Resolve to Love #6: Play Like a Kid

I can hardly believe that this month marks the half-way point of the Resolve to Love Challenge. There’s still so much to do and say, and sadly, I had no time to post last month! I hope you all did well with your mental workout. Did you find it challenging? Did you notice yourself slipping into self-criticism? Did you let yourself give up too often? And what about April’s challenge? Have you been working on radical self-acceptance?

These are two assignments that I hope you will continue to work on throughout the challenge. Our mental and emotional health are just as important as our physical health. I don’t believe you can truly have one without the others. So keep up the good work there!

And now, since summer is finally here, it’s time to go out and have some fun. Your assignment this month is to simply make FUN movement a part of your daily routine. I’m not talking about carving out time to do yoga or go to the gym (though that’s great if you do, of course!). I think many people look on trips to the gym with dread and do it simply out of a fear of gaining weight or because it is an act of discipline that makes us feel we are doing something good for ourselves. And while it IS good for our bodies, let’s face it – forcing yourself into a routine that you dread is not a sustainable action. And if you hate the stairmaster (or whatever), why force yourself to do it when there are so many other things you can do that you might [gasp] LOVE?

Copyright: Five Seed

In this culture, it seems we look on physical activity as something separate from our everyday lives. The example of the gym comes to mind – that hour before or after work that we put in, whether we enjoy it or not, while the rest of our lives is spent largely in the sitting position. Sitting at our desks. Sitting in the car. Sitting on the couch. Everything in our culture seems to support this notion that movement isn’t meant to be part of our everyday activities. Our cars, our clothing (high heels, panty hose, silk blouses that don’t mix well with sweat, pencil skirts), our schedules.

But here’s the thing: Movement is not meant to be compartmentalized. It is not meant to be assigned to an hour’s block in our daily schedule. We have bodies and they should be moving! And what’s more, that movement should mostly be fun.

Remember when you were a child and you ran, walked, skated, scootered, boarded or bicycled not just to get from Point A to Point B, but as a form of recreation all by itself?? Remember when you couldn’t WAIT to get home from school so you could get out of that desk and just play? Well, it’s time to be a kid again. Get off the computer and go outside and PLAY.

The first thing you need to do is to get on Craigslist and buy whatever you can afford in human-powered transportation – either something you loved as a child or something you’ve wanted to try as an adult. A skateboard, long board, skates, roller blades, bicycle, adult tricycle, scooter, etc. Get on and get rolling! Try riding around your neighborhood, at first, then try longer journeys. Maybe you can start scootering or biking to your friends’ houses or to get-togethers at the coffee shop. Maybe you want to try skateboarding to work, if it’s not too far. Work these activities into your life, into your routine – why not?! (And if you have kids, all the better! Join them!)

The second assignment is somewhat simpler. Take more walks. But there’s a catch: These are not workout walks. You are not allowed to listen to your workout playlist on your iPod while taking these walks, or to wear your fancy jogging tights. Nope. Your walks are pleasure walks. If you take your iPod, you must listen to either relaxing music or audio books. It’s fine to wear your workout shoes if you walk in a rocky area like I do, but all the better to go to a park and take your shoes off so you can feel the grass under your feet. Look at every tree and flower and weed you pass. Take note of the sky. Listen to the wind and the bees. Take your dog and play fetch or take your kids and show them the caterpillars on the trees and the way the clouds move. This is not a workout. You are having fun. You are moving. You are observing. You are alive. Simple as that.

Your third assignment is to move more at home. I see a definite pattern in my life to gravitate toward the computer, toward wasting time with video games and streaming videos, toward sedentary activities. But there are a million things to do at home that you might love – and they all require movement. Gardening is a number-one sweat-inducer for me! And I absolutely love it. There’s something so satisfying about growing your own food. And what a great gift to share with your kids – movement, connection to the land, good nutrition. What could be better? And how about all those things on your to-do list? Wash the car. Clean out the cupboards. Organize the garage. Get some people involved and get moving. Make it fun. And oh yeah, you’re getting healthier as you move those boxes and stretch to dust the shelves and squat to clean the stain on the carpet. Sex works in the “fun movement” category, too, and *might* be more enjoyable than organizing the garage.

Finally, if you are up for a final challenge in June, try something you haven’t tried before. Go horseback riding. Take a martial arts or dance class. Try a 2-day hiking/camping trip or a 30 mile bicycle ride (believe me, it’s easier than it sounds). Stretch yourself not in an effort to lose weight, but in a spirit of adventure and childlike curiosity.

