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So, it’s actually been two weeks since my last update!

As I think I mentioned in the last post, I spent last week visiting my parents back home. This is not an easy thing for me to do!

(BTW this post is about to get very honest, and is also about to ensure that I never ever tell my family about this blog.)

I’ve written about my sobriety a little bit here, and I’m planning to do a post soon about my grey area drinking that led me to get sober. But I grew up in an alcoholic family and no one at home has changed!

I don’t get back to the East Coast where I grew up as much as I’d like, but the alcohol culture in my family is a big part of why. I’ve been sober now for over three years, so it’s less that it makes me want to drink. Mostly it just makes me sad for them and angry for my child-self who didn’t get the role models or the emotional support that she needed.

I love my family, and I understand how we got here. I feel compassion for them, individually and as a system. But there’s a lot that I just can’t be too up close and personal with. I live 700 miles away for a reason.

And yet…I went home last week.

Without getting too much into it…last week was basically the opposite of the well path. High stress, less sleep, poor eating habits, and less of everything that I deserve. Not a lemon water in sight.

It was mostly in my interest to release the standards I was trying to hold myself to on the well path and survive, and keep an eye on my emotional reactions to things.

The Well Path and bad weeks

One of the things that I really like about the way Dr. Haskett writes the book is that she’s very attentive to making sure that the model doesn’t become another stick for women to beat themselves with. It’s carefully written to be something that you don’t “fall off” of or fail at.

I left the book at home when I went, but halfway through the week I checked it out of my library as an ebook to read the section on mindset again.

Here it is (under Creative Commons):

If, for whatever reason, you do veer off the Path, it’s okay. Just gently, slowly, consult your GPS (this book) and find your way back. […] Keep moving forward. If you’re standing on the middle of a tightrope, you can move forward or backwards with the same risk. So you might as well move forward. With each step, ask yourself, “Why am I on the Well Path? What do I hope to achieve? What is at stake? What makes me feel good about myself? What makes me feel bad? Your feet will take care of the rest.”

So when I got back from New York, I absolved myself of the week off the path, picked up some lemons and a cookbook, and got back to work. Some of my routine stuff was shaky this week and felt less easy, but I felt so happy to be back in the healthy environment I have built for myself out here.

Incentive is everything

Look, a soup has never sounded so good to me as it did this week! With a few exceptions of healthy meals I was able to get while we were in the city without my extended family, most of my eating was very unhealthy last week, and I was so eager to get something in my body that would feel light.

You know that heavy, kind of greasy feeling you get inside after an unhealthy vacation or the holidays? It was that! And all I wanted was lemon water and soup.

And I’ve been thinking about that a little bit this week — how when my body feels out of balance, I really really want to nourish it properly. And then when I’m feeling better, that incentive kind of goes away. I’m going to try to at least keep that feeling in mind for a while. It feels so good to be well-nourished! And I shouldn’t settle for just okay on a regular basis.

Hunger visualization success

A few weeks back, I was writing about how I could not make the hunger visualization exercises click! But I shifted to the image of a subway car that either was or was not my train, and that was super helpful to me while I was traveling and stayed helpful this week.

While I was away, I will not lie to you — sometimes the train pulled into the station and I envisioned my mother as the conductor. Could there be a stronger signal that I’m not hungry, I’m just upset?

So this has been super helpful as a way of distinguishing between actual-hungry and emotional-hungry and someone-brought-cookies-in-so-now-I’m-hungry. I gotta be honest: sometimes I know I’m not truly hungry and I eat the thing anyway. But it works sometimes, and I’m going to keep trying to help it work more.

It’s funny: for the first couple weeks this was the hardest, most irritating part of the well path. But now it feels like the one I’m doing the best.

What I missed the most

Man, I love dry brushing and I missed it while I was gone! It felt like maybe it wasn’t doing as much as I remembered…until I stopped doing it! I was so happy to have the dry brush back in my hand this past week.

The lemon water was also very missed! I have settled into a lemon water + pranayama breathing routine when I get out of bed, which isn’t technically correct but seemed better than nothing.

I was also so, so happy to get back to my regular exercise routine. I haven’t really taken my cues from the books on exercise because I was already active, but I did lose some of the non-exercise activity on the days we weren’t out doing activities with the kids. Since I’ve been back, almost all of my non-exercise activity has been cleaning and doing house projects! During the school year, it was walks during lunch and after school. I think this was a really good pivot for me.

(I also started training for another triathlon. Who do I think I am?!)

New this week

Legs up the wall! This is another one that I knew I always should have been doing and just didn’t regularly get to. It’s obviously great for everything, but if you have any lower back pain at all, it’s clutch. Do this exercise and push your lower back into the floor, and you will feel so much relief.

Some movement every hour — my Apple Watch has been shaming me into doing this for years. (Sometimes I walk in place in my classroom. They think I’m crazy anyway, so why not.)

Eating schedule — I tried this one but didn’t do so well. During the school year I’m on a pretty strict eating schedule (like a bell rings and I wolf down my lunch at the copier type thing). And during the summer, we have more schedule unpredictability, especially since it’s my husband’s busy season at work. I’m going to keep trying here. This week, I’m going to target a 9AM breakfast, a 1 PM lunch, and a 6 PM dinner. She likes snacks in the books, but I’m not a snacker.

Dinners – this was a mess this week. I’m going to set a goal for veggie-rich bowls. I took some inspiration during our travel from a couple of fast casual restaurants in NYC: CAVA and The Little Beet. (Basically my favorite thing about going home is all the easy, delicious, healthy food that’s available!) We don’t have either in Cincinnati, but I was able to get some of the CAVA sauces at Whole Foods so I’m going to try to do something like what I got there for dinners this week.

I also bought the cookbook for Maman, a restaurant in the city that had some great soups.

So this week, I’m going to make their sweet potato soup and their veloute for this week. (I did not get these when we went there — I got the pastries! But they sound good.)

Halfway through!

Chapter 4 starts out by talking about how most people are really seeing the benefits of their work by week 4. And because of my disrupted week and all the challenges of my trip home, I really wasn’t. But by the end of a week back on it, I really didn’t feel like I was starting over anymore.

I am getting to a point where there are a lot of moving parts, so I’m trying to block all the habits except the meals into a morning routine and an evening routine. I forgot some things this week.

On to week five!