As much as I love healthy food, I do get a lot of entertainment out of teasing the health food fanatics. My roommate at championships in LA gave me a hard time the whole weekend about the box of Cheezits that I carried around everywher. "J!! Where's your fiber?!" I was like, "What? They're cheap and delicious! I have some trail mix and Gatorade, too." "Gatorade?! J!!" Etc. We are rooming together again for advanced seminar and I'm bringing a couple Costco sized boxes of Cheezits (you know, the 3 lb. ones) to see if I can give her a stroke. Because this is my idea of HILARITY.
And I'm definitely not worrying about burning calories. After I did back-to-back classes yesterday morning (8am - ouch and 10am - fabulous), a friend of mine told me that according to her heart rate monitor she had just burned 500+ calories in the 10am class. I've heard this plenty of times before (ahem... Missus...), but at that moment I was taken aback by the idea that I could have burned 1000+ calories before even having breakfast. I was so struck by this observation that I immediately had a peanut butter smoothie, followed it with 2 slices of cheesy pizza, and then took a long nap.
The thing is, my attitude used to be SO completely different. I lived in a constant state of "I think I should really lose 5 or 10 pounds" from age 12 until maybe.... 20 or 21? With a few exceptions, but just a few. And when it came to counting calories, ones burned and ones consumed, I could be scientific and ruthless. At one point there were food journals with Excel spreadsheets involved. Oh yes.
My traditional New Year's resolution for years was to eliminate junk food. I'm sure you can imagine how well THAT worked, since I made it every year. Then one year - and I honestly can't tell you why this happened - instead of resolving to lose 5 (totally healthy) pounds, I resolved to stop calling myself fat. And holy shit! That turned out to be the first New Year's Resolution I actually did a decent job at sticking with, and I LOVED it. It was a total paradigm shift. It felt good.
Shortly after that, I got seriously into Bikram yoga, and that was the thing that finally made me fall truly in love with my body. Not for how it looks or what size pants it fits into, but for what it can do for me, how it functions, how it moves, how it is flexible and capable and strong. Bikram got me to look myself in the mirror every single day and just see myself instead of judging. That was, and still is, the most important thing that I've gotten from the yoga, especially because after I learned to look at myself this way, I started looking at the whole world that way, which is another serious paradigm shift.
My posts have been getting away from me lately! This is the second time in a row that I've started off writing about one thing, and ended up on a different (and much more personal) topic! What's up with that?!
All I wanted to say here was, I love food, and I am a huge believer in just following your cravings. If you eat what you like and move your body every day, you'll probably be healthy. And HAPPY. And that's what matters.