If you are stumped on what to do, please take a moment to think about your favorite activities as a child, or something you dreamed of doing but never did (tap dancing? fencing? ice skating?). That’s it! Follow that lead!

I would absolutely LOVE to hear about your adventures. Please leave me comments about what you decide to do, or post it on my Facebook page. Believe me, you will have fun with this one!

Resolve to Love #5: The Mental Workout

I can hardly believe that we are near the halfway point of the RtL Challenge. How are you all doing with it? Last month, I hope the posts got you thinking and maybe even stretching your perceptions. Can you accept yourself as you are right in this moment? Is self-acceptance synonymous with complacency? Or giving up on yourself? If you’ve been as much of a stickler about it as I have been, has it been hard?

I have lots to say about my own experience, but for now, let’s jump into May’s assignment. This one is piggybacking on last month’s challenge, which, hopefully, you will continue to keep as part of your everyday routine. Since we touched on “dieting” in April, we are going to focus on working out this month. But not the usual way. You won’t be pulling on sweat pants or dragging yourself to the gym. Your workout is all “upstairs.”

During the month of May, I’m asking participants to start and end their days with affirmations (or prayers if that works better for you). Your affirmations/prayers can be as long or short as you like. They can pretty much be about anything you like. The only rule is that you must create all your affirmations to be in the present tense. Avoid “not” statements, like “I will not criticize myself today.” Keep it in the affirmative. For example, “I will build myself up today.”

I asked Melanie Jade of My Magical Journey to collaborate with me on this one, as she is a wonderful spiritual coach who has truly inspired me these past few years. The affirmation she was prompted to share with my readers is simple, beautiful and says it all:

I am love.

If you want to add to this, try looking through the affirmations at her website.

I also highly recommend Marianne Williamson’s book, A Course in Weight Loss. Though I mightily hate the title, I have a feeling that was more about the publisher’s desire to sell books than Williamson’s desire to help others heal from destructive relationships with food. This book is full of amazing insight and beautiful prayers. One to try:

Dear God,

Please help me begin anew,
to rebuild my temple
and restore my body.
May I learn to eat well.
Please send angels to help me.
May angels oversee my food and sit with me while I eat.
May food,
which I have so used to hurt me,
now become a blessing
and a blessing only
in my life.
Amen

Again, you don’t have to use any of these. Make up your own – whatever works for you and makes you feel good. Your affirmation/prayer can be about your body, about food, about self-acceptance or about your inner worth. Or all of the above.

The challenge is making sure you repeat your new mantra every single morning before you get out of bed and every night before you go to sleep. And anytime you can recite it in between!

These are your new abdominal crunches, your squats, your curls. Would you ever fail to perform your weekly allotment of sun salutations? Would you skip your morning jogs? Most of us are pretty diligent about our workouts (whether we’re really disciplined or just plain afraid of what will happen to our bodies if we stop), but no workout is as important as this one.

You absolutely must commit at least one minute in the morning and one minute in the evening to repeating your affirmation/prayer. Every single day. No fail!

Are you in?

Being a Stickler

I know I’m being a real stickler about the Resolve to Love monthly challenges. If you read this month’s challenge, then you know that I’ve asked you to completely “refrain from talking about your weight, your feelings about your weight, weight loss, diets and/or your feelings about how ‘bad’ you look.” I’ve gotten some comments on this one, suggesting that this isn’t fair, healthy, realistic and/or necessary. I’ll address the “healthy” aspect in the next post, but first, let me explain why I chose to add this to the challenge.

Just a few weeks ago, my sister and I were talking about some events that have been stressful for us when she suddenly said, “How come whenever I feel that I’ve conquered my eating disorders, I come to realize that I’m still struggling with the same issues as before?” This is a frustration I share with her, and I told her that that is one of the very reasons why I started the RtL Challenge and why I’m being such a stickler about it.

We are masters at tricking ourselves. We know how to convince ourselves that our latest diet obsessions/compulsions are the result of a new, healthy relationship with food. We know how to spin our latest fitness regimes into a harmless-sounding effort to build muscle or cardiovascular strength. And while all those goals are ultimately important and certainly worthy of our time, underneath it all, most of us believe that these new behaviors will help us lose weight. When it comes to the subject of weight loss/body image, we are masters of PR.

This is one gal who has some seriously health self-esteem!

