EDIT July 2018:

In retrospect, this was the peak of my struggle with my body and weight.  What I wrote here about tracking macronutrients with an app, attempting hit specific numbers of carbs, sugar, fat and protein, this *broke my brain*

Around this time my surgeon had told me I should really lose weight before the surgery.  She didn’t know I’d been struggling to lose weight for *two years*.  She was an excellent surgeon, and thank heavens cured my pelvic pain with the surgery, but I don’t think she understood the complexities of stress, pain, hormones, food, nutrition and weight.

This struggle to try to control my body’s pain (as though that was within my control) through food choices was me drinking the commonly repeated diet-culture koolaid:  if I just try harder, I can fix myself.

Folks, I needed surgery.  I got surgery.  It fixed my pain – hurray!  But healing from the surgery meant healing from the eating disorder I’d quietly, unknowingly, developed in the two years previous.

If you’re reading this post now, please know my “tracking app” just made things worse.  If you’re going through something similar – weight gain during a time of stress, physical pain or illness, or even just as your body ages, I suggest you start with this podcast:

https://christyharrison.com/foodpsych/

And now, back to the original entry:

***

Holy crow, George Harrison has been around a lot. This is reminding me of three years ago, when it was practically every day I felt like I was talking with him, John, or Kurt. This is the type of thing that makes you feel like you must be making this up, or have delusions of grandeur or something – where I question myself to make sure I’m staying grounded.

And then I get another email from yet another blog reader who says she just found this blog, and George has been talking to her!

Gotta love those synchronicities.

So before I get into the latest with George, I thought I’d give you all an update on life here: My trip to Ontario to visit my family is right around the corner, and I’ll be offline for much of that. I will not be checking my email much at all for the first two weeks of June, so please hang tight. I will potentially be on facebook, Instagram, twitter – but the best way by far of contacting me is through email because your messages will never get lost in a pile of spam, and I *will* get to you, I promise.

The Weight of It news: I was all stoked when I went on the Endo(metriosis) diet and lost 10 pounds easily – hurray! That’s usually what happens when I’ve hit the nutritional sweet spot, the weight just falls off. That’s how it’s supposed to happen.

Then it stopped coming off. At least it didn’t come back on. That’s huge. BUT my nutritionist is really honing in on things with me now. These statistics may not mean much to you folks, but I know there are at least six of you who are on the same general track as me. The approach we are now taking is to tweak the nutritional balance of my meals. Although I’m eating between 1600 – 1700 calories per day, and I’m reasonably active (not sedentary, but not athletic) this alone *should* have triggered weight loss.

This is what a family doctor will tell you. Weight loss is simple. Calories in minus calories burned. Eat less, move more.

For folks like me, this can make you want to scream, and then give up. Don’t, my friends. I love you, don’t give up. You CAN be healthy. You just need more input.

What’s it been for me now, three years of trying? It’s a learning experience. I’m right there with you.

Anyway, contrary to popular belief, a calorie is not a calorie. It depends very much what that calorie is from. I’m not a big food documentary person, I had my fill after watching “Supersize Me” – but I’m going to recommend a movie that my friend turned me on to recently, and I enjoyed SO MUCH I didn’t even knit or scroll through facebook while it was on. This movie had my complete attention. It’s called “That Sugar Movie”. It’s about a dude who maintains his healthy lifestyle, same exercise and SAME CALORIES, the only thing he changes is he eats more “health food” that has sugar in it.

The difference made me feel vindicated. I have had this “a calorie is not a calorie” argument with multiple people, most recently with a *nurse nutritionist* who was adamant she knew more than I did. Hint: No one knows more about dieting than a person with disordered eating, no matter what your body type. Those of us who have been overweight and back again, for decades, we know what usually causes gains and what causes loss. Those of us who have developed some type of eating disorder, due to the toxic combination of popular food availability, marketing, nutrition messaging, and well, just society in general right now. I don’t need to get into that, you know what I’m talking about. Never mind how the most convenient and available types of food are engineered to be addictive. I’m preaching to the choir here, I know.

Anyway, I’m enthusiastic about my recent upgrade to the free app “Lose It”. I’ve been using the free version of this app ever since it came out, but I just upgraded to the “premium” version so that I could break out the nutrition information in the foods I eat, to be sure I’m hitting these key figures per my fabulous nutritionist:

Less than 24g of sugar per day (including fruit and veg – this one is HARD you guys!)

Less than 150g NET carbs per day (carbs minus fiber)

Around 60g fat per day (avocado, flax, fish)

At least 65g of protein per day

Nutrition is incredibly complex. I’m so glad I have the help of a nutritionist who has specialized in metabolic issues. She *was* trying to get me to eat a lot more grains in the beginning, but they’re all required to start at the Canada Food Guide. Insulin resistance is a BIIIITTTTCH to fix.

Anyway, if you would like to be my friend on Lose It, please look me up (Kate Sitka) It’s kind of like facebook for weight loss, and it’s a very positive community in general. No psychic stuff on Lose It please, just weight loss and nutrition geek friends! Remember you need to upgrade to the “Premium” version if you want to track nutrition stats and measurements. I’m tempted to just throw out the scale and only track measurements at this point!

Okay, enough about this mortal body, let’s talk about immortal consciousness!

George: Try Vegetarian, it’s the best overall diet for your health.

Kate: Et tu, my friend?

George: It is the truth!

Kate: I am getting so sick of beans and lentils, man!

