Some of us feel ruled by food. The first time we had too much of a good thing (although it’s usually a bad thing that gets us) was not necessarily the first step along the wrong path, but with too little attention and control and too much regularity we find ourselves hijacked by what we put in our mouths.

Before we realise how serious our situation is, we are riding the tides of the sugar highs and lows as we suffer the mindless face-stuffing of all the worst kinds of food under the sun.

And it is suffering. Surely something in our psyche is being bruised as we look at ourselves consuming a jumbo block of chocolate, an entire discount store bag of lollies, packets of biscuits, half a loaf of bread loaded with butter and jam, drinking the bottle of wine then looking for more.

Extreme situations require extreme measures. To land on firm ground again we have to eschew (there’s a small irony using a word that contains ‘chew’ in it) the kinds of food that brought us to ashamed unhappy fatness. We also need willpower—or simple bloodymindedness—to get through the first few weeks while our blood sugar levels are calming and we are building a different kind of relationship with food, based on the kinds of food and the measurements that they give people at Overeaters Anonymous. Some of us simply can’t do ‘everything in moderation’. We’re not able to come out of the other side of our diet and ease up. Ever. We’re just not built that way. We’re either totally in charge of our food with Sergeant-Major-like exactitude, or we’re totally out of control.

So what do you lose when you decide that this food plan you’re on is a forever thing? You certainly lose some spontenaity around food. You stop seeing food as entertainment or a sop for boredom. You sacrifice some of the enjoyable social aspects of breaking bread with family and friends—or at least you have to re-imagine it to make it work on your own terms.

Is it worth it? I’m starting to think that the answer is a resounding YES. Not just for the weight that you don’t regain (yet again). There is integrity in a controlled diet. Integrity and dignity and a kind of freedom that people who haven’t gone through food obsession never even realise they have.

It is a cold winter’s morning, quite early. I am sitting close to  a small but delightfully warm open fire and contemplating life. Firstly I am thankful for my husband who stirred the fire and fed it before going to work just after dark. I know the fire won’t last long because we have been using wood that is not considered ‘good’ wood for burning. Some people call it rubbish wood because it’s not ironbark or yellow box or similar. And while it’s true that the wood doesn’t have great longevity and leaves more ash than other types, this forgotten wood, collected from around the property, burns warm and bright and gives us wonderful comfort. Our slow combustion heater gets the so-called good wood but actually we prefer to sit and talk in front of the open fire and appreciate the wood that no one else values much.

This wood I am gazing at, as it moves from active flames to orange embers, makes me think along somewhat philosophical lines. How we think things are never good enough. How we don’t appreciate things for what they are. How sometimes we don’t make the most of what we have readily available. How much value there is in the humble, the ordinary. How hard the humble and the ordinary will work if given a chance.

Ah, an open fire. Sometimes I sit and think. And sometimes I just sit.

Being on a proven eating plan is like being on a train. The line is set out before you and all you have to do is follow it. Choosing your own way is like driving around on unformed roads. There may be no signage, or there may be many contradicting signs that make you so confused you don’t know where you’re going. There may be difficult corners you simply can’t negotiate. There may be sandy areas that bog you down. It can all be pretty hard doing it on your own.

The railway is a system where someone else has done the infrastructure for you, and that makes the travelling hugely easier. Of course you can make a detour to the sidelines and have to get shunted back to the main line. Life’s not always straightforward. But by and large, you just choose the right train – one that will get you safely to your destination – then you just stay within the rails.

I had found such a train. It was an eating plan that was flexible enough to be really  healthy or give a bit of leeway for those emergencies when junk food was pretty much the only available option. It was something I could stick to, day in and day out. I was happy. Losing weight, in control, looking good.

During that time, someone said to me, “But you wouldn’t want to stay on a diet forever.” I thought, “Why not?” Because it was great. The problem was the goal weight syndrome. I was there. I had arrived. I didn’t need to follow the lines any more. So I didn’t put enough energy and thought into the maintenance phase I should have been attending to with great vigilance until I became used to the more relaxed rules. But i didn’t just change trains. I got off the system. I wandered a long way away and now I’m going to have to look for the railway station all over again.

