Sadness? Weight Gain? Blame it on the winter!

"Abracadabrafatsad"!



I blame the winter really...and ours started in May with plummeting temps and frosts way before we're used to it. It feels a bit like the endless winter in Narnia here, and I feel like the cranky White Witch/Snow Queen (Can't remember what she's called without consulting Wiki or my battered copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so I will just call her WWSQ).  And not exquisite like the flawless waif that is Tilda Swinton either - I've been a WWSQ who's been hibernating and getting a little rounder and a little more Rubenesque while she awaits the thaw called Spring that is allegedly supposed to start happening any day now.


Yeah, what of it? Ever heard of Rubens?  

    

Is that...you?

 

So the last few months I have been feeling  a little bit slumped, a little bit blue and well...a little bit sad.  And I mean sad in a couple of senses.  I have moved about 83 thousand times this year and I have "stuff" stashed in 2 storage rooms, 3 apartments and a garage.  I don't know where anything is, and I am currently living in a house that's not mine in a suburb that I don't wanna be in. I have writer's blank/block or just a general inability to write anything that anyone, let alone me wants to read; I have internal struggles to deal with; one or two or three family dramas; and I have had a virus for months that culminated  a little while ago in the mother of all influenzas that laid me flat for 2 weeks.  This, I thought, was my body telling me something - I chose to believe it was saying "...rest...rest...rest." What better time to rest than while the Olympics was on? Yippee!! I thought. I can lie on the couch and watch people in the prime of their lives doing amazing things with not an ounce, a skerrick, a gram, a smidgen, a jot, of fat on them. 

But the coverage was awful and I was too cranky and then too tired to watch anything, let alone amazing athletes and their amazing bodies over and over again in the same two swimming races that the network insisted on playing over and over and over again, leaving me to think I was watching a swimming carnival instead of the Olympics.

Anyway, being ill, alone at home (except for the dog who is more like a cat and sleeps about 23 hours a day) gave me the chance (always on the look out for opportunity) to think about 1) why I was ill and 2) why was I SAD? and 3) why were the lumpy, round, jiggly bits that I had thought disappeared last year returning and placing themselves on various parts of my body?  I came to the conclusion that 3) was the answer to 2) and that 3) and 2) were the answer to 1).

Here is my logic on this one: stress (38,000 moves, no stuff, family dramas,etc) + winter = SAD. SAD + inactivity + stress+ delicious winter comfort food + wine+ stress + a lot more wine  + compromised immune system due to the aforementioned factors = round wobbly bits in the form of fat cells.  Voila! Questions answered and explained.

Why so blue?

But a little more on "SAD".  The dictionary tell as sadness is "emotions experienced when not in a state of well-being".  Yep OK I will agree with that.  My being wasn't well, so I was sad.  SAD however, is also an acronym for "Seasonal Affective Disorder".  Seasonal Affective Disorder is a form of depression that usually occurs in the winter months and can cause the following symptoms:

Depression

Anxiety

Lethargy (lack of energy and enthusiasm)

Weight gain

Oversleeping

Loss of libido

Withdrawal from others

Loss of interest in previously enjoyed activities

Dietary changes – for example, increased appetite for carbohydrates

Difficulty concentrating

Depression pattern that follows the seasons – usually symptoms start in autumn, get worse in winter, ease during spring and disappear by summer

OMG! Check out point number 4, and the one about increased appetite for carbs. And it all started at the end of autumn! I found the answer! I went ahead and diagnosed myself! I have Seasonal Affective Disorder!!  Look it up, I am not kidding! It is a real illness!. Best of all, it can be treated! (Did you note all those exclamation marks? I'm excited, how 'bout you?) Some of the cures for SAD are:

Increase sunlight exposure
Get some exercise
Let the light in at home - open the curtains and blinds
Look after yourself - eat well, drink water, cut down on caffeine, alcohol, sugar

But here's the best one:

"Holiday somewhere warm and sunny".

That's it - I'm taking the cure folks...no more SAD for me (and those wobbly jiggly bits can get the hell out of here too!).  I am booking a trip up north...to a writer's retreat, with a gym, a lot of sunshine and no curtains!

Goodbye cranky-impossible-to-please, immune-compromised,  a-bit-too-Rubenesque- for-my-liking WWSQ!  The thaw is about to start!

Visualise a thinner future!



Check out the non-believer on the left!