George: I did too, and that helps with the weight loss! (winks)

Kate: For heaven’s sake George. I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with you.

George: I’m offering, being helpful my love. (big smile, golden light)

Kate: I appreciate the love. Remind me George, what were you saying about the collective meeting the individual consciousness?

George: Ah yes! (Shows me a dot, with a pulse, which rises. A pulse like a heartbeat – everything is vibration, this is common knowledge, the pulse is at the beginning. It’s simple to look at each lifetime as a pulse, each pulse as a life, a heartbeat in the life of the overall soul.

 

Kate: What I was shown was visual with a conceptual download which I’ll do my best to paraphrase. (This sort of communication is often like a flash of understanding or inspiration, followed by grapple with English words to attempt to translate it before the complete picture fades. I drew it and then make the above infographic)

The black dot represents consciousness as we perceive it in life. We are solid, fixed, and fairly opaque most of the time. We’re tuned for physical existence. George shows me the pulse of our heartbeat, the pulse of our breath. How we live has a relationship with how our individual consciousness functions. Those with heartbeats (mammals, birds, insects) have a more solid, here and now, consciousness. Moments separated by beats. Lifetimes separated by clear birth and death events.

Those beings whose bodies do not have heartbeats, who are more plant-like (or actual plants) have a consciousness that is more fluid – their lifetimes flow like air across a membrane. Their heartbeat is the pulse of the planet, the turning of the globe, the rotation and the orbit around the sun. When one tree in the forest dies, it’s consciousness does not leave the planet. It rejoins the collective of that forest – and will emerge as a part of a seedling or multiple seedlings – easing from one into many and back again with ease, like an ocean evaporating into rain, drops of rain forming pools, lakes forming rivers, rivers returning to the ocean.

George reminds me of a past post, the sea urchin consciousness. Here’s the excerpt:

“Recently, we had the opportunity to observe, communicate with and then eat a live sea urchin. Urchins have been a food staple in our region for hundreds of years. It was amazing talking with this creature, which could best be described as a collective consciousness like the Borg from Star Trek. In the picture of the urchin, see how each spine waves individually? Each spine is an awareness. As the fisherman broke apart the living collective to access the roe, the edible part of the urchin, I was braced for the urchin to feel pain.

But it didn’t happen. All that happened was the collective consciousness separated into its parts – now there were half a dozen singular collectives where once there was one. The message came “Put us back!” and the image of returning some of the pieces to the water formed in my mind. I understood that this would seed future whole urchins. I also understood that when many hundreds of sea urchins are together, they form a singular collective consciousness too, almost like one huge animal. The moment a single urchin is removed by a human, otter, crab etc for food, this portion of the collective is simply unplugged from the larger one, and simply becomes it’s own consciousness. It was so fascinating and instructive, talking to urchins. It makes you wonder about the sheer nature of consciousness.”

So the first thing we need to really understand, our starting place on the game board of understanding all of this, is to be aware that our personal experience of consciousness is not ALL which consciousness is. We experience as humans a TYPE of consciousness which allows us to know ourselves as “separate”.

This awareness of our potential separateness is a spectrum – and it’s a spectrum within species. I did a post a while back about my friends wonderful chickens, and how one or two of the hens saw themselves as individuals, and most of the others existed within a flock consciousness most of the time.

George, are we on the right track?

George: Yes but let’s return to humans. For this conversation, we need only remember that humans believe themselves to be separate from everyone else – even (especially?) from other humans. This is unique. This is “ego” as some now call it – not Freud’s Ego, but simply self-awareness + future awareness+ logical capability.

Kate: I can see why you want to keep this conversation about humans, because I immediately want to chime in about the animals I know who have human-like consciousness. Not all of them are cabable of future awareness and logical thinking, but some do. Maybe 10 – 20 of the pets I speak with can count and understand 5 days in the future. Most simply understand the future as a feeling of time passing, of the light and seasons changing.

George: Back to the dot. I love your focus on your animal friends; I must gently remind you, your readers are human. (smiles) Let’s start with them.

Kate: Okay! Sorry!

George: Look closely – each life pulse, each single lifetime, is filled with variations. These variations are alterations in the timeline. Each lifetime is not a straight line. The consciousness often wants to explore varying possibilities within a lifetime.

Why waste the opportunity afforded by an incarnation when the soul consciousness is not limited by time or space?

Kate: Okay, this is close to the psychedelic image George was showing me while explaining this. Think three-dimensional fractals.

Each additional green dot is meant to symbolize variations on life choices – that time you went left instead of right, broke a limb and couldn’t go to summer camp, chose one school over another, chose one job over another – there are detours available to us and sometimes we choose to live out those variants as well.

Now, take the first image and imagine you’re looking at it from the top (or bottom). It would look like a green circle with a black dot in the center – then remember each circle represents a lifetime, and within each lifetime there are variations.

George: This is integration, the perspective from the top of the pyramid – the god-like view of your own existence. It’s very beautiful.

Kate: Who are you, when you’re looking back on your life? Which circle is George, and who are you when you’re looking at everything from above?

George: (warm smile, love) You only have to realize that the you who you are when you see things from above is the same as the you that you are right now. I am George from the god-like view of my own spiritual history. You will still be Kate. But you will *know* yourself better, and you will have infinite compassion for yourself. This is self-love.

Kate: Wow. I think we’ll stop there for now. Next time we can talk about collective consciousness? That’s what got this ball rolling.

George: Yes.