De-stressing

Purely lazy day.
And I've loved every minute of it.
I did not use my time wisely.
I revelled in doing absolutely nothing of consequence.
I am a sloth!

I read a couple different articles over the past week that link weight gain with stress--no duh. I gain weight when I get stressed because I am a stress eater. Tell me something new. Well, believe it or not: they did!

When a person is stressed a hormone is produced that essentially does two things. First, it increases your hunger: no wonder I'm a stress eater!!! This hormone overload also causes the belly fat to kick in to overdrive.

So today I thought a lot about kicking stress out of my life.
Actually, I contemplated ways to de-stress my distress. Here's what I mean. I believe that we are wired to take a certain amount of stress. Stress, not distress, becomes a motivator to grow, change, and improve. The problems come when we don't handle our stress in healthy ways and it shifts over into the realm of distress: stress overload that paralyzes us and causes us to react instead of acting in responsible and appropriate ways. When we get stuck in distress we make poor choices and poor choices lead to increased distress. It becomes a totally self-defeating process. In my classes I then teach ways to de-stress your distress.

In my slothful state today then, I began to examine my own life to see what distress I have allowed to crowd into my life. One of the major areas of over-stress is my working two jobs. I have been taking on more and more hours at the Curves job and at times have allowed myself to be taken advantage of by the manager when she needed someone to fill in. I will own that it has felt nice at times to be called and to be considered capable of closing the club by myself. I think my ego is over that now. I like the pocket money and the fact that I don't have to pay for my membership, but since I've started working I haven't lost any weight or inches and I'm wondering if it's due to the extra stress I've been experiencing? Perhaps it's time to quit. (insert huge sad sigh) Or, perhaps I just need to get better at establishing boundaries and limits. I'm not going to be any less a valuable employee if I learn to say no. In fact, I may be able to be an employee a lot longer if I do.

I like the way this feels. Hope I still feel that way when I talk to the manager about it.