My challenge to myself during the entire twenty-eight days of February is to pay attention to what I eat. But! Not only that, my challenge is to eat consciously and write every single day about it. I want to break compulsive habits and form new, healthy habits. I am not going to count what I eat, though I may record it for ideas for the future, etc. But really, I want to concentrate on how eating makes me feel.

A few years ago I did South Beach Diet. I'm going to take some ideas from phase one and combine it with eating fruit and fruit juices. At least for a week or so in hopes that my body will detox without my having to be entirely hardcore about it. I remember during those first two weeks when I did South Beach I craved fruit a lot to the point where I had a strawberry and it was considered cheating. I think this is silly and not the point of this challenge, so I am allowing myself to eat fruits.

I'm going to chronicle the way I feel, the weight I've lost and other changes I notice. I'll chronicle inches lost, breakdowns and differences I experience in my skin. This month of February will be a month of change and growth, and hopefully that will also reflect in this blog!

*to read more about the iCiNG Transformation Challenge, visit Galadarling's website

Apple Sauce

Are you addicted to sugar? How do you handle that? Do you handle that? For the past year or so, I've been ignoring addiction by giving in to it.

I have a sickeningly high sugar addiction, or what I'm believed to be that. About five or six years go I was told I have Insulin Resistance. All I could do about that was lose weight, eat healthy. It wasn't long after that when I entered college and undid all the weight loss I had done in my last two years of highschool. Through Weight Watchers I had lost almost twenty pounds. It doesn't seem like a lot, especially not for two years. I lost most of the weight the first year, and maintained the second year.

I still live at my childhood home with my parents and my younger brother. My mom never has junk food in the house, and while this can be good during times when I'm trying to lose weight, it tends to drive me nearly insane when all I want is something genuinely sweet. Most of the sweet foods in my house, puddings, a sugar free chocolate souffle and countless amounts of powdered juices contain Splenda. It seems like such a great sugar substitute, but the taste lingers in my mouth for hours afterward, and I can't be bothered to build up a tolerance.

Tonight I went on my usual cabinet raid looking for anything sort of sweet. Nights when I do this, I end up consuming anything I can just to fill that urge. I bounce back and forth between salty and sweet, hoping something will satisfy the void I have. Tonight, as I was looking through the bins in the refridgerator, I consciously decided I was going to have apple sauce - the organic no sugar added kind. It was a decent decision, I sprinkled my bowl with cinnimon and pretended it was some sort of dessert. It was, afterall. Because who ever said dessert needs to be full of sugar? My mind, I guess. It's what I've become accustomed to expect, even living in a house without sweets, it's hard to escape the mindset.

And from tonight on in, I'm going to try eating fruit when I'm craving sugar. Right now I don't have the focus to try and break the sugar addiction by abstaining -- in 2005 for about two months I did South Beach Diet. Though I did well, I stopped because of boredom and my heart wasn't focused enough to keep on going and figure out the way through the boredom. I believe most of the foods on South Beach Diet, and Weight Watchers Core program and some other so called diets are on the right track. I think we as humans tend to get off track, especially in America where everything is manufactured to be quick, cheap and tasty. For now though, I don't want to participate in a diet. I'm loosely tracking calories on Sparkpeople.com while trying to figure out a lifestyle I can make into my own.

And so, I've found my first habit to replace, sweets with fruits. Still sugar but of a different sort.

The year that will become something.

I'd like to say I can't remember how I got this way. In theory, I can't. Sometimes it's like, I look in the mirror and wonder when this happened, how did I come to weigh almost three hundred pounds when in high school I had tried to hard to lose those twenty pounds? How did I let myself keep on eating? When did I give up on myself? Or maybe, I never really had much to give up on, because something was missing.

It's 2009, and I'm going to subscribe to the whole "new years resolutions" that I try to ignore every year. I don't know why I try to ignore them, but it probably has something to do with the fact that I always tend to lose touch on goals quickly. So in time I've realized I've stopped making them in general; it's only led me to the days I've spent sleeping until one am, clicking around on the internet, crying and reading blogs as if any of that would somehow get me somewhere.

I forgot to mention the one main factor. Compulsive eating, a topic that hardly comes up with any people I know, goes along with the disorder in the first place and somehow has found it's way into my life. I have a friend with an on-again off-again case of bulimia and she's the only person who kind of sort of knows. She's the only person I've talked to in real life about eating issues, it's so sensitive to me that I can't put into words any of it. At least, I don't try.

So, this blog is a way of figuring things out, setting myself straight. It's a way to get out words and thoughts I have that I want to share but can't seem to find myself to push it out there. It's 2009, and I refuse to let this new year be what 2008 became. So instead, I am going to welcome it. I am going to embrace myself and figure everything out. Not only with the use of written words, but by example. And I'll be reporting back here.

Here's to 2009; the year that will become something.

Highflyer is about learning how to live & be the best person you can be. It's about me, Ivory, reclaiming who I am, or at least figuring it out. This is my journey, my memoir-in-progress. Highflyer is about taking leaps and walking on tightropes, bouncing back and recovering your wings.

The title Highflyer is taken from a Hanson song, Broken Angel, about how everybody falls & now it's time to get up, and earn your wings tonight.

a highflyer's what i want to be
seems they won't let me
says i'm too small
don't feel small, at all.

...

little angel gotta learn to fly
get up
earn your wings tonight

broken angel - hanson