle with that only missing one rush event. And as for my grades, 15 credits and just shy of a 4.0.

Ask me about my weight – I gained 32 pounds in one semester!

And The A Word That Took My Weight Loss Efforts Down:

Autism rolled into my life like a hurricane.  Within a few days, my healthy Son looked so sickly, had a huge distended stomach, didn’t poop for days, and lost speech. To make matters worse, he didn’t sleep for more than two hours at a time, had extreme sensory issues, and the impulsive and aggressive behavior was dangerous and scary..  Everywhere I went, I felt like people were judging my parenting skills.  And to make matters worse, my husband and I were not seeing eye to eye on our parenting approaches.  I have never been so stressed out in my entire life.

I gained 60 pounds in less than a year and a half!

And This One Time When I Had “Balance” In My Life:

And then there was this one time about a year and a half ago,  my life was, dare I say, in balance.  I walked an hour a day, made it to my yoga mat at least twice a week, lifted weights 2-3 times a week,  journaled about 1500 calories a day on myfitnesspal and dropped substantial unwanted pounds.

Then, I accepted a job I thought sounded fun and easy enough.  I would be working for a great company and with a dynamic team.  The position itself wasn’t stressful but there were always a lot of balls in the air,  and a demanding travel and social schedule.  I enjoyed the position but it definitely threw my family out of balance and life at home got really chaotic.

Ask me how many pounds I gained in less than 4 months – 37!

There is a common theme in all of these situations and I’m sure she is part of the root cause of my weight gain setbacks in my weight loss journey.  and the likely reason why I haven’t lost all the weight.  I’ll introduce you to her in my next blog,  but be prepared, I’m next to positive you won’t like her one bit.

Weight Loss Help

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What Would Your Perfect Weight Loss Day Look Like?

 

“There is no perfect condition so now is the perfect time and today is the perfect day to take action”- Debasish Mridha

I awake and step toward the almighty scale.  I do have a small accomplishment, I made it through the movies yesterday without eating popcorn and as you know from The Pursuit of Ketosis – Day 3 this is no small feat for me.  Luckily my movie theater now sells these delicious Whisp snacks and they are high protein, low carb, and gluten-free!

I need to make a quick confession, I snuck a Propel into the theater.  Not because I’m cheap, but because the theater doesn’t really offer anything for me to drink.  I breezed right past security.  If you stuff your purse with enough tampons, you can get just about anything past a male security guard.

Yesterday was an exercise rest day for me, I know what that means.  When I don’t move, the scale doesn’t move.  I step on the scale and voila, no change in weight.

I need to make another confession.   Even though I have clearly determined in my last few blogs and specifically in Are You or Someone You Love Gluten Intolerant?  I’m still eating gluten!  You must think I’m crazy right?  Do you want to know why?  It’s because I bought all the clinics snacks and I don’t want to waste them.  So instead of wasting them, I might as well poison myself.  Crazy thinking, I know.

As I sit down at my desk a calendar reminder pops up for Surfers Healing and I instantly feel my heart skip a beat.  Surfers Healing is a non- profit organization that teaches children with autism to surf which is amazing, but it is so much more than that.

Surfers Healing High Fives

Have you ever entered a room, an event, or in this case a beach and felt chills throughout your legs and so much emotion in your body that tears start to flow?  We have been fortunate to attend Surfers Healing two years in a row and it has happened to me twice.

Beautiful Day at the Beach

I know I’m not the only one who has these feelings toward the event because a Mom friend of mine described the day as being exhilarating, beautiful, and miraculous.

The best part is watching the kids react to the amazing environment that the caring team fills the beach with. I’ve watched children stop stimming, echolalia diminish, and kids previously plagued with anxiety relax and enjoy themselves.  One of the most amazing things is that this team of talented surfer volunteers somehow gets almost every kid up a surfboard!

Surfs Up

The Surfer’s Healing team hashtags their event photos #oneperfectday and I can’t think of a more appropriate tag.

So, what does this have to do with weight loss?  Well, what if we had one perfect weight loss day?  What would it look like? What would you do?  What would you eat? What type of exercise would you partake in?  And most importantly, how would you feel?

Wishing you one perfect weight loss day!

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They Say Confession Is Good for the Soul, Hoping It’s Even Better for Weight Loss

“SLOW Progress is better than NO Progress” – Fitlosophy Calendar

I awake and move towards the almighty scale not really knowing what to expect.  Yesterday was a good enough diet day, not great but not bad.  It was a little off, ok, maybe more than a little.  I’m overdue for my vitamin B shot so I was exhausted all day and it was hard to muster up the energy to exercise.  The shot also contains inositol which really does great things for me.  It seems to drastically reduce my food cravings and help balance my blood sugar which makes me less hungry, so sans inositol I was very hungry all day. Check out https://draxe.com/inositol/

For the first time since she’s been driving, I eagerly jumped in the car with my 15-year-old daughter Taylor yesterday, so she could take me to the weight loss clinic.  I was excited to get my vitamin B shot and purchase a bottle of the Fat Burner.  The clinic is about 15 minutes of pure driving torture from my house.  When we got there, we discovered the clinic was closed for the day.  Ugh.  How could I be so irresponsible to run out of the Fat Burner and get behind on my vitamin B shot?  I thought about throwing myself on the ground and pitching a fit.  I also contemplated driving 45 minutes away to the next closest clinic, but my kids’ schedules wouldn’t allow for either, so I decided to wait until tomorrow.

As for exercise, I walked and did 8 minutes of kickboxing, but I couldn’t walk at the same intensity I normally do.  My Son’s amazing therapist and sitter, who has become an integral part of our family and has worked for us for over two years, is leaving for grad school in two days.  If that isn’t a reason to slurp down two martinis and a piece of flourless chocolate cake I don’t know what is.  Anyways, a potential babysitting candidate called right at the moment I was going to take off for a walk.  Finding good sitters that work for my special needs son is like finding gold on the beach, so I had to talk to her. I walked for our entire 40-minute conversation, but I didn’t want to scare her away, so I didn’t walk at my normal super-freak intensity.

Looks like the almighty scale is registering in at the same weight as yesterday.  I’ll take it for today.  I will be getting my vitamin B shot and Fat Burner today, and eating better and getting a better work out in, so the scale should know she’ll be going down!

I have a confession to make.  I eat processed food sometimes.  I don’t like to and with all the special diets we’ve been through with my son who has been affected by Autism,  I can’t even believe I do, but sometimes when push comes to shove, I eat processed foods.

And yesterday was one of those days.  I had a goal of starting to publish my food journals on Pinterest yesterday and almost didn’t because I was embarrassed by the fact that I had eaten processed food a few times throughout the day.  I stock a few of the weight loss clinics high protein low carb snacks so I have them in a pinch.  My favorites are the chocolate celebration delite bars and the BBQ zappers because they are both tasty treats that ring in at under 100 calories and 10 grams of protein.  They can be found in Tanya’s Treasures.

I have another confession to make.  I’m thinking of cheating on my diet. Well, I guess I have already kind of started.  I was googling around last night, and one click led to another……  I came across The South Beach Diet Super Charged.  I told you about Tony and my success with the South Beach Diet in 1,2,3 Ketosis Again, so how could I not be curious?  I ordered the book and well, we’ll see.

What about you, what would you like to confess?

Weight Loss Confessions

 

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