I had a smoothie last night and was proud to have listened to the correct inner voice.
 
Huh?
 
I’ve been thinking about how we all have multiple inner voices giving us perspectives that have varying degrees of present-moment relevance, healthiness, and so on. Listening to our intuition is useful only insofar as we are confident that said intuition is coming from a solid foundation.
 
Since the beginning of 2019 I’ve cut way back on sugar and have been pretty diligently doing Intermittent Fasting (which led to a broader semi-overhaul of my already pretty good eating habits). The results have been great – within a few months I noticed increased energy and clarity, reduced inflammation, and statistically significant weight loss. The last of those wasn’t a top priority (and yes, I’m well aware that I wasn’t clinically overweight to begin with) but I was at the outer edge of my healthy weight range when your joints are as unstable as mine (thanks, EDS), the less they have to carry, the better.
 
Within reason anyway. My ultimate (and seemingly far-fetched) hope was to shed a certain amount over the year based on my meticulous observations about what weight allows my body to operate at its best. I got there in a few months and, though I decided at that point that it was time to shift from “lose” to “maintain,” I kept losing, albeit more slowly. After a couple days of unrelated digestive distress this weekend, I found myself a decent bit below my already somewhat precarious “maintenance” threshold. It was a jarring number on the scale and I was falling out of my new pants that I’d recently gotten to match my smaller waist.
 
And yet there was a part of me that relished the shrinking number on the scale, conditioned by multiple aspects of anxiety, distorted body image and so on. I’ll spare you all those details here, it’s enough to note that this is a potential rabbit hole for me.
 
 So last night I had a choice after dinner – eat more (to earnestly try to move back to where I know, objectively, I should be) or stand pat (secretly relishing that I might be able to maintain or even move beyond an unhealthily low weight, hoarding increments of thinness like a nasty miser accumulating more dough). I haven’t experienced a struggle to maintain weight since my early 20s (when a presumably well-intentioned nutritionist, who had never heard of hummus, suggested I consume ice cream by the pint), so I essentially had no experience navigating something like this as a full-grown, legit adult. And in one small step for man, I had a smoothie. I did the thing that I knew was healthy and in keeping with my more “enlightened” perceptions.
 
I have NO interest in sharing my dietary business on this level for its own sake. I’m giving you this little anecdote as a reminder that we all face many moments when we can find justification for obeying a voice that ultimately does not wish healthy outcomes for us OR we can identify and obey the voice that wants us to be well. Every moment when we breathe through the dilemma and choose the latter voice is something to celebrate. With or without a celebratory smoothie.

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