Day 22 - Control

Expanding from yesterday's topic of 'if I only knew'...  it comes down to control (personally, speaking...and maybe for you, whoever you reader person may be :)).

It's about wanting to have control... I'm tempted to say more moms are control freaks advocates than the rest of the general population..but I could be wrong (it's just because that's the world I'm most intimately familiar with right now...I guess high powered business/career folks are, too?).  Anyway, we like control...and to a certain degree it is good.  While my children are young, it is good for me to have control over them lest they run into the street, climb on a hot stove or jump on their infant sibling.  BUT, we often want to have control because we're under the delusion that we actually have control.

The thing I've learned a lot of recently is that we DON'T have control... (self control and reacting to situations, is a different type of control that I'm talking about).  Often times, we are faced with situations that were simply out of our control.  After that, the only thing we DO have control over is how we react to the situation that was out of our control.  Make sense?

And so it goes with Whole 30 and any other food belief system.  Based on all the scientific evidence, research, testimonials, 'proof', we think that we need to control what we eat because of what it will do/does to us.  And it can become consuming.  I thought of this because I was remembering again when we were deployed and had pretty much no control over what we ate... aside from the mess hall versus Burger King (yes, we had BK in the middle of the desert!).  My choice was shelf stable chocolate milk or shelf stable banana flavored milk.  Yep.  Chocolate milk every time and you know what?  I actually thought it tasted good!  I had no control of the food I ate and I don't remember being stressed once about food while I was deployed (except when we had to scrounge the MRE box and found the jambalaya.... no thank you!).  

Once I realize/remember that I am not in control, it actually brings a great deal of freedom.  So what?  - I didn't have a chance to put together an organic, free range, non-GMO, gluten-free, paleo/whole 30 compliant lunch for my kiddos.  Breathe.  They had pop tarts today.  Breathe.  Something fell off my plate (no pun intended), they had a pop tart (and loved every bite of it) and they're going to be just fine.  I can only try to control so much, but the rest is in the hands of the God Almighty and that is quite a relief to me.