Hey y’all! I’ve been working through the layoff thing, and trying to stay on top of exercise and job hunting and everything else.

Not gonna lie, it’s a little stressful. Sometimes it’s a lot stressful. Thanks to my personal Yoda, Karen, I’ve been working through all kinds of control and perfection issues due mostly to feeling out of control.

I’ve been working on little things like taking myself out on fun (free) days. The collage there was from my day at the National Gallery of Art after an interview I had last week.

Speaking of which, I’ve actually had a fair amount of success with interviews lately and had two in particular I’m pretty excited about, so keep your fingers crossed for me on that one! It’s nice to feel like I’m getting positive responses to my job search.

All of that being said, I’m also struggling with feeling out of control, feeling overwhelmed by my situation right now. So naturally, I’ve turned to food for comfort. My first step in fixing my relationship with food and self has been simply to be mindful, so I’ve spent a lot of time working on recognizing/admitting when I’m eating emotionally even if it doesn’t stop me from doing so. I’m getting pretty good at that, so now I’m trying to focus on taking it further… specifically on waiting when I realize a craving is emotional in nature, and putting it off until I can explore the feelings behind it a little bit. It doesn’t mean I don’t eat, but it does make me more aware, which I think is the key to healing my food issues.

Sounds like a good, healthy place to be, right? And yet… I can’t leave well enough alone I suppose. Thanks to some friends who are having amazing success with the Whole30 plan, I’ve been considering it. I kept fighting with myself about it, because I didn’t really want to do it, but I felt like I needed something serious to jumpstart me again. The more I thought about it, the worse I felt about it, but I was mad at myself for it. I was frustrated that I just didn’t want to do it because it would be hard or an inconvenience. The more I thought about it, dug into it, the more I realized that my ONLY motivation for wanting to do it in the first place is weight loss. Except that when I take on a plan like that, specifically with weight loss as my goal, it makes me OBSESS about food. I think about nothing all day except what I can’t have, what I can have, what I need to prepare so I don’t screw it up. It’s just… not worth putting myself in that headspace. I’d rather take ten times as long to lose the weight, or never lose it at al, then put myself back into a place where all I think about is food.

And so, no Whole30 for me. I’m SO glad it’s making such an amazing difference for some of my friends. I’m thrilled that they’re seeing some of the changes they want to see. But it’s just not right for me, not right now, and that’s the beauty of this process for me… being able to take a step back and choose what’s right for me, right now.