Im glad you seem to be figuring things outIt isnt easy to pin points and such...You were always such a great big positive here on the forum, your loaded with it and we have all missed you and missed it!

I guess I am in the habit of noticing triggers now. I spent a while doing that, some months ago without trying to influence them.

Mine are not that hard to miss just now - quite often I just get that sinking feeling, knowing that someone is about to do the same thing they've done before that drives me crazy - a "stress is coming" moment, where I can can make some choices about how I think about that situation and how stressful I will let it be. Or maybe I don't know it's coming beforehand - but I feel the steam coming out of my ears! Then it's a matter of how long I'm going to let my emotion roll for, and what am I going to do next. For example, I might consider whether the situation is important enough to deserve my response, and if it is, maybe shift the emotion it to an awareness that I WAS rightfully angry without choosing to stay tense and instead letting the tension go from my muscles. I'm still learning, but it is working.

As far as I can remember I was fully outraged twice today. Both times I reckon I was justified in being put out. A woman tried to pinch my parking space in clear defiance of the parking lot etiquette, and my husband firstly reached in between me and the chopping board I was using, so that he could get a little water, then dumped dog meat in the clean bowl I was about to cook cabbage in. So sure, I was justified in asserting myself. Did I need steam coming out of my ears? Nah, not really.

Consequently, I reckon that as well as the in-the-moment stuff, I still need to work on lowering my overall levels of stress also. To do that, I need more physical exercise, and also I need to set aside some time to practice relaxation exercises. On the plus side, I was less anxious than I've been, I was not especially focused on food but I ate properly, and I DIDn't have steam coming out of my ears on about 12 other occasions when I might have done!!

Are you still exercising?Even just a little bit.Those kinda things totally set me off too however I notice when im not exercise as much as usual or at all I get stressed to the max and set off alot more and alot more easily!

Lol.

I hear ya.

When you said "steam coming out of your ears..." it made me think of myself.

I babysit full-time so I spend most my days feeling like my nerve endings are danglin from my finger tips, I'm wound so tight. Lol.

Like right now, I have a four year old in my lap repeating LOUDLY: "What happened!? Why is that green thing waving!" (In reference to the Smilies)

More often than not I'm lucky if I make it through each day without rippin my damn head off.

Lately I've been trying really hard to just chill out though. It makes things so much easier, and life a lot more enjoyable.

Def not as easy said as done tho.

But you're right. Exercise really does help with this. Get's all your endorphins running.

Yep. It's not easy staying cool when there are kids around, but it's worth the effort. Also it's worth the effort to try and cool down after erupting - as I did this afternoon. It really took an effort though.

I had a fabulous walk this morning and knowing that I had, was a help in keeping and then getting myself back together. I was a bit late leaving on the walk, so I was lucky the weather was so pleasant. I took my time, took photos, listened to what is currently the full set of music on my phone and just blissed out.

I hadn't expected that it would make me feel so good. It wasn't really my intention to get a lot out of it physically, just to shift myself towards the place where I want to be. For a long time I've had the idea that the best way for me to make sure I get consistent exercise is to have a habit of doing it very soon after I get up. This was the first little step towards putting it in the right position.

After clashing with my son today, and then doing what else I needed, I was really tired and drained. I've just woken up after falling asleep earlier than normal. I was quite interested to notice how much more tired I was than I have been. I'm guessing it was some hormonal thing related to what happened previously. Feeling sleepy can be a real trap for me, tying in with impulsive poorly controlled eating, so I was super careful about it. So far so good though. This has turned out to be another day where I ate lightly and in a balanced way, with no battles about food.

Welcome back! It's good to "see" you I don't think you need to apologize! But yes, we're glad to have you back

I HIGHLY recommend Yoga It did wonders for me! Changed my life, and no I'm not talking Bikram, LOL!

I'm the same way with lack of sleep--makes me eat uncontrollably at times Glad you enjoyed your walk, and you're right--more exercise and relaxation techniques will help ya in your weight loss / fitness adventure, happy travels!

