Hi Brooke,
I wanted to share a big win I had this morning (please feel free to delete this if you don’t think it’s appropriate here!).
I’ve been doing IF for almost 2 weeks now (11 days while vacationing in Mexico and 2 days since getting back home). It’s going amazing. I did a ton of research on IF and exercise because I love to exercise first thing in the AM and am taking BCAAs before and after my workouts to prevent muscle breakdown and I finally feel like my efforts are paying off. My bloating is completely gone – so THANK YOU!
This morning, I had an early breakfast meeting with a bunch of colleagues. I had decided ahead of time that I would make a coffee at home and then have another at the breakfast and fast until noon, as usual. And then I arrived and when the menus came, I told myself I was going to decline. But that was until I had a thought that went “OMG Sam, just order breakfast. It’s not going to kill you. You can NOT fast for one day, you’re not going to go off track. And you’ll probably have to explain to everyone why you aren’t eating and then people will scoff and say ‘why do you need to lose weight, you’re so fit'”. And so I opened the menu and started looking for something to eat.
As I flipped through the menu, I had another thought that went “You don’t even like Cora’s and there’s nothing on here that you even want”. This was a 1000% true thought. So I closed the menu and declined ordering. And you know what? No one blinked an eye and we went on with our meeting.
2 hours later as I was driving home, I realized that the 2 hour meeting happened, the food arrived at the table and I didn’t even notice. I didn’t have any thoughts regretting not ordering; seeing my colleagues eat didn’t make me feel hungry and at no point did I feel deprived. I truly didn’t even notice what had transpired until I started thinking about it during my drive home. The most uncomfortable part for me was actually having to have that mental conversation with myself and having my primitive brain try to undermine my commitment, and not the sitting and not eating while everyone else was as I expected. Very interesting.
It was truly an enlightening experience that I felt compelled to share with you. So thank you. One of my goals during this program was to consciously feel proud of myself, like you, it is one of my top 3 feelings. I feel proud of myself not only for not eating (out of habit, guilt or obligation) but also for really trusting myself to commit to this work and for trusting that if I did the work, it would begin to integrate into my life.
I may never have acknowledged what a big step forward this was for me had it not been for you, I’m typically very hard on myself so it felt good to literally watch myself coach myself in a loving and automatic way.
Thank you <3
Samantha
