How Are You Making the Most of Summer?
For many, summer’s end brings feelings of sadness. For others, it’s relief.
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For many, summer’s end brings feelings of sadness. For others, it’s relief. There is no mistaking how Bottom feels.
“Each year as we arrive at mid-July, I begin to panic: Summer is passing too quickly! It’s always been my favorite season. I feel the most like a kid this time of year, even at 57, and I never want it to end. But alas, it always does, and too soon.”
— Sari Bottom
While I welcome the more relaxed pace of summer (because ironically I can get more work done), I don’t share Bottom’s views, mostly because I live in Texas, which is absolutely miserable in summer and will be at least through mid-October. There are more reasons than that, which I’ll get into below, but let’s just say summer is a mixed bag for me.
This summer has been particularly hot, and we’ve tried to escape every chance we get. So I guess you could say I’m making the most of summer by staying out of Texas as much as possible. I’m writing this from Colorado, where we’ve spent the weekend celebrating my middle child’s birthday by seeing Paramore and then visiting another daughter who lives in Colorado Springs. Our trips always include the outdoors, and we had a spectacular hike through Garden of the Gods on Saturday afternoon as a storm blew through, providing even more vibrancy to this striking landscape. The day before, we took in a different set of landscapes—the idyllic French countryside in a variety of seasons—via the impressionist paintings at the Denver Art Museum.
How are you making the most of summer? Click the comment button below and let me know!
Beware, Summer Triggers Are Upon Us
While Bottom’s post is an ode to summer, for some—perhaps many of us—this season isn’t all that sweet.
For parents of children with mental health issues, and especially eating disorders, summer is a time of high stress or at least vigilance. The lack of routines, disruption to sleep and eating schedules, travel to new destinations and fewer interactions with friends bring its own host of issues. Summer triggers is how the National Eating Disorder Association, NEDA, describes them.
Despite my best efforts, we’ve had our share of them this summer, which is yet another reason I’m mixed on this season. For the entire month of July, NEDA is doing a series of guest posts on summer triggers. For those of you in this boat, you can read these first-person accounts and hopefully find some company or tips that might help. I contributed a post, and it will be live later this week.
Summer Marks My 1-Year Anniversary of Quitting Diets… Plus, I Did a Podcast
As I wrote last week, I’m almost a year in on ditching diets and transitioning to intuitive eating. In case you missed it, here’s what I learned in a year of saying F-it to diets and diet culture.
For years, there was this small voice in the back of my head telling me I needed to stop with all of the madness—the calorie counting, the restricting and consequent overeating, the crazy overexercise. I knew that it was the thing I needed to do for my personal liberation and yet I was terrified of what would happen. So I ignored it, until I couldn’t ignore it any longer. Once I made the decision to give up dieting, it set in motion a rapid cascade of life changes, most of them good.
I’m grateful for the liberation I’ve found in diet recovery, but there are still days when I question what I’m doing. Making this kind of change is never easy. It takes an incredible amount of courage to examine yourself and your sometimes not-so-pretty behaviors.
In the past week, I’ve done plenty of reflection on the past year, and last summer in particular, because it’s when I decided to ditch diets. There’s more to it than that, and in this week’s podcast episode with the Eating Disorder Therapist, I talk about the family crisis that forced me to examine my own relationship with food. Full confession: I’m still working up my courage to listen to this episode.
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I have to say, the heat is making a lot of decisions for me.
Shorter walks outside, mainly in the shade, and less overall outside time between 10 AM and like 6 PM.
Seems like a good time to focus on writing, honestly!