Day 4: Aha moments

Hello friends. I hope everyone had a good day. My day did not start the way I wanted but it got better. At 7am, I was going to go to the Green Mountain Morning Momentum class. I did this on Tuesday and really enjoyed it. However, I woke up with a bad headache and nausea. This I attributed to being over hungry. This was the first time I had experienced feeling so hungry since I arrived here. I went back to sleep for another 30 minutes and got up in time for breakfast at 8am. Breakfast was very good today. We had waffles and vegetable sausage!! I got in 3 proteins and 4 carbs and felt very good after eating some breakfast. I had a talk with the nutritionist and she made some great suggestions. But this brings up a great point. Many times, diets limit our calories and by the time evening rolls around, we have "run out" of calories and decide to go to bed hungry. This really sets us up for failure the next day. Sometimes it continues a cycle of being overly hungry the next day. Or, like it did for me, it might keep you from getting up and participating in exercise that you had planned. I do want to clarify, however, that here at Green Mountain, they do not restrict our calories to some impossible number. The probable reason I went to bed hungry goes back to dinner, which many of us thought was not as filling as usual. In that case, I should have added a salad to my dinner. By the time snack time rolled around, I was very hungry and I should have had 2 snacks. However, my ingrained "diet mentality" told me I did not need 2 snacks and, therefore, I went to bed hungry and that set me up for not getting up for the morning momentum class.
Our first class of the day was "Listening to your Inner Voice." This was a great class taught by the psychologist. Her classes are always great and I have gotten so much out of them. I had an Aha Moment in this class. We were talking about the different types of inner voices and one type of Inner Voice is the rebel self. We all have it in us and it is expressed differently in everyone. Some people allow their rebel self to have more control over there lives. Others suppress that self with their compliant self. Women in general give themselves very little opportunity to express anger. However, our rebel self wants to express that anger. In those who allow their compliant self to control them, their rebel self still has to express itself. In many women, that is done by eating. Binge eating, eating in secret, overeating, or even undereating. I was thinking about when I think my weight really became a huge problem for me was in my teens. This is a time when many teens allow their rebel self to have more control over their lives. However, I did not. I was very much ruled by my compliant self. So, the way my rebel self expressed itself was by eating. Overeating and eating in secret. And that was my AHA MOMENT. It was like AHHH. A light bulb just turns on. I AM A REBEL EATER!! We then went over some ways to allow our rebel self to express itself without food.
After such an amazing class, it was time to get active. Today I chose to go on the walk. It was a cold day but the walk was so nice and really helped clear out any traces of a lingering headache I had left.

Our fitness instructors took us up a very long hill and we had a sense of exhilaration when we got to the top. It was definitely camera worthy.

My roommate and I after our walk

Lunch today was a chickpea saute on brown rice. After lunch, we had another class with the psychologist called "Body Neutrality: Messages from the Past." This was a great class on learning to move away from negative self talk. The goal here is that so many women have negative self talk. It may be such a huge leap to go from negative self talk to positive self talk that if we can just get to a neutral place, that is great. Next time you are experiencing negative self talk, saying something like, "I can't believe I just ate that brownie. I'm such a fat pig." ask yourself, "would you talk to a 9 year old girl that way?" Obviously that answer is no so why should you talk to yourself that way.
At 2:30, I changed into my bathing suit and we headed over to the pool for some water aerobics. Today we did circuits. This involved doing one exercise for a minute and then moving on to another one. There were 10 stations and we made the circuits twice. It was a lot of fun. This is definitely something I could do when the pool opens at my apartment.
Our last class of the day went perfectly with the exercise class we just did. It was called, "Design Your Own Circuit." The trainers helped us put together simple and easy circuits we can do in our apartments, the park, or the pool.
Dinner tonight was salmon, vegetable couscous, and broccoli. I also threw in a salad to see if that helped with my hunger.
After dinner, we had an arts and crafts activity. We made Green Mountain Cookie Jars. But you don't put cookies in these jars! Instead, we identified feelings that typically make us overeat. For example, mine were being bored, lonely, and anxious/overwhelmed. We then picked out activities that we could substitute for eating whenever we are having those feelings. We wrote them down on colored pieces of paper and then, if you are feeling bored, you can reach into the cookie jar and see a suggestion such as paint your nails or go for a bike ride.
Tomorrow morning, we will not have a morning momentum class so we get to sleep in an extra hour!! Good night from Vermont!