Of Life, Love, Loss and Fullness
There are two things that I think I have clung to since I was a child, the avoidance of loss and the feeling of fullness. I liked them both. Perhaps genetically, I come from a long line of shepherds, but I like to know that my people and things that I love are accounted for when I go to bed at night. If one “lamb” was missing, I would be an anxious, little mess as a child. I have learnt to mask this anxiety as an adult, but fundamentally the feeling still bubbles under the surface, sometimes unacknowledged and unconscious.
I don’t do loss very well, certainly not of anything I truly love. Friends, I have collected from when I was as young as six, are still in my life; people I love, fill a space in my heart and if they leave, the shape of the space they created deflates and I don’t like the feeling of emptiness. I need the fullness of my peeps. I also like the feeling of fullness after a meal, surrounded by the people I love. Maybe that is the Italian in me, but that is the ultimate bliss. So musing on this I turned my thoughts to my own emigration (I am reading Joanne Fedler’s book and it is certainly similar). In emigrating, I lost the ability to “count my sheep” as I got into bed at night. I had no idea where they were, in fact they were prancing around in daylight, wide-awake while I was dreaming on the other side of the world. One loses a lot when one abandons your home, your culture, your music, your life and starts over. I gained a lot too and have been enormously blessed, but it made me really hate loss even more!
So how does this translate to weight loss. It just feels like another loss I have to endure, another emptiness, another deflation of a space that something I loved used to occupy. Yes, there is a gain. Just like my wonderful new home, that gave me an amazing career, more freedom than I ever dreamed of, the ability to build wealth in a stable currency, an infrastructure that is first world and even tiny things like the ability for me to walk unharmed, at 10pm on a foggy, winter’s night, alone, with ipods in my ears is amazing. But the loss if horrible. Going forward I am banishing loss, to the extent that I can. My no diet philosophy has a new angle, it is the gaining of health. Out with loss! And if you are reading this and you are one of my peeps, far away, I still hold you with fullness 🙂
Onwards to a successful week for all of my buddies all around the world…
I too responded to emigration with weight gain, but found my change of lens was pregnancy, and breastfeeding ( yes!) Once I stopped thinking every minute of every day what my next meal would, or would not be, and just ate what I needed, I lost the anxiety that was attached to food, and the weight too.Now I exercise regularly, because I like it, and its become part of my routine, but that again stops the anxiety associated with a biscuit, ensuring that the biscuit remains singular.
Jan, that is brilliant! You are a GP…what is your view on the anxiety and weight gain? Absolutely fine if you don’t want to comment for professional reasons…I get that. But do we understand enough of the connection between the chemistry of our thoughts and the impacts on our bodies?