I think one of the problems with this is that it is extremely hard to separate our desire for better health with a desire for a more beautiful, sexier body. Let’s face it: We all want both, right? And there’s nothing wrong with that, either. But for so many of us – myself included – this so-called journey to health just becomes another exercise in vanity, control, self-denial and compulsive behavior.

I have told myself a thousand times that if I could just be stronger, firmer or more muscular, I’d be happy. I’d feel sexy. I’d accept that my body is shorter and broader than the tall, thin silhouette favored by our culture, and love it just the same. And you know what happens every single time I lose weight, get firmer, build muscle, feel stronger? I look in the mirror and feel more and more driven to lose more weight in hopes of reaching that “ideal body.”

At this point in life, I realize that this cycle is never going to end – at least not the way I’ve been trying to end it. Now it seems to me that the only way to get off this train is to absolutely, completely and radically love myself exactly the way I am right now in this moment. Muffin top. Stretch marks. Droopy behind. Early crow’s feet. Scarred skin. Cone-shaped thighs. Cellulite. The whole shebang.

Can you honestly say that your health-related goals have nothing to do with a desire to be thinner? And again, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with wanting to be thinner, with wanting to lose some extra weight and feel pretty and sexy. However, I often find that this journey is similar to some people’s never-ending journey toward financial success. “When I make enough money, I’ll be happy.” We all want to make more money, to have a little extra at the end of each month, but when you really sit down and think about it…what’s enough? Every time I make more money, I still find myself wishing I made even more. When are we going to be happy and confident just the way we are?

Stay tuned – I’ll be talking about another aspect of this in the next post, inspired by a great comment I received from EcoGrrl!

*UPDATE: I have SO much more to say on this subject – I literally think I’m working through it as I blog about it! But please be absolutely assured that I, in no way, am trying to say that eating healthy or exercising are bad or that we should stop either one! Both are super important to me – my health is one of my number one priorities. I think what I’m trying to get at is: How do we separate these two desires – to be healthy and to be sexy/thin/beautiful? To me, the latter is a ephemeral goal, while the former is something more of substance, especially if you are talking about mental-emotional-physical-spiritual health. I suspect that we will actually never BE sexy/thin/beautiful until we BELIEVE we are RIGHT NOW. No matter what we look like. And that is where I’m going with all this. More soon!

Resolve to Love #4: Going on a Different Kind of Diet

I’ll bet you never thought you’d hear me use the D word for this challenge, since Resolve to Love is about the exact opposite of dieting or putting in a lot of effort to look better (which tends to be a futile attempt, since many of us are never happy with the way we look, no matter how hard we try to improve our appearance). If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know I passionately don’t believe in diets and I refuse to ever go on one again.

But for April, we’re going on a different kind of diet – a mental diet. This one is simple, but I think many will find it the hardest aspect of this year-long challenge. Here’s what I’m asking you to do:

::Every time you have any kind of negative thought about yourself (not just about how you look, but anything and everything about you), remind yourself that that was your inner critic talking and immediately replace the negative thought with a positive one.

::Be 100% committed to refrain from talking about your weight, your feelings about your weight, weight loss, diets and/or your feelings about how “bad” you look. No more, “I feel so fat today!” or “I wish I had a butt like you!” or “I’ve got to lose 10 pounds!” or “God, I look awful today!” Your commitment has to be super strong on this one because I know from experience how easy it is to think that just one little comment isn’t so bad. But it is. Enough is enough. You have better things to do with your life than complain about your perceived weight problems.

::Remember that like unhealthy foods, negative thoughts give you a temporary burst of energy, then leave you empty and needing more. They weigh you down, just like sugary, fatty foods and make you feel (and therefore appear) heavy. Choose your mental diet as carefully as you choose your gastronomical diet. Positive thoughts truly sustain you, give you energy and buoy your spirit, making you glow from the inside out.

I know many people, including myself, have found this to be the hardest diet of all. And others who think they don’t even need to try it, often find that the awareness of their negative thoughts only made them realize just how much their attitudes were dominated by these little gray clouds of self-doubt. Whether you think you need to try this or not, I hope you will. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Unfortunately, many of us have been taught that it’s not okay to think of ourselves too highly. Heaven forbid we have self-confidence! It’s okay for men to know their worth, but not always women. So how do you get around this, when feeding yourself positive thoughts at first seems like a forbidden feast of vanity? Pretend you are your own daughter or best friend. Would you allow someone to say to them what your inner critic says to you? Probably not. Be your own protective mother, your own best friend and turn your back on that voice over and over and over again. Give yourself the credit, support and love that you deserve.