I’ve often thought that it’s a rather wild claim to say – “just imagine it, and it will happen”. We have all heard of “The Secret”, and the laws of attraction, and many of us have squeezed our eyes tightly shut and wished really, really hard for something, or wished on a star, or bargained with God.  Doesn’t always happen, sometimes it does.  A fluke, karma, the David Jones’ Santa heard the kiddies’ wishes and told the parents to buy their offspring an X-Box, or a “magic happens” kind of thing.  When it comes to weight loss, I just don’t think one can “wish” to be thin - and viola! – you’re on the cover of Vogue and Hello! with Katie chainsmoking Moss et al. I think there’s more to to it than that.



In my quest to learn more about the power of  imagining, focusing, visualising, dreaming and hoping to get what we want, I stumbled across the  Capital T, Capital S “The Secret”, and I have just read some cracking good stories about weight loss on the Secret Website (if it is secret, how is it so easy to find?).  How’s this one from “Dee B’ in Florida:

Miss Dee is the one in the pink shoes

“I told myself that I could eat whatever I wanted and lose two pounds (that's a kilo folks!!) every night in my sleep, and even wrote it for every day on my calendar. This happened for a week, and I began to get discouraged when I didn’t feel results, but I believed so what did I do… I took out all the clothes that I had in storage containers for when I would be “skinny”, and hung them in my drawers. I put the other clothes in a bag on my closet floor. I hung up all the clothes that I BELIEVED I would wear shortly. After that I released it into the universe and just let it go without doubt. I honestly believed I had done my part of the process, and ate whatever I wanted with the internal belief that it would help me lose weight.  What can I tell you except that at my cousin's wedding four weeks later I was utterly in my perfect form, with a beautiful short hairdo wearing my beautiful size 3 dress”

What’s missing for me in Miss Dee B’s “I do believe in the Secret, I do believe in the Secret, I do believe in the Secret” excerpt (the original was way too long to put in here – but hey check it out yourself) is that Miss Dee B apparently took no action to be thin, as in changing her behaviours in any way that may have caused the weight loss.  She just hung skinny clothes in her drawers (drawers with hanging space? Big drawers Dee B) and “ate whatever she wanted”.  The implication being that WHATEVER she wanted meant she didn’t follow a diet, an exercise plan, or a good eating program, -  but maybe she wanted sprouts and chicken, maybe she did follow a good eating plan but just omitted to tell us that.  The Secret stories (there’s thousands of ‘em) all imply they all did nothing to achieve their hearts desires but release their wish to the universe and “believe” in “the power”. Call me a sceptic but as Oprah said:

“Hope is not a plan, honey".

So maybe just imagining and wishing for things might not work (for me anyway, I’m not Dee B), but we do have at our disposal a very marvellous tool that can help us reach our long hoped for goals. 
So what am I talking about here?  I am talking visualisation, baby. Using visualisations as a way of helping us achieve our goals is probably a more helpful way of going about losing weight than merely wishing for it to happen. There’s even science associated with visualisation for achieving goals.
Take sport as  an example – sports psychologists have been helping athletes for years to visualise their performance, perfectly and in minute detail.  There is much research to support the efficacy of visualisation in sport.   Think back to the last Olympics – right before the start of a race or event – the athletes are not waving to the crowd or chatting idly to each other. Instead their gaze is set firmly on the finish line and they are visualising their event or race as they want it to go – perfect and error free, perfect in motion and execution.  They have rehearsed and practiced their event until they know exactly how it will all pan out, exactly where to place their feet, their arms, their torso, their head.

An effective way of visualising the future is to think about the processes that are involved in reaching a goal, rather than just the end-state of achieving it. 

Visualisation is also used in psychological therapies to help people change their behaviour. There are a couple of reasons why visualising goal achievement works:

• helps focus our attention on the steps needed to reach the goal; and
• leads to reduced anxiety.

Visualisation helps us deliberately change the way we feel, our level of autonomic arousal, our behaviour, and it helps us improve performance, reduce fears and phobias, and can also improve the functioning of the immune system. Creative visualisation help us relaxxxxxxxx.....

So how do we do it? Creative visualisation is a practice that uses the mind to focus on  visual stimuli that is pleasing or empowering - and done so in a state of calm. As our mind is guided to focus on this imagery, a feeling of already being in that place, or that state, is encouraged and stimulated. The idea is to vividly picture our goals and actions as if they already exist, as if already happening.  And here is the BEST thing: the subconscious mind does not know the difference between what is imagined and what is real - this remarkable fact is what makes regular creative visualisation so powerful.  That our mind belives it is real then helps us to take the steps needed to reach our goals.  Pretty good huh?

Try it and see what happens – I might even tell Dee B about it!

 

"I wish I may, I wish I might..."

 

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