Perfectionism - BE GONE!

Ahhh perfectionism...My favorite form of procrastination. I've done the posts. But they are not just quite right, so I delete them. Not save them in draft, nope, delete them. Why, I guess so I don't have to share my lack of perfection with the ethernet. I always think I have held it at bay and then it sneaks in and rears its ugly head.

But I'm a firm believer that naming the problem is more than half the battle. So this is getting posted no matter what. It kind of helps that it was a good scale morning too!

I've been cooking this week and just about got all the junk food that I like out of the house. My husband's birthday cake is still lingering, but fortunately it is WAY to rich for me, but it does get me thinking about other types of chocolate which, as always, leads to chips. And those chips are how this whole weight loss program began. (Insert "Wayne's World" flashback music here...)

Back in late February I felt like I was coming down with the flu one afternoon. Not unheard of in Feb., but I don't get sick to often and I always think it's something else. Well this particular afternoon I was trying to find something to "settle my stomach" and thought - "oh yes, chips." As I opened the cupboard I remembered that we had run out of chips the day before. Hmm...

(A side bar here - I can remember this day like it was yesterday. I can see myself at this cupboard as I type and feel how I was feeling.)

As odd as this is going to sound to some - it was indeed the lack of chips making me sick. I found it unbelievable too, at first.

Now, I love chips - Lay's plain potato chips are first with Doritos (original) a close second, but really any chip will do. But I always believed I ate them very moderately. This day I found I was dead wrong.

Fortunately we were out and I decided to eat some plain turkey instead. I felt a little better, but was down until around 6pm, then I felt pretty good again. I felt fine the next day, but around 4pm, I started feeling "flu-ish" again. That's when I really began to understand it was the chips. (Even as I'm typing right now, I'm getting a small headache and feeling a bit nauseous...) I was going through a withdrawal from them. Similar to coffee.

A friend and I were talking once about diabetics not being able to stop consuming sugar because they felt better after eating it and we agreed heroin and crack users probably felt a lot better after getting their fix too. Even though it was slowly killing them. Same with sugar for a diabetic and apparently the same with chips for an obese person.

The good news is, I haven't had a chip since then. And let me tell you - I was so sick - every day from 4-6pm - the main times I ate my chips. It took a full week to get past feeling sick. Then about a week later I went to a movie and had popcorn. BIG mistake. I was really sick the next day and all day. I decided no more "sharp" food. I know even outside of whatever horrible ingredients are in those things the "sharp" edges do a number on my digestive system so I stopped it all.

The bummer was, I did not lose a pound. Nada! But I noticed my dry hands and feet started clearing up and I just felt better. I figured if I could stop all chips for this long it might be a good time to get some other things under control too. Namely, my food intake. I wanted to make sure I didn't start substituting different bad stuff for the chips. And I haven't.

That one conscious decision has led me to a series of decisions culminating in finally doing the hard work to regain my health. These decisions have come from me - not motivation from a book or talk show host or television show, but from me. That is one reason why I am so confident I will be successful this time, once and for all.