I would love to hear your stories as the month goes on. Please leave them here in the comments section or email them to me at five5seed@gmail.com. Good luck, fellow dieters!

Rescheduling the Naked Face Collage

Today, while looking at my blog post schedule, I realized that I have two blog events that are booked near the same time. I want to give each one their own moment in the spotlight, so I’m going to move the Naked Face Collage to April 16th (photos due on April 13th). The word cloud contest will continue, as scheduled.

Come on, join in! (Pretty please!)

March Challenge Check-In

How are you all doing with this month’s Resolve to Love Challenge? I got a couple of responses on the blog of people’s favorite things about themselves and several responses on Facebook (thank you!). Have you made your list yet? No, I really mean it – have you sat down with a pen and pencil (or computer) and written down at least ten things you love about yourself that don’t have to do with your looks or your roles within your relationships?

What you said you love about yourselves.

For many of us, this process is hard. Almost bizarrely so. There are a whole lot of reasons behind this, but one that I hear so commonly is that it’s “selfish.” And another I hear, far more often (I’m sorry to say), is “I don’t deserve to identify good traits in myself. After all, I’m so imperfect, people would laugh if I tried to pretend that I’m good enough.”

Well, folks, I’m afraid that’s not going to fly this time. If you are participating in this challenge, there are no acceptable excuses for skipping this step. I don’t care if you cry the whole time you do it, or if it takes you three weeks. DO IT.

I am convinced that building a healthy sense of self-esteem is essential to happiness and inner peace. That probably sounds really obvious, but it is a relatively new idea for me. I can remember reading something Marianne Williamson wrote about developing self-esteem: She said helping others is one of the best ways to learn to love yourself more because how can you not love yourself when you see others appreciating your kindness?

Well, I tried it and it wasn’t entirely successful. I spent years doing pretty intense volunteer work, and though I loved it, I’m sorry to say that I still went to bed each night thinking that I was a fake. “If only these people really knew who I was, they wouldn’t love or appreciate me,” I thought.

Now I’m not suggesting that volunteer work is a waste of time, nor am I suggesting that everyone with self-esteem issues should run out and sign up just because they need an ego boost. Volunteering is wonderful and important and I know it has been (and will continue to be) an essential part of my journey. All I’m saying is that helping others is only part of the equation. If you build up others but refuse to build up yourself, then ultimately, you can’t help anyone.

We’re all connected. We are all creations of a divine energy and we reflect that same divinity out into the world. If you can see it in yourself, you can see it more clearly in others. The reverse is also true – muffle your own brilliance, and you muffle the brilliance of those around you. How can you be of service to them if you can’t see their light? How can you experience true peace or joy if you keep yourself and everything around you in darkness?

Need more? Try this on for size:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
― Marianne Williamson, Return to Love

Don’t you owe it to your daughters to recognize your inner beauty? Wouldn’t it be nice to share your light with your life partner? Don’t you think your friends want to see you shine? Don’t you deserve to have total faith in yourself?

There’s still time to participate in this month’s challenge, and I’m going to up the ante. Go to tagxedo.com and create a word cloud with at least 10 words that describe what you love about yourself (remember, nothing physical and nothing regarding the roles you play or the contributions you make within your relationships – this is all about YOU). Send it to me at five5seed@gmail.com. I’ll post the word clouds here on the blog and let the readers vote for the winner! The winner will receive a tube of my Coconut Vanilla Bean Lip Balm*.

So come on, join in! You only have a week and a half!

*You must live in the U.S., Canada, Europe or the UK to be eligible for the lip balm (though ALL word clouds are welcome and will be used!). Deadline for submissions is Sunday, April 8, 2012. The winner will be announced during the week of April 9th.

Resolve to Love #3: Claiming Your Inner Beauty

When I started the Resolve to Love Challenge, we talked about the fact that the body is not going to be around for very long and therefore, it just might be a waste of time to fret about how it looks. We then talked about how important it is to be grateful for the health with which we are blessed, no matter what our bodies look like. Our March challenge calls for us to claim our beauty – our true beauty. The beauty of our spirits, our personalities, our love.

This time, we are going to actually sit down and make a list. Go ahead, grab a pencil and sheet of paper, or open your word processing software. I’ll wait.

Did you do it? I hope you did, cuz I’m going to ask you a favor at the end of this post that will require you to complete this challenge.

You are going to list all the things you love about your inner self. Please note that I said INNER self. Nothing physical belongs on this list, with one exception: you may include your smile. Or, more accurately, the fact that you use your facial expressions to share joy with others. Everything else has to be about who you are, on the inside.

