Murky waters

Dawson's Creek. Remember that? Bad haircuts, hyper sensitive and uber analytical teenagers (played by 20 somethings) with bad haircuts and odd style, melodrama up to your eyeballs, all set to the most emotional popular music of the time. Ringing any bells? If that doesn't, then the opening theme song by Paula Cole certainly should. Anyway, it should not come as a shock to any of you that I fucking loved Dawson's Creek when I was a kid. Running for six seasons, the main story arc that ran through the entire thing was who would lead female Joey end up with - Dawson or Pacey? (What type of name is PACEY incidentally?). I had enough female friends at the time & since who watched the show and to a woman they all sided with Pacey, and sure enough, Joey picked him in the end. I was always pulling for Dawson. He was the emotional centre of the show for me. Sensitive, sweet and ultimately kind of a loser, I could relate to him in my teens. His circumstances mirrored mine - his parents broke up when his mum had an affair, and his Dad died a couple years later while he was still in his teens...sound familiar? But there was one drawback to Dawson, and indeed his entire fucking Creek for that matter. The overanalysing and the obsessive thinking. Do these teenagers ever have a thought or feeling they don't vocalise to one another or explore in great detail? It was insufferable at the time and the show has not aged well, often mocked in popular culture for all the above. 

Teenage Ken, apparently doing my best impression of a Dawsons Creek character, staring miserably at the water

In retrospect though, I can completely see the pull it had for me. The overanalysing and the obsessive thinking that, rightly, led the show be criticised and mocked by some, are absolute staples of my day to day existence, and I've never been more palpably aware of that then I am at the moment. 29 days on from the whole 30, life has definitely changed for the better, but old habits die hard and I'm learning to accept that.

The basis of this whole thing was to change my relationship with food, and to improve my health. Along with that, I believed my skin would improve, I'd sleep better, and I would lose weight. It was and is important to me that my focus was on the journey, day to day. As such, I have deliberately avoided putting emphasis on weight loss. However, this is where my desire to make incremental changes today crosses paths with decades long obsessing over my diet & weight, and navigating those murky waters has been challenging, particularly because of my obsessive nature, which I have been painfully aware of.

In the 4 weeks since MT and I concluded our 30 day detox, I have gradually sampled or reintroduced everything I had removed, however obviously the goal is to have a more measured relationship with those things reintroduced then before.The struggle has been with how painfully aware I am of EVERYTHING I put into my body now, and how that has impacted my thinking. 

This is how things look for me now: Between Friday night and Sunday night, the rules are relaxed. Mostly Saturday is my 'cheat day', where we'll get a takeaway and I'll have some ice cream & sweets while watching Match of the Day when everyone's gone to bed. On Sunday I might get a macchiato from Starbucks and we'll have something mildly indulgent for dinner, whether that be a sunday roast, a shepherds pie or something similar. Otherwise, Monday - Friday is a lot like it was in the detox month. I do drink diet coke, but in terms of processed sugar, there's not much. It's usually a nakd bar for brekkie, a salad for lunch, meat/veg/carb for dinner. But without the hard restrictions in place I had in July, there are exceptions. I might have a biccie in work, or if I go meet a friend for a coffee, I'll have one and maybe a cake or something too. Or if I'm having a hard day, I might treat myself with a bag of jellies or a bar of choccie. This might read like normality to you, but for me, this has been causing anarchy in my head. One week in particular - I'd a friend over for coffee and she brought pastries, so I'd one of htem. The next day, I covered for someone & played football at the last minute, so missed my dinner and was famished by the time I got home, and had an oven pizza. And I think the day after that I'd some sweets in the office. I was guilt ridden. I track everything I eat, every day, just to keep myself honest and stave off complacency. So it's all there in black and white. My thinking just became so obsessive and hyper critical around all this stuff. It was constantly on my mind & I beat myself up for what I believed were bad choices around food. I had decided in July that as I didn't want to focus on my weight, I'd only weigh myself every two weeks. However, 2 weeks came and went and I would not get on the scale. I knew I'd put weight on and I didn't want to know. I could feel the extra 3 or 4 pounds from all my indulging. I didn't want to face it. If anyone is reading this and doesn't experience some level of OCD, it probably sounds like insanity. But I can tell you it's very real. This stuff really honestly plays on my mind, stresses me out.

Last week I spoke with Erin in great detail about this. At a certain point, when describing all of this, I could feel the insanity in my thinking. Laying it all out there, I got so frustrated that I yelled, with a smile on my face, "WHY DOES THIS SHIT EVEN MATTER". Erin politely pointed out "Kenny, at some point you just have to live life", with her point being that perhaps having a danish & a coffee with a friend or 2 digestives with my tea in work was not something I needed to lose sleep and/or hair over. She then suggested maybe I was being a little hard on myself. Generally speaking I'm pretty self critical, but I considered it and felt like there might be something in that. So the next morning, I thought "look, you've put on a few pounds because you've been a little more relaxed with your diet. Just accept it and move on, stop avoiding it". I took the scales out, and stepped on.

I had lost four pounds.

Que? What? Eh? That's right. I'd spent 2 weeks in my head berating myself about how irresponsible I had been with my diet, disappointed at undoing the hard work from July and sending the ship back in the opposite direction. Meanwhile,back in the real world, I'd been sticking to my new eating pattern pretty rigidly with just a few minor exceptions, and as a result I'd lost another 4 pounds, meaning I'm now down more than a stone and a half in 8 weeks. Obviously, it was nice to be down a little more. But the bigger impact was the realisation that with my thoughts alone I had managed to twist three solid weeks of healthy living into a guilt ridden, stressed out period. I put myself through this misery and worry for literally no reason. Wow. Dawson - you ain't got shit on me buddy. 

I once heard the expression that "life is 10% about what happens and 90% about what you do with it", and it resonated with me. But there are days when I'm so deep in that I can't see the wood for the trees & I need to be cognisant of that because once I go down that rabbit hole of negative thinking, I can stay down there for days or weeks, and that's just not good - for me, nor the people who love me.

So I need to be vigilant around my thinking, diligent around my eating, but rational with my decisions and forgiving with my tastebuds. I am going for a work do tomorrow and I'm not going to sit eating salad and drinkin water because, well fuck, I have a life to live and eating nice things is something I enjoy and apparently it doesn't make me a bad person.