ARE YOU CHASING NORMAL?
There are times where we look at the work we are doing to make change and achieve our results and get overwhelmed. Tracking food, getting up early to exercise, saying no to treats, and more feel necessary but simply feel like work, and like a lot of work at that. We can simultaneously be enjoying the results of our efforts but also have thoughts like:
“Can I really keep this up?”
“This feels like too much.”
“Why do I have to do this when so many people I know just eat what they want and stay healthy?”
“I just want to go back to not having to think about or plan food!”
“What’s wrong with me? Why am I so broken?”
“I just want to be normal!!!”
I cried myself to sleep many nights with those thoughts swirling in my head. I get it. We see other people who do not struggle with food or their weight seemingly moving through life never having to give food a thought, eating what they want, and living a healthy life. I wanted to just scream “Why!?!?!” every time the thought entered my head. Can you relate to this? For me, it became one of the biggest hurdles I had to overcome and I want to talk about how I did it, because I honestly believe that you can too! You can stop chasing normal.
Normal is a perception, not a fact.
So let’s address what I consider to be the elephant in the room when it comes to working on chasing normal… Normal as we’re perceiving it just simply does not exist. It is a dream and an ideal that we project onto other people. This is why I firmly believe it is a perception issue. The reality is, the people and state of normality that we see they live within are in reality giving more thought to food and activity than we believe. The difference is for them, this is something that involves skills they built earlier in life and challenges that we do not know that they are facing. We know our own issues very well but we don’t often come together with others and talk about all of this! The person we are envious of may be dealing with challenges around food and body image that we may never hear about. So moving forward, I want to put normal in quotes because part of the work needed is going to be how we define “normal.”
“Normal” got you where you started.
After my last point, I am certain that there is a contingent out there reading this saying, “That’s great but you don’t understand, I used to feel normal around food and now that I am losing weight it feels like conscious work.” To that I want to say that often when we are overwhelmed and exhausted, we put on a pair of rose colored glasses when we look to our own past. We will vehemently claim that as bad off as we were, at least we didn’t obsess about food. It feels like we just ate what we wanted without much thought, and this is true to an extent. The reality is that the “normal” we want to return to was filled with skewed and disordered perspectives on food that brought us to the point where we felt we needed to make change! That “normal” added up to life at a place where other things were missing in our lives because of it. “Normal” included a slew of things we tolerated, like for me it included severely impacted mobility, inability to buy clothing I actually liked, and more. Is the “normal” we’re chasing even something that we have ever experienced in our lives? I think the truthful answer is no. So what do we do? What did I do?!
It is about defining a new normal.
Plain and simple, the answer isn’t chasing a “normal” that we perceive in others or our past, but instead doing conscious work to accept that we must build a new normal. Now while the concept may sound simple, the work to do it is hard. In a lot of ways it took accepting that my definition of normal had to be rebuilt and I had to let go of what I held in my head previously. It took empowering myself to do this and to stop worrying about outside perception as well. I wanted to lose weight to save my life, and be an active participant in life. I had to accept that doing that would take building new habits and mindfulness, especially around food, that would feel awkward and like work at first. I had to shift my focus from that work being about depriving me of what I wanted and instead was about giving me what I truly needed. Knowing my purpose for making change not only helped me define a new normal but made me actually want to do it.
Defining your new normal will mean working on self-acceptance of your challenges. Things you may need to do for the rest of your life to keep you healthy may not have been in your previous picture of normality. For example, for me this means planning most of my food choices. I don’t often “wing it” because that is a space I know it becomes easy for old bad habits to resurface. This is not something that is broken in me or wrong with me, it is simply what I need to do. Giving yourself the grace to do the things you need to for yourself without getting angry or judging them is important! Sometimes when we are working on healing, the end result of that healing looks differently than we expected it to when we started. Being open to that possibility can lead to you feeling stronger than you ever have before. I know that was the result for me. I truly believe this part of the journey is one that is important for every person to go through.
Often with clients who are working through this I will say, “If doing these things allows you to not only achieve but maintain your health goals, and everything that comes with them, would that make them worth doing forever? You might not have to do everything the same way, but are you willing to accept that your new normal might involve maintaining new habits?” The answer is sometimes “yes,” and sometimes “I am not sure.” If you’re sitting in that not sure place right now, I would love to actually talk to you about it. Scheduling a call doesn’t mean you’re committing to anything but instead taking some time to talk through things like I have discussed today so you can clarify the path you need. So don’t hesitate to click here and do that if you think it might help, you’ll find links to talk to me and Coach Jon!