Here is a sample of mine:

I love…

…the hard work and discipline I put into my jobs.

…the patience I give to my students.

…my honest efforts to uplift everyone I see each day, even strangers.

…the care and love I give to my relationships.

…my earnest efforts to live a life that is friendly to the earth that sustains me.

And oh yeah – you can’t identify yourself in the context of a role you play in another person’s life. I’m going to ask you to drop the role and claim the beauty of who you are within it, instead. “I love that I’m a good mom” becomes “I love that I bless my children with my love and support each and every day.” Why am I asking you to do this, when it seems like a game of semantics? Because we are not our roles. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of feeling good about ourselves because of the roles we fulfill in the lives of others. So you’re not allowed to do that here! You get to claim who you are and what you do and what you give. You are beautiful, for instance, not because you are a good mother. (What does “good mother” even really mean, anyway? It’s all subjective.) You are beautiful because you share your love with your children, because you gift them with your patience, because you make their lives brighter by your nurturing guidance and support. You get to claim that. That is part of your beauty. And this goes for all the roles we fulfill – daughter, partner, wife, sister, grandmother, boss, etc. We are so much more than those labels. Explore it, name it and own it!

As for that favor I mentioned…? Well, it would just make my month if you would share some of your lists with me to post here on the blog each week for the month of March. You can leave yours in the comment section or email me at five5seed@gmail.com. Please feel free to leave only excerpts if yours feels too personal to share in its entirety. I do, after all, intend to publish the lists here on the blog as individual posts (or a joint post, if I only get a few contributions).

Now go write those lists!

Resolve to Love #2: Gratitude

How are you all doing with the Resolve to Love Challenge? Ready for your new assignment? Here it is:

Be thankful for the body you have right now, no matter what it looks like. You are pretty darn lucky to have it.

Almost two years ago to the day, my father had a stroke that partially paralyzed him. He was in a wheelchair for a very long time, struggling to regain his ability to walk through intense physical therapy. Over and over, he told me how much he longed to be able to get up and do his morning chores like he used to. It was such a simple desire: to be able to walk and perform daily chores with ease. But suddenly, that was no longer an option. He said that he had always taken that ability for granted and that he would never do so again.

Copyright: Five Seed

How many of us do the same thing? I think we all take our bodies for granted.

A recent experience confirmed to me that this is an important lesson to remember. I was at the fabric store, behind two women who were in the process of checking out. The older woman, probably in her late 60′s, started toward the candy shelf to grab a pack of Milk Duds. I noticed she had such a severe limp that she could barely walk. I wondered how she got around at all without a cane.

Her younger companion grabbed the candy and bought it for her, and the older woman suddenly started crying. She turned to me and told me that this friend of hers was a literal angel. And just as suddenly, her tearful gratitude turned angry and bitter as she told me that while living in Portland, not long ago, she had unwittingly driven herself into the path of a police chase. Her car was struck and her injuries were so bad that she lost both her legs (she showed me the prosthetic legs under her pants), her hip (which was replaced), and she nearly ripped off her wig to show me that her hair had never grown back after her surgeries. “Why did this happen to me?!” she wailed so loudly that the woman checking them out turned away to help other customers, obviously uncomfortable with this show of emotion.

I’m still wondering how I happened to stumble upon that woman, at that particular moment. Perhaps she needed to share her sorrow and had nowhere else to do it. Perhaps she needed some loving thoughts and the Universe pointed her in my direction. Perhaps it was to remind me how fleeting good health can be and that as long as I’m able to walk, bicycle, run and jump, I should be grateful.

So what does our weight matter? What does it matter if we don’t look the way we want to look? At least we can walk. This seems such a simple thing to do, yet those who cannot would trade with us in an instant, no matter how much we weigh.

This month, remember all the wonderful things your body can do, all the things it allows you to experience. Be grateful for all of it. The numbers on the scale, the way we look – that doesn’t ultimately matter at all.

Resolve to Love #1: The Temporary Body

This was supposed to be posted during the first week of January – not the last! But thanks to my procrastination, here we are. I think part of the reason I delayed in posting this is simply because I wasn’t sure how to make this idea sound positive, when there’s a certain morbidity to it. But hopefully, I will get my point across in an uplifting manner.

