The Green Mountain Diaries – Day 3
This is how I feel right now…
at peace. loved, loving and in love. happy in my body. grateful. empowered. unstoppable.
Do you know that I never leave the house without make-up? Did you know that I often wear high-heels or platforms to make myself appear thinner? Being here every day – often with no make-up, wearing sweats and tennis shoes, I feel closer to myself and actually feel more beautiful. This doesn’t mean I’m going to wear sweats to work everyday and never put mascara on again, but it means I’ve let go of my stringent habit of maintaining a facade at all times.
Is this the Green Mountain at Fox Run effect? Can this feeling last?
I’m convinced that self-love without contingency is possible. Am I there yet? No. But I’m hopeful. I think hope (in one’s self) is a HUGE step towards self-love.
The morning started with breakfast at 8 a.m. for me, though I had the option of a 7 a.m. “morning momentum” class. After breakfast, I took “Lower Body Conditioning 101″ with Kate (I would describe Kate as someone who is incredibly beautiful and down to earth with a contagious positive spirit). We used our body weight in this class and did basic moves like squats, leg lifts, pelvic thrusts (is there a more technical name for these?), calf raises, crunches and lunges. There was simultaneously a class on lower body conditioning with machines taught by LynnAnn but in a different room. I think classes like these are so important ESPECIALLY for beginners. Do you remember when you were afraid to go to the gym or to do any body-weight work-out because you didn’t even know where to start, let alone anything about proper form?! It took me getting fit to get the courage to go to the gym and that’s just wrong. And, even though the class I took was a “101″ class, my ass still got handed to me (that’s the beauty of using your body weight and having the ability to exaggerate a move).
Next was a mental challenge: “Nurturing the Whole Self” taught by Darla Breckenridge, who is Green Mountain at Fox Run‘s psychologist. I expected I would love Darla because people told me I would, but I knew I’d love her after 5 minutes into her chat when she mentioned that it’s important to use words that we believe and that resonate with us when defining our own version of “self nurturing.” Why did I enjoy that so much? I’m a firm believer that our diction plays a huge role in how we can effect or hinder both personal and societal change. Just ask my bosses 
So, I appreciated that. Darla’s discussion centered on squashing negative self-talk with thought-stopping and positive affirmations. She discussed habit formation and how it’s easier to add something to our lives, such as a positive affirmation every time we complete a particular task, than to take something away (such as our propensity to call ourselves ‘fat’). It’s about making self-care the habit and building a new neuropathway over time (takes 300 repetitions!). We were asked to answer the following, to help us pave the way for some positive affirmations we may choose to make habit:
- one thing I like about myself is ______
- one thing I’m good at is ______
- I am ______ (quality)
I invite you to answer those for yourself and to believe them.
My 5 biggest take-aways from Darla’s discussion were:
- move away from judgment and harsh self-talk. treat yourself as you would a child – with forgiveness and compassion (“take the blame out. the blame is much worse than the pie!” – Darla)
- “No one has done the research to prove that when you criticize people, they change their behavior!” – Darla. So don’t think that by belittling yourself for a behavior you’re doing yourself any favors! [shall we send this golden nugget to Strong4Life?]
- we need to take the time to re-connect with ourselves – we can use breathing to connect to the body, we can use affirmations and self-love to connect with the mind, we can use an activity of being that brings us to our spiritual & creative selves (music is a good one).
- emotional eating is habitual. you can create a new habit for dealing with that emotion.
- “you are something beyond what you did” – Darla
Golden nuggets, right?
Later, I took “Identify your Personal Eating Style” with Robyn where I found out that my eating style correlates with the “diet mentality eater” more than it does with that of the emotional eater, the chaotic eater or the dysregulated eater. It makes sense, but I still found it surprising.
We learned about food optioning, which allows you to eat the things you love and also take the power away from food. One thing that Robyn repeatedly said, which I loved, was, “it can’t hurt to experiment to find what’s going to work for you.” I immediately think people are more credible when they advocate that each person take her own journey to self-discovery (no cookie-cutter approaches here!).
We learned general strategies for dealing with each type of behavior, but understood that they overlap (and that again we should experiment). I found the following useful and easily translatable to other areas of our lives:
Four Stages of Changing Emotional Eating (though I imagine this would work for any sort of compulsion)
- Unconscious emotional eating
- Conscious emotional eating (I’m guessing this is where “mindful binges” would fall)
- Conscious choice of alternatives
- Unconscious (habit! building new neuropathways!)
After my brain had a work-out there was nothing left to do but give my body one, too, so I tried snowshoeing for the first time! It is one of the funnest activities ever! I’m sure part of the appeal and draw was the scenery…
An additional thing I’ve learned about myself over this trip is that I’m very panicky. First the plane incident. Then the mitten incident. What was the mitten incident, you ask? Well, I was wearing thin little rinky-dink knit gloves and soon convinced myself I was getting frost bite because I couldn’t feel my fingers. So, I started to haul ass and kept making fists with my hands. Thankfully a pal offered to switch my gloves for her mittens as she was used to the cold weather and was already warm. It’s no wonder a few people here call me “California”
If you’ve never snowshoed, you’ll have to try it! It’s like wearing strap-on flippers that have traction which makes it easy to plow through the snow. With the actual inches of snow beneath us, and the several hills, it was quite a work out!
After snowshoeing, I relaxed for a bit then decided to relax further with “Gentle Yoga,” taught my Barbara. It was very peaceful and slow-mo – no cardio mixed in like my Jillian Michael’s Yoga Meltdown DVD 
We did moves like downward dog, sun salutations, table pose, plank, upward boat and more basic poses. A great way to prep for dinner. By this time I actually felt hungry. And, I’ll be honest, feeling hungry is not something I can typically identify.
Tonight there was the option of a stress management class with Darla, which I would have loved to take, but I decided, instead, to wind down, blog and get ready for bed. I call it managing stress 
My favorite part of the day, hands down, was dinner. I’ll tell you one of the things I enjoy most is hearing other people’s stories. I am truly enlivened and heartened by the presence of so many intelligent and compassionate women. And, it’s nice to spend time with people who share my struggles in some way or who can truly empathize.
What a lovely day to be.
<3,
The Cranky One
Tags: dieting, emotional eating, green mountain at fox run, intrinsic exercise, intuitive eating, mindful eating, self-love
One Person has left comments on this post
“it can’t hurt to experiment to find what’s going to work for you.”
I agree. I’m a big fan of self-experimentation, as advocated by Seth Roberts in his best-selling book about his Shangri-La Diet.
And I’ve found that what works for me often doesn’t work for somebody else, and vice versa.
So I’ve also learned to stand up for myself and not blindly follow the conventional wisdom. And that gets doctors very upset when I question their “doctors’ orders.”