Can I do better?

I'm not being a very consistent blogger, am I? Today I was on a message board, and someone had posted a link to their blog. And I loved it so much that it made me remember that I have a blog, but I haven't written in it since OCTOBER. That makes me disappointed in myself.

Which reminds me of a conversation I had with my mom a few weeks ago. I was telling her that I hadn't been working out that week, and that I didn't think I was doing my best. And she said, "Sara, everyone ALWAYS does their best!"

At first, I was like, "No way! Why would every one try so hard to achieve 'their best' if they are ALWAYS doing their best?" But then I thought about it. I think when people say "my best", they mean the best that they could do ever. Which would probably mean some other factors were involved, like years of experience coming together, and having the right people around you, and God working in your life. But those things (well, the first two) don't occur every day. But you do do your best at any given point in time given the circumstances.

This realization was such a relief for me. I've always been hurt by the phrase, "try harder," because it's not usually a question of effort. And even if you feel like you didn't exert any effort, I bet there was something else going on that made that lack of exertion your "best" for that point in time.

Anyway, moving on.... Since I've been doing my best all along :) I will be interested to see whether my best in the future will include writing in this blog! I would like it to.

Last time I posted (October), I was telling you about Intuitive Eating. Well, I am still (attempting) to eat intutively, and I have to say, it's going pretty well. I had some trouble for awhile there, though. Here's what happened. First, I had a mood swing, and I got depressed. I should talk about emotional eating in another post. Second, I was reading an intuitive eating message board, and people started comparing alcoholism and over eating. I thought that they had it all wrong, and that I knew everything I needed to know about alcoholism. What you didn't know until now is that my dad is a recovering alcoholic, and I have spent thousands of miles in the car with him going to AA conferences (that also had activities for the kids) discussing alcoholism. So when I read the "misinformed" posts, I called my mom to talk to her about it. (I call my mom 1-7 times a day.) She informed me that I was the misinformed one. So I called my dad and invited him over to discuss AA and intuitive eating.

When my dad walked in the door, I was still under the impression that AA was about control. Apparently I've never paid much attention to the first step: "Admitted we were POWERLESS over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable." You see, I had attempted Overeaters Anonymous, and the first thing they asked me to do there was make a list of my trigger foods, and then simply not eat them (as if that could ever be simple). To me, that came across as, "Step One, Take Control."* I'm not judging any OA group except the one I tried, which to me, had it ALL wrong (based on what I know now). So, my dad explained to me that AA was about relinquishing control, and, as step two indicates, turning your life over to a higher power. He told me that in  his opinion*, AA was no place for anything "psychological", such as thought techniques. He thought that if your head is the problem, how can you expect to fix it with your head?

I took this to mean that I couldn't follow any of the intuitive eating techniques because they were all "psychological". My counselor later explained why this was crazy very well. She said, "If what you were doing was working, why did you mess with it?" So, for the last few weeks, I have been working to regain the progress that I lost in the last month or two. My next post will be about what I'm doing to get back on track.

*AA is a wonderful program that I credit with wonderful things. OA also helps many people. Any person's opinion is just that; an opinion. Please do form impressions of the program as a whole based on what I have said.