So our first thought to ruminate on during this one-year challenge is this: Ultimately, our bodies are temporary, and therefore, how much time do we really want to waste on worrying about our appearance? Perhaps there are other, more productive ways to spend our time, our energy, our thoughts, our money, since we will, after all, end up in the ground someday. (There’s the morbid part, but please, read on!)

Copyright: Five Seed

Now I’m not suggesting that since we’re all going to die someday that we should just let our bodies go to ruin. Not at all. Our bodies are wonderful gifts that allow us to experience this world, and the healthier we are, the better we can experience it. So of course, we should spend some time moving every day, we should try to eat healthy foods as much as possible, etc.

HOWEVER – when you stand in front of the mirror and find despair creeping in because you have spent years trying to trim your thighs or because your butt just never seems to get smaller, or… Why waste that good time when our bodies won’t actually be around that long?

I will always remember a story Anne Lamott often tells in her essays and spiritual lectures:

“When I was 38, my best friend, Pammy, died, and we went shopping about two weeks before she died, and she was in a wig and a wheelchair. I was buying a dress for this boyfriend I was trying to impress, and I bought a tighter, shorter dress than I was used to. And I said to her, ‘Do you think this makes my hips look big?’ and she said to me, so calmly, ‘Anne, you don’t have that kind of time.’”

That’s what I’m trying to get across in this seemingly macabre post. We’re not going to be here forever, so ultimately, who cares what we look like? How much we weigh? Whether or not we have cellulite? We don’t have that kind of time. Life is short. Why waste it on fretting over our appearance?

Make more time for this, less time for fretting over your weight!

Your challenge for the last week of this month is to remind yourself of this fact daily. And please leave a comment here if you have had a Lamott moment like the one described above.

Next month (just a few days away!), I promise to post the next challenge on time!

Resolve to Love Challenge: The Survey Results

For those of you who answered the survey (thank you!) here are the results:

::Sixty-two percent of you have resolved to lose weight in 2012.

::How often have you made this resolution before? Twenty-five percent have made it once before, another 25% twice before, 8% have made a New Year’s resolution to lose weight more than three times before, 25% five times before, and the final 17% of you, five or more times.

::Only 7% of you weigh yourself every day. (Yay!) Eighty-five percent of you do NOT experience anxiety when you can’t weigh yourself on a regular basis (another yay!), but a full 50% of you said the numbers on the scale affect your confidence level. (That’s why I never weigh myself – it’s too easy to fall into insecurity.)

::Forty-six percent of you feel you must be constantly vigilant in order to maintain your weight, and 33% of you avoid certain foods in order to maintain your weight. As for social settings, 41% of you expressed feeling anxiety at gatherings involving food. However, this anxiety was not always triggered by weight issues, but by nutritional preferences and/or special dietary needs.

::Predictably, no one claimed to be satisfied with their weight “always.” Thirty percent are happy with their weight most of the time, 15% are satisfied half the time, 23% once in a while, and 32% of you said you were “never” happy with your weight.

::The final question (How much of your time, money and energy are spent on weight issues?) prompted a slew of interesting responses from both sides of the spectrum. Here are a few samples:

Way too much. But doesn’t everyone? The day that chubby women appear in beauty magazines is the day that maybe – MAYBE – I’ll feel beautiful the way I am.

About a minute out of every three months when I finally get curious enough to get on the scale. I used to obsess over my weight, but now I barely care. I have way too many other things to concern myself with, and besides, I think I look great, so who cares what number the scale reports?

I pay for a gym membership to help me access a way to help keep me healthy and strong. I feel better and have more energy and am happier when I’m able to exercise a few times per week.

I spend a lot of time and energy thinking about it and trying to convince myself to FEEL what I THINK: that my weight shouldn’t matter if it’s not affecting my health.

For me, I often feel lulled into thinking I don’t have anymore weight issues. After all, when you finally find yourself free of planning your entire life around your eating disorders, you feel like you are completely healed. Yet, I was drawn to this subject because I was annoyed by the many “lose weight in 2012″ slogans I heard over the past month or so – nothing new when January rolls around. I also realized, yet again, that I do still have some issues and I truly want to release them.

My own answers to this survey would be reflected in those you readers gave: I, too, am only sometimes satisfied with my weight, my confidence is affected by my weight and appearance, and I’m scarily gifted at trying to trick myself into weight loss goals under the guise of getting healthier. (Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to lose weight or getting healthier – I simply mean to say that I’m very good at tricking myself into trying to lose weight by pretending that it’s about my health.)

Thank you all who answered this survey and stay tuned as I (very belatedly) post about our first Resolve to Love assignment in the challenge.