It seems that you can cheat with bad food as long as you keep it to a very small percentage of what you are eating. But once you’ve totally let go and your blood sugar is out of control, it’s very hard to regain your balance.

The point is, you can choose different routes to take you to different destinations. Life’s still an adventure. There’s still so much to see along the way. But if you go the structured way, you’ll get there, slim and healthy. And that’s something to toot about. So here I am, ticket in hand. I need to board my train. And the next time I get to my destination weight, I’m not leaving the station. I’m going immediately to the maintenance  train. It might be running on a different guage but it will still keep me on the straight and narrow.

Self loathing is destructive. There is nothing good about it. It is a totally negative emotion that leads to desperation and despair.

But sometimes if you loathe something you have done (it’s important that you are loathing your action, not yourself), there can be a shining light come from it—a catalyst for change. Such a moment can turn your personal path in such a way that you are forever changed—if that’s the way you want to play it.

The moment appears between one heartbeat and the next. How you use it is up to you. You can choose to continue to wallow in the depths of shame or regret or despair … or you can take the precious kernel that has presented itself from the experience and use it to pave the way to a better you, a better life. It’s a shining jewel you can use to pivot your existence – or you can fail to see its significance and allow it to pass into oblivion.

If one of these rare moments should come to you, grasp it with both hands, your heart and your head. But be warned, the power of the moment is very short lived. Within 24 hours it can be gone, leaving only the cold ashes of regret and despair.

The magic of this small spark only lasts if you to take action straight away. You can’t afford to analyse it or think about it. It is the moment. You either grasp it or you lose it. The strength is only there when it is new and it needs the fuel of your immediate and complete commitment. If you try to recall it at another time you will find it insubstantial and dreamlike.

The moment itself can come from horror, from grief, from shame … from anything that is a strong emotion or occurrence. What it cannot do is survive by itself. The magic only lives on when a totally new action gives it a free piggyback. It is a moment to change. Blow your warm breath on that spark and set it on fire so it can light your way to a better path. And do it as soon as you realise you hold something precious, albeit fleeting, in your possession.

I’m a pretty busy lady. I have work commitments (I work from home), masses of business and household paperwork to do for a couple of other people and am involved in two clubs that take a fair slice of my time. With a lot happening and nearly no down time, it’s rather strange that I feel like I am in a season where I am very much waiting on the sidelines.

Because of circumstance, it’s not possible to travel, so there is a definite feeling of not being able to do everything we desire in that respect. Of course, some small amount of travel – for example, to the next town – is possible – but only within time constraints and after making arrangements for others to shoulder my responsibilities for a day.

In recent years I have lived my life by what I couldn’t do rather than what I could. However, for three years of that time I had my diet perfectly under control. And last year I threw it all away and gradually slid down a slope that started gently and has become increasingly steeper.  As  I whiz down the hillside, I collect all the milestones that I so diligently and slowly accomplished on the way up – the wine, the chocolate, other confectionery, the bakery treats … even bread and butter.

It gives me no pleasure to do so, for I know I am going against my own wishes. Okay, it gives me some pleasure. The first piece of chocolate, the first bite of butter-slathered bread are deliciously guilty pleasures.

The thing that I have found is that when I have my diet right, it is so easy to do the right thing, and a small deviation doesn’t derail me. But to put the train back on the rails once it is off, that’s a major exercise that requires a massive effort, sacrifice and short-term pain. In those couple of weeks where the blood sugar levels are levelling out, the body is fighting against the mind so there’s a lot of willpower required to get through the time.

So here I am in this season where we can’t go travelling as we wish and are very much constrained to home – at least, I am. This is the perfect time to be on a good food plan – to get the diet sorted for life. I have an arsenal of information, all the knowledge I require to do it and I’ve done it before so I know it’s possible. What is lacking, then?

