Thursday, February 4, 2010

Weight loss and Confidence: Do they go hand in hand?



I decided to approach this topic because I saw some interesting videos by a young lady that went natural on You Tube. I get a lot of information in Youtube about hair care because there is a big natural hair community and it is a good resource for learning to take care of and style your hair.
Anyway, one of the young ladies has been doing a series of videos about how when she went natural she became more aware of not just caring for her hair but her body, as well.
So I started looking at more and more of her videos and one thing that she pointed out is how if you want to be able to take better care of yourself you have to also be more confident about who you are and what you want in your life and not let others dictate to you how you should act or be or what you should be doing in your life.
This really sparked m
y interest and I actually ended uplooking up yet another young lady that was over 300 pounds and she had to get the full body lift and just completely reshape her entire body http://goleadoresbrillanporsiempre.webs.com/
Her transformation was pretty amazing I thought cause she went from spending her time eating donuts on the couch to a soccer playing weight lifting maniac.



Anyway, the things they had in common were they had to go through a mental transformation before they could even begin the physical. I know that most of the people in my family are over weight and I watched ladies in my family really struggle with it for almost every year of there life. They loose it and then they gain it back every time.

One thing my mom told me when she went on weight watchers over 30 years ago and got really thin, was that she still felt like she was a fat person even though she was thin. She had been big all her life and had been trying to lose weight just as long. And sure enough not long after I was born she gained every pound back and then some. My mom is in her 60's now and has been on the Atkins diet for a long time and has lost half of that and still dropping. God bless her heart.

But i think what happens and why people lose and gain is that there needs to be an internal transformation. You can't just walk around carrying all the pain, frustration, sadness that made you eat a lot in the first place. WHy cause eventually you go back to your old habits.

It made me come to the realization that I was destined to be a big girl. Why, cause I have been the most unhappy person any one could ever know for a very LONG time. to the point of feeling like everyone else was way more important than I was so I needed to do what ever I could to help them. The bad thing is people don't help you either. I think they see you what you are willing to do to get love from them because you don't love yourself and then they, often unintentionally, use it to there advantage with out regard for you.


I think the moment I packed up all my stuff and moved to Jersey and went to school was when I had reached my lowest point of all time. me and my mom constantly fought at that time cause I was tired of doing what people wanted me to do for them all the time and it lead to a lot of animosity and anger. I still struggle with that anger now.

I was so low that no matter how much people gave me approval it just was not enough. I needed more, I was like a leech. begging for compliments, is this ok does that look right, is this pleasing to you and i going this the right way. All my friends were on the internet and the ones I had in person I felt uncomfortable around. I even did the Atkins diet with my mom for a while and lost like 40 lbs but I felt like she was forcing me to be like her and I rebelled against it.

I don't think things started to come together for me until people I met when I was in jersey started looking at me and going, don't you know what your value is? Don't you even get that you are good enough?

I kid you not, people actually asked me this, many times over, and one day it suddenly sunk in that I was selling myself very short and no one up to that point (at least when I was back home with family) had ever really stopped to say hey you are good enough so stop trying to please me.

So I started working on improving my outlook on life and confidence. Correcting negative self talk and I have to say It has been a 3 year journey to get to this point but I know I have made progress. Honestly it isn't surprising that it would take so long to start actually caring about yourself and realizing your importance. I can't remember much time when I was happy or confident about anything in my life past the age of 5. As a result I have been a binge eater for most of my life. I even remember the first time I had a cinnamon roll. It was like an epic even. I think I was 5 or 6. The crazy thing is I have never wanted to be unhappy. I hate being unhappy and negative.

I remember when I got my first art job in a studio and I had to commute 3 - 6 hours a day. Mentally that was the biggest fight of my life. I had a lot of time walking and sitting on buses and trains to do nothing but think and boy did I do a lot of thinking. I started seeing experiences in my life that had hurt me just show up and attack me and try to make me feel like giving up on what I was trying to do and i had to fight demons and skeletons on a daily basis cause these thoughts of bad things that happened before I left home just tried to eat away at me. It was like wading through a swamp on a daily basis to get to work. Everything came into question and then suddenly I started having spiritual transformations because I started seeking God and asking him where all the mental torture and suffering was coming from.

Before I knew it I had become a stronger and more confident person. I was starting to become happier with my life but I wasn't out of the woods yet.

I think God gives us suffering so we can grow. I appreciate that more than anything today cause though a lot of my physical life has not changed I feel reborn and a lot happier all around about living. But I know the process isn't over yet at all. Still got a lot of purging to do which is why I brought up confidence and weight loss.

I have always wanted to loss weight. Always, even when I decided I was happy with myself the way I was it still nagged at me and I think it is cause being over weight really a burden in every way I can think about it. Even over the last year I have gained like 20 pounds just due to being frustrated and unhappy about the current situations, Sexual harassment, being taken advantage of by that old job, being back where I started and having my life be in a whole other state with no way of fixing it. Just feeling trapped. It has required me to do more spiritual renewal on my part to recognize that I gotta stop punishing myself for bad circumstance I can't do anything about at the moment. i sometimes literally punish myself with food. I get unhappy I go eat and then feel bad and eat more. it is a bad cycle that I decided needs to stop. which means changing behaviors which means making a conscious effort to change bad habits and taking my problems to God and not internalizing them by trying to eat the anger and depression away.

To do that I think it requires a more confident existence than ever before cause if I can't be confident about choosing to correct these things then it can't be corrected. They say whether you believe you can or you can't you are right. I think people that want to lose weight secretly don't believe they can and that the ones that loose and gain it back secretly believe they can't possibly remain that size and they don't plain and simple.

I am not making any promises to anyone here about trying to lose weight. I am not proclaiming to the world I will be thin in the next year or anything like that. This is a very personal journey after all but i am putting this out there so people start looking at things a little differently. If the tire around your waist is getting bigger you will not be able to get rid of it until you work on the things that are making you eat yourself to death. We all know the risks of not eating health and exercising. but then we still keep our bad habits and don't try to correct out behaviors.

I really think that weight loss required mental preparation and love in it's purest form not applied to other people but applied to your own self. I really believe that by loving the person God made you, that you can start to overcome the destructive things that are holding you back from your potential. Gotta stop giving up on yourself and believe if you want good things to happen.

God Bless
~Arie
















Monday, February 1, 2010

Padme 01



It is a new week. This weeks character is Padme. I plan to do this one as a charity auction for Haiti.

Arie's Sketch Dump