Thanks. It's good to "see" you too. That energetic avvie really suits you.

Yeah, I guess, I've never felt that anyone else should apologize for being away. It just made me feel bad that people left those kind messages with no visible response from me.

At any rate, this has been a good move for me.

Right now, I'd need some physiotherapy before I tried yoga, but I have the physio booked and the yoga sounds like a good idea.

I just checked - if I go to bed early enough Saturday night, my health club has yoga classes (not Bikram I hope!!) on Sunday morning. (Mind you it is 3 am here now, so that's not exactly a good indication of how likely I am to get up in time

I don't have space in a pm for this, and maybe it's more relevant to put it here anyway.

Self-Criticism
I think criticism can be another word for assessment, and I think self-assessment is required for us to make changes in our lives. Otherwise why would we make changes? How would we know whether the changes are the ones we want?

Attacking ourselves, hating ourselves, putting ourselves down in harsh ways - these are different to healthy self criticism and do damage to ourselves just as much as they would damage our children if we treated them that way. I agree that it can lock us in to negative patterns. I think at times, we can damage ourselves with self hate without even being consciously aware of that. I'm quite sure I've done that. When I was here last year I wrote about a confusing moment I had while I was fighting a potential binge, and over the past months I've often been reminded of that moment. (It's here but geez such a long post and barely relevant - it was just the start of my awareness). I think I've recovered, but I do keep going back and poking the spot because I see I'm not perfectly achieving everything I want, and I like to make sure that's not the reason. I don't want it sneaking up on me again.

I suppose I could try to counteract it with affirmations to myself, and I might do that, though today I have a pretty long to do list and for the near future I have an even longer one. Even deciding to add an affirmation would mean doing a bunch of mental juggling. I suppose it would be like adding a new piece of paper to my messy office type area and trying to decide where to file it. So I will just put the consideration down on-line as a draft file - I'll get to it.

Part of what I'm trying to do as I recover is to keep making progress with a bunch of different parts of my life that are all important to me - weight loss and personal growth are only two of a bigger number. I don't want any of them to get out of control and end up punching me in the head. I'm trying to make changes slowly across a range of parts of my life. LOL. No I'm not - I'm trying to make changes fast across a range of parts of my life, but I only have so much time in the day and I'm trying to practice the discipline of attending to all of them. So that makes some of them reasonably slow, the way they probably should be anyway. I'm a person that loves to follow my inclinations to their extremes, and I don't want to lose that altogether, but I want to be very careful about how I handle it. I think that's critical for me to maintain a weight loss long term.

do you think people who love themselves and their bodies neither abuse themselves nor others?

That seems reasonable - like it makes sense that it would be true. I don't have any personal experience or knowledge of studies or stories that would contradict that. On the other hand I know that people who hate themselves may abuse themselves or others. It would be a hard thing to actually be sure about though.

I can imagine a person who does love herself and her body but has a few insecurities about what she's capable of, and yet wishes to achieve something she's not sure she can manage. (Maybe something like starting a new type of work, or taking a promotion.) She could be safe and not try, or take a risk and give it a go. Maybe she could even believe it was something she could well cope with, then find out she'd been misled about what was required. While she's in the area she's not sure about, she might react badly to the way someone else treats her.

Yes, the love herself thing would impact but what if she gets snowed under with a lot of conflicting demands and a short timeline? What if she's also under physical stress - sudden back pain? Even if she decided it would be more loving to herself to leave, she might be caught in a position where she was responsible for carrying on for a while, regardless of feeling inadequate, and leaving would cause distress to other people. I guess we could say that during that time, she would be loving herself less and that would be why she might make a bad decision that hurts someone else, or stress out and speak meanly to them. Still she might have been loving herself to start with. That's just a fairly simple example. Real life is more complex.

I guess I think that generalizations like the love one, can give us some big clues about useful behaviors, without being the whole story.

