IP and Pottery

I recently started doing pottery out of boredom, and discovered that I love it/am obsessed with it.  I spent 8 hours in the pottery studio in the last two days.  It’s been a really great stress reliever and an outlet for me.  School hasn’t been that stressful, but ideal protein has been really emotionally difficult.  There are constant up days and down days, and the process of creating art from a lump of nothing helps me deal with this emotional roller coaster.  Also, now that I actually have some concept of what I’m doing  (after a week of constant practice) pottery gives me a lot of confidence.  Today, I made a really nice, and somewhat difficult bowl in about 5 minutes.  I loved the bowl at the end, and did it in a really short amount of time.  I’ve spent a lot of time (when I’m not actually doing pottery) thinking about it and how it’s enriched my daily life and weight loss journey.   It wasn’t until today that the analogy between sculpting and molding my body and sculpting and molding clay.  When I first started last week, I would get really frustrated.  The main barrier of pottery (for me) has been mental.  If you do something to the clay, it will respond, but you have to believe that you can make it respond, and not that it’s controlling you.  This is really important for working on the wheel; any tiny movement of your hand can make a huge difference: positive or negative.  The most difficult part of throwing on the wheel is centering, which is basically turning a misshapen lump into a smooth, perfectly round shape.  This is difficult because it requires keeping the hands absolutely still in one position while the clay spins around haphazardly bumping into them, until it eventually adopts the shape of the hands.  This can take 30 seconds, or 5 minutes, depending on various factors like the moisture level of the clay, how still you actually keep your hands, how misshapen the clay is, how fast the wheel spins, etc.  The biggest hurdle in learning how to center correctly is maintaining the position of the hands no matter what and knowing that eventually, the clay will yield to their shape. I think my frustration (and eventual accomplishment) with learning how to center clay is really similar to the frustration that I’ve had with losing weight.  Results are happening, I’ve lost 25 pounds (the most I’ve ever lost), but I still feel frustrated and want it to happen faster.  As with throwing, I need to believe that if I keep up with my program, which has worked amazingly thus far, I’ll continue to lose weight. A huge mental barrier for me is the fact that I’ve never seen myself not overweight, so I can’t really wrap my head around the concept of myself at a normal weight When you begin centering a lump of clay, it’s impossible to know what the finished product will look like.  All you can do is move your hands through the right motions at the right time, and if you do everything correctly, you end up with a piece of art.  It’s never perfect, but it’s beautiful.

Ideal Protein

Day 6 on Ideal Protein, 9 lbs lost so far.  The first 3-4 days sucked, but they're finally becoming worth it.  Cheating has become much less of a temptation, and my answer to cravings is reading Paula's Home Cooking recipes and fantisizing about which one's I'll be making once I'm done with the program.  Not that I'm gonna go on an out of control junk food binge (at least not a huge one).  As we all know, every diet tells you you need to "change your lifestyle" to see permanent results.  The thing is, my lifestyle has always been great, so why is my weight such that I need to be on a diet in the first place?  Actually, a lot of people at Ideal Protein shared the same predicament before staring the program.  They've eaten well and exercised (some obsessively, myself included) their entire lives, but have always been overweight.  Whenever I would see people like this on infomercials for overpriced diets and exercise equipment I was the first to call bullshit.  If you're fat, it's your fault, right?  For most people, that's true, but my first week on Idea Protein, in addition to reading about the science behind it, has made me start to believe that this isn't always the case.  For some of us, a shitshow of a pancreas is to blame.  Now, a lot of people have a shitshow of a pancreas because of their shitshow of a diet (hence the type-2 diabetes epidemic in this country).  However, there is a small minority of people who were born this way.  My brother and I recently discovered we were part of this unfortunate group.  Being born with a sluggish pancreas makes it nearly impossible to lose weight without a program such as Ideal Protein, and causes the body to store everything as fat from a young age.  I'm no expert on physiology, but I will say it's known that complications during pregnancy can lead to this problem.  I always knew that 1) I have a weight problem that seemed impossible to correct and 2) my mom DID have complications during her pregnancy with me.  Enter Ideal Protein.  It feels like a miracle, because, for once in the 12 years that I have spent being on some kind of diet, my efforts have finally begun paying off.  Talk about a godsend.