It’s not simply a case of ‘just start’. I can start multiple times a week and fall over within half a day. I think there’s a burning desire – or at the very least a switch that needs to be flipped – that is not in evidence in my life. I have the idea that I want to do it, but the heart is not there. It’s as though the energy required has been channelled elsewhere and is simply not available.

So I am on the sidelines, waiting for the sign to dive right back in. The best I can do is be ready – kitted up and warmed up, so that when my name is called, I can run onto the field and play the game the way that, in my heart, I want to.

It’s funny how we reveal the kind of people we are even in simple aspects of life. Let’s take the example of a travelling holiday. There’s the get-there-at-all-costs-and-put-a-flag-on-the-peak person and there’s the meander, stop, savour, meander a bit more type of person. And let me say this. They’re both getting what they want … and they’re both missing out on something.

People who are wired to keep heading towards the destination miss out on the joy and depth of the experience of staying a little longer in one place. Others who stay and savour run out of time for some of the exciting things up ahead. They don’t have the benefit of the extra distance or the enjoyment of the race.

So, whatever we choose in life, we’re missing out. If I want to try everything and never settle to any one hobby or career, I miss the opportunity of the deep dive. I might enjoy the surface skimming life, but the busyness of doing all things at once means never really experiencing the peace and the kind of happy certainty that comes from knowing one subject well. And of course the opposite is true. I’m not living a well rounded life if I put all my energy into just one activity.

Compromise is equally problematic. If I try to be both people at once I will likely find that it can’t be done and I will be living my life at a hand gallop but never really feel that I am truly accomplishing anything.

I think there’s a reason the saying is, Live the Dream. Singular. Because if I try to live all my dreams, I have too many half-baked visions swirling around in my head to do any of them justice. In the end, I think it’s the same for most people.We don’t choose the one dream. We try to fit it all in and in doing so have a great deal of pleasure from playing in many puddles but none of the true contentment of having immersed ourselves in one deep pool.

At the very end of my life I’d like have accomplished my one big dream. Naturally, the precursor to that is knowing what the one big dream is. That takes thought and a kind of curating process which can be rather uncomfortable. But even if I only edit my life partially I’m sure that I will find that a great deal of the busyness and bustle is just so much chaff that I can easily live without once I’ve been brave enough to identify and evict it. With the space that’s created, the truly important will become much more obvious.

And if the time-consuming and sometimes painful winnowing process leads through the fog to clarity on the other side, it’s worth the soul searching.

Imbue. It might not exactly be a dying word but it’s certainly not a term that gets a daily airing from the general populous. I would like to suggest that the word stands for something quite powerful and that many of us could benefit from a verb like this in our day-to-day dealings.

The dictionary definition is to inspire or permeate with a feeling or quality. Well, who couldn’t use a verb like that in our lives? Its origin, as with many English words, seems to be somewhere other than England … in this instance, the French imbu (no doubt from a Latin predecessor), meaning moistened. The word seems to have made its Anglo-debut in late Middle English, with the stronger meaning of saturate.

The word is usually used in a positive sense and I would put the case that we all could use it more in our lives—not necessarily to speak it, but to live it. For myself, I’d like to imbue my life with more of the good things—love, creativity, beauty of all kinds.

And not just to moisten my soul with these wondrous qualities, but to absolutely drench it.

I’ve always been one of those people who Gets Things Done. Not everything, mind. Some things have fallen through the cracks over the years. But it’s interesting to think about times when I failed. Why didn’t that get done? How could that be fixed for next time? (Or to be pedantic, how could that be fixed so there isn’t a next time!)

