Checkin and review of blog

Without having gone overboard on anything, I looked briefly back through my blog and assessed my progress.

Today my measured weight is lower than ever measured this summer. I was going to say, “in spite of what I ate,” but the reality is, my weight is what it is, DUE to what I ate. The scale gave me no opportunity to beat myself up over eating too many carbs or too many refined carbs, because it showed a good steady weight loss, and I ate an amount that I could live with for the rest of my life. In fact, the only cravings I had were for more veggies.

The last 2 days my eating has been without the obsession of “trying” to keep small portions or a certain mix of foods. It’s been, shall we say, normal. I still have goals around eating habits, but I also still have goals around most of the rest of my habits.

Another thing that is working well at the moment is my self-talk. After evaluating what I was measuring and paying attention to, I concluded that I would prefer to pay attention to something that will change my behavior toward my desired future state. This I say while completely disregarding the statements of Daniel Gilbert, who finds it MOL useless to work towards a future state of a person, meainly because he thinks it detracts from the current enjoyment of life. Sort of an intellectual’s version of “you gotta stop and smell the roses.”

Daniel Gilbert notwithstanding, I prefer to obsess less about what I should be doing or not doing. After listening to myself over the course of a day, I found that I was still frequently doing micro-obsessions, namely thinking thinking thinking useless repetitive thoughts about a topic that could have been decided upon and forgotten.

My battle with micro-obsessions is being fought with micro-self-talk. LOL What I mean here is I choose to not have micro-obsessions, so every hour I check in with myself and see if there’s anything that I need to simply decide on and to choose to stop thinking about it.  This is a great relief, because it gives me an out from compulsive worrying, a trait that is clearly genetic, as I observe based on my maternal history.

ABCDEF on micro-obsessions

Activating Event: There’s a pretty steady stream of worry running through my head. I found myself worrying about anything (no worry too small!) and not stopping.

Irrational Belief: Constantly thinking about something will give me relief or a better answer

Consequences of this irrational belief: I’m constantly worrying about something that doesn’t deserve worrying about, be it past or future. It takes away from the pleasure at hand.

Dispute the irrational belief:

Look, some of the things you’ve been obsessing about include

• what you should be eating
• what you’ve said or done in the past
• what might happen, regardless of its likelihood of occurrence
• how you should be doing something better

None of these things are actionable. You are an excellent planner, so you’ve made all of the plans really necessary for the future. 

Effective new thinking: You prefer to obsess less. Well, rather than doing this worrying and thinking that becomes obsessive, why don’t you practice stopping obsessive thinking? A reasonable goal for this is to checkin with yourself every hour to see what you can simply decide to stop worrying/thinking about.

Feelings: Relief! to find some self-talk that addresses my issues, and doesn’t look at technical changes like my eating patterns.