I reckon I had a little win last night.

I was about tripping from wanting sleep. That's two days in a row and both days included binges. Inside the bigger picture, I'm not stressing about these binges, but I don't want them. So I amended my tentative thought that maybe it would be enough to work on anxiety and if I did well enough with that, I could fiddle the sleep a bit. Handle it, yanno. Anyway, turns out I was way overestimating my progress, and headed for high stress regardless. I needed everything set up for that, no mucking about.

So last night, reasonably enough, I decide on an early night. These things are relative, especially when my bedroom temperature feels like it's in the high 90's and probably is. So at 5 minutes to midnight I'm trying to read myself back to sleep, wet from a shower and under a fan, when my son arrives. He throws himself across the end of the bed, feet and head don't fit on - that's how big he is these days - but he wants my help.

I totally have that sinking feeling. Yanno, that vision of a slope opening up, sliding away to where you shouldn't be. He's tried to make a change to his computer and totally lost the internet. I don't even want to talk about it, but I do. Then we have the conflict, he wants me to come and look at it, and I can imagine getting hooked in and feeling like I don't even want to leave it until it's sorted out, because computer problems are one of my stress buttons. Many times in the past, I've tried to remove the stress by fixing the problem. I'm not that knowledgeable though and they've caused some all nighters. Logically - they do not need to be one of my buttons any more, but there's an old emotional loop waiting to pull me in.

Boy wanting what I don't want to give him - well that's still a big button, which I might never be over, because he doesn't give up easy and I don't even know that I want him to be someone who gives up easy. However, I want him to put that effort more into what he does himself and less into persuading me to do what I hadn't expected. Cos, yanno, I am the mum and I have to feel okay about putting aside other plans I have to meet the kids' needs when they're needs. Only, NOT at midnight and not when they're wants. So I resisted. It still woke me up big time, partly for the computer issue and partly for the argument, but I was asleep within an hour and I count my small victories. (EDIT: When I woke up in the morning he had used one of my tips and his persistence and fixed it himself. Whew! No need to go there today. )

Still, holidays or not, I'm going to have to get to bed earlier.

OK. So I said I wasn't going to post here in the old way but it doesn't look like that today. Especially not after I post this.

Yay! I finally got the clothes organized this week and today we (feligirl and I) went to swim at the beach. No sharks ate us today. It was just amazing. The water was so clear and beautiful and the feeling of being in the ocean again left me blissed out.



I have done a bunch of things this week with no other purpose than decreasing my tension - and some of them worked well and made me feel unexpectedly wonderful. Today I really just went to the beach, because I was going through the motions. I believed it was the right thing to do today. I had no emotional expectations. It was amazing to feel so good afterwards, like the ocean just dissolved everything awkward and replaced it with sparkles.

We stayed in heaps longer than we realized.

Yay!!

I'm glad you're feeling good, good, good!

I'm also glad no sharks ate you. I would have been very sad. Lol.

It's great you had such an amazing experience!

Hey Felici! Just catching up

self criticism is important in the sense that it should keep us in check...'you ate too much, you didn't workout and you need to' and similar. self-criticism is a powerful tool when used in the right way. the problem with it is that it comes along with self-esteem...our self-esteems are low and hence our self-criticism tends to be too poisonous. it tries to keep us in check but its failing making us more and more miserable. so in my opinion we need to balance these. and we can balance them by giving ourselves balance in everything we do...eating, going out, drinking, stressing, working. moderation is the key...balance is the key.

the need for balance is what is driving me now in my weight loss. i'm trying to reduce stress i feel by practicing yoga. now i'm a beginner so i'm practicing only beginner's positions...but what is helping me is the breathing. focusing on breathing (through your nose...making that windy sound...as some say like the ocean) and movement at the same time really is improving my own focus. i feel more balanced. and i've been doing this for what...three weeks maybe. and the good thing is i use this breathing also at work and i've noticed i'm less anxious. maybe that can help you too.