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The blame game

Katrina Russell

So I was talking to one of my friends who is a recovering drug addict. We were discussing some of the people in his AA/NA programs and he was amazed at the fact that a lot of them don’t have any real goals in life. I was amazed by the fact that he was amazed by this.

4127653707_7476ea3ccd_bAddicts aren’t really known for being goal oriented (unless you count the goal of getting a fix. He was talking about this one particular friend who has decided to start a club of sorts for his addict friends. In theory it sounds like a good idea, not the way he’s implementing it, but the concept in general. It’s basically getting a group of addicts together and agreeing to be there for one another. If anyone needs a ride to a meeting or someone to talk to, that type of thing. Then he was talking about expanding it to an outreach program. Talking to troubled kids and the like…. again, sounds like a fabulous idea…

Here’s the catch. The friend who is looking to start the program isn’t really sober. I mean, he’s sometimes sober… he can go for periods of time being sober, but as soon as anything happens in his life he jumps head first of the wagon. On top of that he has severe issues with relationships. He just got out of jail for stalking and harassing an ex… this does not really feel like the type of person that should be teaching others about sobriety and living well sober.

When I mentioned this to my friend, he started with the excuses, “well, it’s not really his fault, he has severe abandonment issues… his childhood was…. ” blah blah blah. I stopped listening at that point. Your childhood is not a reasonable answer for your choices. It is a pathetic excuse to blame others. Now I am in no way perfect. I admit that. I picked up a lot of bad eating habits from my father growing up as I have discussed previously, but once I became an adult… maybe not the moment I turned 18… but 25, 30… so on… my parents mistakes were not my problem.. my own were.

This guy with the abandonment issues (because he was put into foster care as a child) has gone on to put one child up for adoption and has another that sees him bouncing in and out of jail and rehabs. Those are his choices. There are plenty of people who have had screwed up childhoods who turn out just fine. I, personally, am so sick of an entire society who blames everyone else for their choices and actions.

My childhood was not perfect. My mother was schizophrenic. There were horrible custody battles, at one point my parents had a literal tug of war battle over me in the middle of the street. When I did live with my mother she took us to religious communes where, since we didn’t live with out father, anyone was allowed to punish us as they wished. For a while we even lived in a car. It didn’t stop once my dad finally got custody. My mother kidnapped us, police were called to the house and my school.. all kinds of things happened, but none of that made me a victim. All of that made me stronger and more aware of my own actions.

As an adult I have taken in other people’s children when the mom wasn’t able to care for them, and now I am a full-time mom to my son, while still running my own business. People make their own choices. If they hate the way they were treated by someone else or society or however they feel wronged, it is not their job to cry about why they deserve more, it’s their responsibility to make sure they don’t repeat the actions, and their right to have a better life.

If you blame others for your problems then you are giving them control over your life. The only person who can fix your life is you!

 

 

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It’s so not my fault

Katrina Russell

So… it’s official. I have a thyroid condition. Ugh… I’ve never had a “condition” before. At least I never knew that I did. Apparently my records indicate that I was tested a decade ago for hypothyroidism, but the doctor never told me or did anything about it. Anyway, now I have it and now I am… ON MEDICATION… as previously mentioned this is not a thing that I wanted, but also nothing that can be controlled by diet and exercise (according to my doctor, if weight-loss-diet-with-juicing-toning-plans-up-for-gym-56403you know of anything otherwise… please let me know).

The one thing that I will not do is blame my poor health choices on a gland. Yes, it may make things more difficult, but it doesn’t tie me to the couch or shove ice cream in my mouth.

I have an appointment to go back in a couple months to see how I’m doing. So far I haven’t noticed a real difference in my energy levels, but I’m starving all the time. So… yeah, not helpful. I’ll give it the couple months and then re-evaluate at that time. I also need to research how this condition can affect me if not treated. It doesn’t seem to be life threatening, so if it’s just that my metabolism is a bit slower and I’m kinda tired.. I got coffee to handle both of those things.

I’ll keep you posted….

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Dieting is Making us Fat

Katrina Russell

It sounds contradictory, but the reality is that people don’t usually diet to get healthy. They diet to lose weight. They diet to look better. They cut calories and entire food groups out of their DIET. They switch to artificial sweeteners and low fat options all in the name of “eating better”. They forget that our bodies actually need food. It’s how we live.

When I started my journey to become more healthy I didn’t just go the same old route of reading some magazine with the cover “lose 20 lbs in 20 days”. I’ve done that before..and it’s great. 20 days later you feel awesome. 40 days later the weight is back on and then some. That ever happen to you? Do you wonder why after you stop a diet you end up bigger than you started a few months later? I’m seeing articles about it all the time now. Even the hit show “The Biggest Loser” has winning contestants who are coming out saying that they have gained a lot of the weight back and it just keeps piling on.

When I made the choice to actually get healthy and not just skinny. When I made the choice to LIVE for my son and for me. I made the choice to change my life. That’s really the problem with diets. There’s no get skinny quick trick. There’s no magic pill to health. There is only lifestyle changes.

When I made the choice to get healthy and not just skinny I started taking nutrition classes. I started learning about how the food I put in my body effects everything from fatigue and illness, to my complexion. I learned how all the calorie cutting and fake sugars b5750867ad37b1aac935ba86672f5559 (1)affected my metabolism over the years and actually caused me to gain weight. The meme to the right spoke volumes to me. We all remember when we first started thinking that we were fat and the diet yo-yo began. We would starve ourselves and only drink diet sodas. We’d cut carbs and fat and the weight would fall off and then we’d be so DONE dieting we’d eat a whole cake… pizza… tub of ice cream… pick your poison.

This is because our bodies actually need calories. It actually needs carbs and fats and all these things that we have been taught are so bad for us… they just need the right ones and not so many. When we deprive our bodies of carbs or fats our bodies basically get scared. They hold on to the ones they have like a grandma with old cookie tins. They know they’re gonna need those carbs and fats at some point to burn into energy and if you’re not going to be giving them new ones every so often they are going to hoard the ones they get. This is also where fatigue hits… calories=energy. If we cut out too much our bodies scream back at us and we cave and end up eating even more than we would have at the start… and now our bodies are so used to storing it becomes the fist line of defense.

I’m not going to get into a whole class on caloric breakdown, that’s not what I’m here for. What I am going to do is remind everyone that EATING IS GOOD. Our bodies are designed for it. It’s what we eat that matters. We need need to eat good… real foods on a regular basis. Food that fills us. Food that tastes good. Food that does its job. And we have to not think of a diet as a quick fix but as what a DIET actually is, “the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats.”