thoughts of the day

So today I read two things that made me think...
The first was a rather trippy article about weight loss and numbness... it delved way too far into hippy vibrations stuff for my taste...but prior to tottling off with the fairies it raised some ideas that really hit a nerve for me. 

The writer talks about how often women, in response to some kind of emotional trauma, become numb...in order to avoid the bad feelings we simply stop feeling anything much at all.  She says "you can’t remain numb and move forward. The two don’t work together. In order to heal, you need to feel. You need to be emotionally involved in your own life. Most people are emotionally involved in other people’s lives and an “extra” in their own life."  This last line really struck a cord for me.  This is very much how I feel that I go about life.   I come alive in relation to the things that the people I love are going through - challenges and excitments - but I am numb when it comes to my own.  I find it increasingly difficult to summon up a spark for anything about my life at the moment, and I have been searching for the reason.  Mostly I have been focussed on trying to find something to feel excited about - but at the same time I have been saying that I feel "empty", "lacking in passion", unable to see beyond the immediate future, and that I simply don't care enough about any one goal to feel terribly motivated about it.  In other words - I am numb.
And the writer of the article talks, amid the scented candle crystal healing bits, about how carrying extra weight is part of the numbing process.  It is a reciprocal cycle in that the putting on weight makes you feel more numb, and the more numb you feel the more weight you put on....
The only answer is to start feeling.  The writer offers some basic CBT tips about false self beliefs... but I think that, after 13 years as a therapist, I will need a little more than that. 
But identifying the numbness is one big step on the journey of learning to feel again.  I start to wonder if I should do this as my goal before I start the goal of losing weight.  Perhaps this is one of the keys to unravelling the broken link between goal and action?
I guess the theory would be Step 1 : Identify the numbness.  Step 2 : Unravel the reason/s for the numbness (what are the bad feelings that triggered it?)  Step 3 : Find a way to heal the bad feelings so that I don't need to retreat into numbness to manage them.  Step 4 :  Spend time rediscovering feelings, things I am passionate about, how I really feel about things, people, experiences .  Step 5 : rediscover my goals, what I really want in life, and the passion that will drive me towards those goals (as well as the belief in myself required, and the sense of being deserving of happiness).

The second thing I read today was another in the recently mentioned series of forwarded blogs from my friend.  In this I picked up two tips I thought were useful... not new ideas but good reminders. 
1. If you want to achieve a goal, have a practical daily plan of what you will need to do each day to get there.
"How much additional time will you need in an average week to pull off that resolution? Where will that time come from? Figure out now where you’ll get that time from so that you’re not stuck having to make hard choices later on which can easily drive you off the rails of your resolution".
2. Keep a diary in which you record what happened each day in the journey towards your goal.  I thought it would be useful to have a diary for A) Exercise  B) Diet   C) What helped me move towards my goal today?  D) What hindered me in moving towards my goal today?
I thought that this would be good for helping me to recognise the patterns in what gets in the way (eg sickness, weather, indi not sleeping properly so both of us being tired, other people distracting me etc)  and then I can find ways of addressing the most common ones.