Maybe there's a 3rd option.

My son looked at me with his striking hazel eyes after I offered him the option of a cookie or ice cream and he replied, “how about I have the cookie and the ice cream”. 

An hour earlier I gave the kids the option to leave the pool in ten minutes or twenty minutes and my older kids said “how about we stay here and walk home when we’re ready?”

Leave it to kids to remind you of the important life lessons that maybe there’s a third, viable option you haven’t considered. 

Like every parent out there, I’ve considered and used bribery, yelling, technology, threats and coercion, but lately I’ve been going back to good ol’ Love and Logic. One of the Love and Logic teachings is that the parent gives the child two options to choose from and the child gets to make the decision. The trick strategy is that the parent gives two options knowing that they’re ok with either option the child chooses. The child feels good having a sense of autonomy and it’s a win-win for everyone involved. 

This week has been a series of I see your option A and B and instead I’ll raise you to option C. Crafty little geniuses. They get the unwritten rule that things aren’t always black and white. It’s time you and I take notes from the kids and get comfortable with the gray, especially when it comes to food and body.

Think about the gray in terms of our bodies, we don’t always love or always hate our bodies. Very often, we have good days and bad days and a whole lot of meh in between. Being in the gray helps us get on with our lives despite our perceived perfections or imperfections.

You might have given yourself a black and white rule around a food or food group like sugar. No sugar for me, EVER! But then you find yourself elbow deep in a pan of brownies. So weird. 

When you’re living from a place of full allowance, it means you drop your black and white rules that sound like “always” and “never” and allow yourself to have whatever you want, whenever you want. After a while (aka the legalization period) you’ll find a variance in your sugar consumption. It won’t be an all out raid of the closest 7/11 nightly for hostess ding dongs and twinkies. Sometimes you’ll eat sugar and sometimes you’ll actually forget there’s ice cream in the freezer. It’s that third option that you can’t see, because you don’t trust yourself enough to get there, that brings you to a place of food peace. And spoiler alert, some of the things you thought were so delicious and you couldn’t control yourself around actually don’t taste very good. 

I challenge you this week to become master of option C. If you’re getting hung up feeling like you either have to eat all the carbs or no carbs, maybe you find a 3rd option like carbs plus some protein to help balance your blood sugar levels. 

Instead of wearing your daily pandemic loungewear zoomiform or your pre-pandemic, “fancy” wardrobe, maybe you’ll wear jeans twice this week.

Maybe you move your body on days when it feels right for you…..not everyday and not if you feel like the only time you can “count” your exercise is by putting on your leg warmers and digging out your P90X DVD’s* or clipping into the Peloton for a double. 

If you catch yourself giving black and white options around food and body this week, find the gray. It’s a lot more comfortable and it’s much more fun to be in a cookie and ice cream kind of place. 

*Does anyone even use DVD’s anymore? I still remember Friday nights at Blockbuster in the New Release section where there was a lot of considering Option C because alll the A and B movie options were already “checked out”.