December Week 1: Get Out Your Pleasure Scale

Welcome to December and our theme of True Pleasure! I am looking forward to exploring how we can use pleasure to impact our weight and our lives in positive ways.

EACH PLEASURABLE WEEK

At the beginning of each week this month, as you plan and prepare for your successful weight release, I am going to give you tools that I think will allow you to experience more pleasure on your journey of weight mastery. This week we will focus on your mind and pleasure.

Please listen to the micro coaching session (download link at top of this email) where I also walk you through getting refocused on your weight release for this coming week.

GET OUT YOUR PLEASURE SCALE

Curiosity killed my fat. It’s true. In order for me to have maintained a weight release of forty pounds for twenty years, I really had to cultivate a serious curiosity about myself and what truly gave me pleasure other than food. There was a time, my monthly mastery friends, that I believed the only thing that gave me pleasure was food!

I remember coming home from freshman year at college after having moved to New York from Seattle. Yes, I had desperately missed my family that first term, but what I was looking forward to was eating all my favorite holiday treats. When I got home, after the tearful reunion with everyone, I got busy reuniting with all of my mom’s baked goods and holiday meals.

I spent a lot of time pursuing what I perceived to be the pleasure I wanted and needed from my homecoming but I ended up gaining twenty five pounds in a month and losing out on giving myself the true pleasure of the holiday season with my family.

TUNE IN TRUE PLEASURE

In order to Shift and become a person who wasn’t seeking pleasure in just food, I started by looking deeper into what truly gave me pleasure in life and started striving to bring more non-food pleasure-filled moments in my day.

A tool that helped me do this was the PLEASURE SCALE. By measuring the actual pleasure that you get from things on a scale from 0-10 (0 being no pleasure and 10 being incredible pleasure) you can begin to really tune in and see what you truly enjoy, and often you will be surprised!

You see there is a huge difference from what we perceive we will get pleasure from and what we really do. I might perceive that piece of cake will bring me pleasure, and enjoy a few bites but eating the whole thing might actually make me feel unbalanced.

So my real pleasure experience from eating cake might be low, like a 3.  Whereas something that I totally take for granted, like laying in bed in the morning and looking at the green of the tree outside my window against the sky and thinking about my day while petting my dog is so pleasurable when I really allow myself to be present to it that it rates a 9.

By measuring the pleasure I got from various things I experienced in my life, I began proving to my myself that I wasn’t really all about food and that I actually got far more pleasure from non-fattening things.  The more I valued these new pleasures in my life, the less I sought out food for “pleasure” and the more I sought out my true pleasures.

Some true RITA pleasures:

Everyday:

• dancing around to music all through my house 10
• singing really loudly to music (including Christmas music) in my car 10
• naps 10
• looking at photo albums 8
• taking a walk and looking at how people have landscaped their gardens 8
• cleaning my house (this was a big shocker even though I am not that great at it I love the
• organizing and feeling of accomplishment) 7-8
• catching up on the day with my husband 10
• drinking a cup of really good tea 9
• learning - I love learning 10

NUMBER YOUR PLEASURES

Are you ready to dive into the pleasures that await you? I invite you to go through each day and measure on a scale of 0-10 the amount of pleasure you get from various things, including food.

Often we overlook the little things in life because we do them automatically. This means you may really have to LOOK, SMELL and FEEL your way through your day. Take lots of moments and CONNECT BREATHS (we talked about this last month) where you take a breath and tune in with yourself and notice what is going on. Use your connect breath and ask yourself on a scale from 1-10 how much pleasure am I getting from this moment? Take notes!

My hope is that, just by tuning in to pleasure you will be engaging in more pleasure by training yourself to seek pleasure from everything in your day.

Have a pleasurable week!