Ice Cream & Acceleration

After all that talk yesterday about whether or not cheese is “clean,” the overwhelming consensus being to either avoid it or stick to low-fat hard cheese, I…um…had a grilled cheese sandwich and ice cream?

It started innocently enough.  Rylee and I had a girls’ day out and went to the Austin Children’s Museum.  (If you are ever in Austin and have kids in tow I highly recommend this place.) Well, it takes a lot of energy to see the full museum so we stopped at Joe’s Coffee Shop for lunch and had the BEST GRILLED CHEESE EVER!

Did you know you can put pesto in grilled cheese?  Now I really need to attend booty camp!   Rylee drank chocolate milk (but it was organic and she’s five, so it seemed better in my mind.)  We also followed this by ice cream sundaes with M&M’s at another fine eating establishment.

Why am I not overly stressing about this?  Well, first because I’m not competing until June.  🙂 Secondly, I’m getting my new diet in a week or two so this was kind of my last hurrah before buckling down and training hardcore.  And third, after spending much of December stressed over gaining holiday weight it took one (1) day of a stomach bug and I am literally 116 lbs. again.  Rock on stomach bug!

But this is more than just a blog post about ice cream.  Stick with me a minute here.  We saw tornadoes made by wind patterns.  We saw real fish and pretended to eat plastic fish.

We experimented with speed and velocity.  My favorite thing to watch (next to the tornado, which was too cool for words) was the spiral experiment.  As the golf ball goes down each spiral it goes faster and faster and the time it takes to go around each loop gets shorter and shorter.  When an object moves with increasing speed it has acceleration.  It made me think about food and fitness.

When I’m not careful I feel my urge to emotionally eat spiral faster and faster until I feel out of control.  When I make poor food choices I tend to feel really bad about myself.  I can’t tell you how anxious I felt the last two weeks of December with respect to this.

But if all it took for me to lose my holiday weight was one day of being ill, why the heck did I berate myself so much?  That’s pretty silly.

Yesterday when I started feeling better I read some new blogs by some incredible people.  People struggling with chronic pain.  People who lost loved ones and are shaken to the core.  People who almost died from cancer.

The themes that seemed to hit me over and over again reading these people’s stories were that 1) life is too short to drive yourself crazy over stupid things and, 2) you only have one body and should be kind to it.  So next time I feel myself spiraling out of control, I’m going to make a concerted effort to stop accelerating the negative thoughts and negative choices and force myself to get a little perspective.

And if that includes a small portion of ice cream, so be it.  Provided it is followed by healthy meals and a workout thereafter.

Do you ever get caught in a downward spiral?  How do you stop it and get back on track?

Lisa

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