Balancing Act

How's your balance?  No, I don't mean the kind of balance that is required to do the grasshopper pose in yoga.




I'm talking about the balance in your life between work, family, relationships, food, personal time, spirit, and exercise.

Oh, that balance. 

I have learned that when my life is out of balance, it gets really messed up, really fast.  There are two prime areas where I struggle: work and food. 

I am the daughter of a workaholic.  My father ran a small business while I was growing up.  He ran it out of our house initially.  He was a contractor.  He worked a lot.  When he got home from work, he would go up to his office and do paperwork and make phone calls to schedule jobs for the following day.  I am lucky that my mom was a stay-at-home mom and could provide the hands-on parenting that we needed.  In that regard they made a good, balanced team.  But I could easily be a workaholic myself.  I've always had jobs that didn't end when the work day was over.  Now I have a full-time job plus I have my own small business.  I often work on weekends and evenings.  I always have my phone and am checking email and texting with clients.  I work at balancing my work life, but do you know what's hardest for me?  When I'm not working.  I always think I want more free time and wish that I wasn't as busy as I am, but I have the hardest time keeping my head when I lack the structure of my job.  During my vacation after Christmas, I had a hard time with the down time.

But this is a blog about weight loss and having an-out-of-balance relationship with food is something I know quite a bit about.  To me either end of the food/weight spectrum is a problem that represents a lack of balance in my relationship with food.  If I am compulsively counting calories, weighing myself obsessively and exercising like a maniac (you know, dieting) then I am out of balance.  If I throw my hands in the air and eat everything that doesn't eat me first, I'm out of balance.  Either extreme is a problem for me.

One of the reasons that I ended up fat is that every time I decided to "do something" about my weight problem and screwed up relationship with food, I ended up back on the extreme dieting end of the spectrum.  I believed that this was the behavior that would lead me to freedom from weight issues and freedom from the general nuttiness in my brain when it came to food.  But because this approach lacks the balance that is required for a good, healthy life, it was doomed to fail.

Now please don't think that I'm all balanced and serene.  If you've followed my blog for any length of time, you know that I am not.  But I'm working on it because I know that it is important.  I believe it is the key to a normal, healthy life.

So how's your balance today?