Monthly Archives: August 2013

The moon…

MoonisaharshMistress

Fresh breeze

earlymorning

It’s easy to get buried in a project or something you do for a long time. Obsessions get born daily, in fact, I am perfectly aware of how obsessive I can get sometimes. The upside is a profound experience. The downside – it’s time-consuming and takes the focus off everything else. Your mind becomes one-tracked.

I’ve recently been immersed in my private little project of losing weight. If you never had to struggle with this issue, count yourself among the fortunate ones. When I think about it, the issue has been a central one since my high-school days. Twenty years, more than half of my life. A low self-esteem and various, minor psychological defects resulted in my weight gradually building up to what started to really bother me in the past few years, not only because of my looks, but also because of health problems that my surplus weight brought into focus. So a few years ago I started exercising, on and off, trying out routines, diets, looking into different types of exercise. Of course, my weight has been fluctuating.

A few months ago I took the matter into my hands, for real. My husband and I implemented a “sweet Saturday” regime, which means that we are trying to eat refined sweets only on Saturdays. The first two weeks were hard – after that, we got into the groove. Speaking from my own point of view, I think it’s easy to do and it does wonders to your metabolism, your overall mood and it also helps weight-loss. I started exercising regularly. Not only once a week, or whenever I remembered to do so, but almost daily. And not only ten, but most of the time, thirty, forty, or even sixty minutes, or more. I combine exercise for abs with powerful cardio (Kari Anderson’s magnificent step routines or Mary Windsor’s “Fat-burning Pilates”, which is my recent favourite, because aside from making me sweat, it opens of my muscles and my back). Also, I’ve been trying to drop my intake of carbs. I’m doing my best to stay away from refined white flour, sugar, and fatty foods. We eat loads of fruits and vegetables. For breakfast, I tend to have just fruit and a café latte, if anything. For lunch, a light meal, salad, soup, or leftovers, in smaller quantities. I also discovered the “5:2” diet a couple of weeks ago and today I am doing my second fasting day – as hard as it sounds, I find it truly, really easy. I drink fluids, I know my body is losing toxins, and I know that in the evening I will enjoy my dinner a great deal.

The long and short of this is that I’ve been losing weight. Slowly but steadily. I’m down appr. six-seven kilograms since I started the “project”, three or four months ago. My goal is to drop appr. 9-10 more, and then I will have achieved my ideal weight. I’m feeling lighter, stronger, more agile, and I’m definitely loving the fact that patches of fat that have been constant for the last, I don’t know, ten years or so, are slowly disappearing. Clothes are looser than before, and I am slowly plucking up courage to fish out some jeans that I haven’t worn in many, many years.

The downside to all this is that in between the above and my translating work, which has basically taken up most of my brain activity since last December, I recently found myself unable to think of anything else than weight-loss, exercise, diet, calories, and everything pertaining to these subjects. And it started to disturb me. I am aware of the mechanics of obsession. I’ve lived through the entire process for more times than I can count, and even though, each time, I was able to receive something memorable from the experience, a spiritual moment, an insight, or a friend, I know that in the long run obsessive behaviour is emotionally, mentally, physically and socially unhealthy. So last night I looked at myself and the way I’ve recently become and I knew something had to change. I had to find something to take my mind off the weight-loss project.

The Universe came to my rescue. I met a few old university friends, whose company revived me and gave me a push into the right direction. One of them suggested a free online course community that gathers freely offered online college courses given by universities from around the world. A few days ago someone shared something very similar on Facebook. So this morning I looked into the two websites, and I’m happy to say that I already signed up for a course on psychology, and I’m looking at a few more. They are free, I do them when I have the time, and they will teach me something new, as well as broaden my recently significantly narrowed outlook on life.

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

https://www.coursera.org/

So apart from enjoying the benefits of a gradually slimming body (naturally I will keep up the exercise and the healthy diet), I will be able to drop the obsession-factor. It’s a really lovely fresh breeze and it came at the right moment, in fact, it came when I asked it to come. Our thoughts create our reality – if there’s anything left for me to believe in, it is this. We help create our world. It’s big power, and a very big responsibility.