by patbarone
My two favorite things are change and commitment. It wasn’t always that way. In fact, I’m laughing out loud as I write those words.
Before I learned what it took to alter my weight permanently, change felt really scary and even threatening. I never committed to anything. Oh, I said it did, but I wasn’t reaching any of my goals, so now I know I wasn’t committed to anything.
In those days, I usually decided to diet in the evening, after eating too much all day, and, by 10 a.m., I’d have blown my diet. Every day began with hope and ended in regret.
I liked to gather all my willpower for the latest fad diet, then lose 10 lbs and regain 15.
I studied books, diets and nutrition advice, then wonder why they didn’t work long-term.
I used various food avoidance behaviors, sometimes going most of the day without food, then binging at night.
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by patbarone
Millions of people around the world are mourning the death of Steve Jobs, the entrepreneur whose ability to think outside the box pioneered a radical revolution in personal computing. Jobs’ company, Apple Inc., grew to iconic levels by inventing such devices as the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
All of Apple’s groundbreaking inventions gave us new ways to connect, learn, grow and relate.
A number of his quotes have been circulating. I like this one:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by
dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise
of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the
courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you
truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
This sentence, in particular, stands out:
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by patbarone
During an interview this week, I was asked a question that stopped me in my tracks.
“What derails you?”
It took me a couple minutes of thought before I could even get my head around this. It felt a little familiar – like maybe I once knew what it was like, but it was a dim memory.
I’ve been losing weight a long time. Like, if there’s an award for long-term change, I’m in line for it. But what happens when you keep going is that some things that seemed like BIG CONCEPTS and HUGE AH-HAs become…
well…
just life.
So I told the interviewer:
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by patbarone
A number of new sources are talking about the addiction paradigm this week. For almost 100 years, alcoholism has been defined as a disease. It took quite a while to get the condition out of the realm of a “moral failure” and into the realm of “medically defined disease.”
But is medicine doing anything to help cure addiction? Or are they treating it as they treat most conditions: by over-medicating?
I’ve long maintained that addiction is multi-faceted. It really can’t be defined as simply a disease or any sort or moral issue. It’s emotional. And it’s deeply spiritual.
Medicine cannot touch that.
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by patbarone
This week has seen a lot of discussion about a new diet book which targets girls ages 6-12. After the initial outbreak of criticism, the author appeared on several talk shows defending his book as “empowering.” I spoke on the news about it Thursday.
I have to admit I’ve been wrestling with conflicting feelings about this. On one hand, I want to have the guy banned from Amazon and every other bookseller. His complete ignorance of the damaging and diminishing effect of diets on young women is simply deplorable.
On the other hand, we live in a country where we enjoy freedom of speech.
And yet, we have laws and policies that protect children from harm. And this is harmful.
To complicate matters further, as a blogger, do I speak up and risk giving him more exposure, or do I remain silent?
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