Dave Allan’s Getting Things Done methodology, when you look at it in a chart, is all pretty obvious. It’s probably the way a lot of us–or at least those of us with a nodding acquaintanceship with organisational skills–do things instinctively. But the one little piece that I thought was absolute gold was the identifying of the very next action that needs to be taken to progress something. Jobs languish. Sometimes they die, and it’s for the want of us doing a little to point them in the direction of completion. That small action, whatever it is, is the very next thing that needs to be done. We don’t analyse the job enough to break it down into discrete steps; we don’t plan and therefore it all seems harder than it turns out to be when we have sat down and looked at our job and worked out the very next small task that needs to be accomplished.

This works well with jobs that I tend to procrastinate over. I can manage to get enough energy to plan or to do some small thing towards a job, I just don’t think I have the energy to do the whole task. Fine. If I just do the tiniest bit I will have progressed the task. At least it is moving, even if at a snail’s pace, towards done.

And there’s never a ‘too hard’ basket, because if I look at the next action I have identified for the task and it’s something that I absolutely know I cannot do, it’s someone else’s next action. In that case, my next action is contact that person so they can schedule it. And then my next action after that is to follow up so the job gets completed in a timely manner. Easy. Done.

I hover in the midst of a sea. The sea envelops me, encompasses me. It is all I can see for miles around. My life is the sea. I am in the sea. The sea owns me.

But I want to walk on solid land again so I wade through the sea, wondering where to start. With the simplest thing. Good. With the item closest to my hand. Yes.

It’s not much. It’s not nearly enough. But it’s a start. And from that simple beginning my mind begins to clear and my vision of what I can do clears a corresponding amount. With my action of doing something, I have made the sea’s vast power over me begin to recede.

Now I see how I can start to tame this sea. How I can corral certain categories of items together and find them even if they’re not necessarily organised into neatness. I can see what I have in this group of items and it’s easier to understand that I don’t need every single item here. Some of this is flotsam and jetsam and does not belong in my life.

I know I am only working on the surface of the sea but I also understand that what meets my eyes every morning is important. As this tide ebbs it will be time to go under the surface, to the deeper levels. I will feel more comfortable about doing that once the surface sea has been cleared. I will know that I am capable. I will know that, unlike King Canute, this sea is mine to command.

Imagine life as a pathway. Instead of the normal analogy of uphill being your challenges and downhill being a time of coasting along fine with no problems, let’s imagine the pathway is flat and that there are different ways of traversing.

Sometimes you walk along quite comfortably. This is when everything is going along fine, at a pace that suits you. Sometimes we have years and years like this. We usually think silly thoughts like “Nothing ever changes” during this part of our life. Sometimes we get a bit bored, even.

But then there’s that moment when life puts you on top of a circus ball and you have to do some pretty fancy footwork just to keep your balance. You might go backwards along the path or mark time as you try to get a handle on how to drive this thing. What a challenge! But you might be good at it and still power along your path, hyper-attention required to keep on the ball but still travelling forward. Exhausting and requiring constant focus, but it can be done.

Another challenge might be in the form of sticky mud that tries to hold you back. If you’re not prepared to get muddy and do the very hard yards, you won’t get through. But if you angle your body a bit forward and use all the impulsion potential within you, you’ll gradually wade through this difficult patch.

Some people, though, seem to rise above change. They’re the ones we describe as ‘taking everything in their stride’. They seem to do it a bit more easily than the rest of us. I think I know how they do it.

Instead of walking, they have built a resilience and acceptance that acts like a conveyor. They still have the same challenges but they manage to keep their wits about them and as long as they stay balanced and attentive to what’s happening in the moment, their faster movement is actually easier than the walking pace. They have probably ditched some non-essential things along the way so they can easily keep their attention on the present.

Being adaptable and accepting of change, dealing with it at once rather than sitting back and hoping it will go away, is like having a conveyor belt under us making the journey a little easier. There is less energy expended when you accept things as they are and don’t dwell heavily on the past or the future – or what might have been or what ‘should’ be.

We all have a choice about how we want to deal with our challenges. We can become mired in them or rise above them. We can mark time or forge forward. We may not be able to change the path but we can master better ways of travelling along it.