It's Weighing Less On My Mind

Forgive the pun, but weight has been weighing less on my mind these days. It’s this amazing shift that has been happening in the last week or so. I can’t even begin to tell you how surprising this is to someone whose earliest memories are tied up in having an overweight mother and being an overweight child.

As I’ve stated prior, my mother put me on a diet around the age of six or seven. It was humiliating. I didn’t understand why I, and only I, couldn’t eat dessert at night or how eating yogurt instead of cookies was better for me. I was six or seven! I just knew that there was junk food in the house and I wanted to eat it.

But what I did understand, on an emotional level though not yet a mental one, was isolation, criticism, and shame. Instead of instituting a familial shift around playing and moving more, eating more fruits and vegetables, and not having soda in the house whatsoever, my mother unintentionally taught me that a) I was fat, b) I was fundamentally WRONG for being that way, and c) it was something I had caused and something in my control to undo.

At a young age, it is not within a child’s control what foods are brought into the house or what parameters there are around television watching. But I am 26 years old now and everything is within my control.

So, guess what? I, casually, came to the realization that I don’t care as much, anymore, about losing weight. I’ve still got fourteen to nineteen pounds to lose before reaching my ideal goal and I’m not saying that being at a healthy weight for one’s body isn’t important. On the contrary, it’s crucial to living long and living well. It’s also something I plan to help others achieve in my future health counseling career.

But there has been a mental shift, a MONUMENTAL shift, in my attitude toward my own weight loss. My ENTIRE life I have either been on a diet or thinking about starting a diet next week, on Monday, after the holiday... As I’ve been making these lifestyle changes in the last 4.5 months or so, the ultimate focus has still been weight loss.

That mentality has become increasingly antiquated for me. I have made change upon change and I feel like a different person, a person who truly prioritizes health, not just talks about it. Yet I was still criticizing myself and feeling angry and stuck when the numbers on the scale weren’t dropping like I wanted them to.

Not to toot my own horn, but I am the healthiest person I know. I prioritize exercise, I experiment with a variety of healthy fats, proteins, greens, nuts, foods I never would have dreamed of incorporating into my daily diet a year ago. I’ve cut out dairy 100%. I consume a lot more water than I ever used to. I don’t eat very much in the evening, which was a difficult transition for me. I almost never eat processed foods.

What I’m trying to showcase here, besides the fact that I am pretty awesome and dedicated (I jest! I jest!), is that I am damn healthy. I am prioritizing my life, my whole self, in a way that I never have. So what, I’m 164 pounds. I’m 164 pounds and healthy. I’m tuning in to what I need on a holistic level. I’ve got more energy and a more regulated mood than I had before. I look at my arms in the mirror and they are looking so strong. I see my stomach and I don’t hate it as much, anymore. I see it soft and youthful and beautiful, even if it’s not totally flat.

I still want to see 145 to 150 pounds on the scale, I’m not going to lie. It’ll feel unbelievable to be able to walk out of the mall with a pair of size twelve or even size ten jeans. That’s not something I’ve ever experienced in my adult life. But if I push myself to get up at 5:00 a.m. to go to the gym or I actually look forward to my sauteed kale with garlic at lunch because it tastes good (and, oh yeah, it’s chock FULL of nutrients), I’d rather do it for the sake of doing it. Because it increases my energy, because it makes me feel full of vitality and vibrance, because I know I’m contributing to a healthier environment by choosing organic, whole foods. Just because that’s what I do now. I am a healthy person. Someday I know I’ll hit that mark on the scale. Until then, so what? I don’t think that I will ever again operate with weight loss as my dangling carrot.

What a Difference

What a difference a few months can make. When you become so bogged down by self-doubt, by poor eating habits and constant lethargy, you start to feel like this is all there is. It's hard to see a way out of the tunnel.

As I posted right before Thanksgiving, I was feeling so stuck, so miserable. I thought I was trying really hard to maintain a healthy eating regime, an exercise routine but I wasn't seeing the results I wanted as quickly as I wanted. I was headed to LA to visit my girlfriend and I was sick with anxiety and self-deprecation. I wasn't excited, I was worried about how I looked.

I hated feeling that way. I wanted to be looking forward to seeing her and basking in the sunshine but all I could think about was, "What if we go to the beach? How am I going to avoid being in my bathing suit?" It was such a waste of energy, especially because once I got there and I saw my girlfriend and we had fun bashing around town, those anxieties slipped away. I still wasn't happy with my body but I was not thinking about it every moment, like I was right before I left.

I'm headed to LA again in four days and I have to tell you, I feel differently now. I'm still not where I want to be physically and am still frustrated by that fact and still step on my scale far more often I should because it only leaves me frustrated. BUT, I feel like something has shifted emotionally and mentally. I'm less focused on weight now. Not because I'm happy to be 164 pounds because I'm not.

I'm realizing that I am really healthy. I eat whole foods, I make exercise a priority, I take lots of supplements to ensure optimal health, I cook my own food 90% of the time. I am healthy. I feel far more energetic, focused, CONTENT than I have ever been. I know that it's in part due to cutting out all of the refined foods that were bogging my body down. Pure fact: you operate far better when you are putting in high-quality foods.

Mentally, I'm also starting to realize that I am more than this body. I want to take care of it because I want to live as long and well as possible. But I'm extricating my self-image from my physical form. I've held myself back from feeling and exploring and learning so many things because I thought as a fat person, I couldn't or shouldn't expect certain things. What a life I have missed living simply because I was overweight. Because I saw myself almost exclusively defined as being overweight.

Fat people shouldn't expect very many people to hit on them or want to date them for very long. Fat people shouldn't expect to excel at sports and shouldn't even try because they will look ridiculous. Fat people shouldn't engage in fun, physical activities with their friends, like ice skating on a pond in the winter or rollerblading on the boardwalk at the beach in the summer. When cute, thin women fall while ice skating, it's cute and silly. When fat women do it, they just look fat.

I'm not exaggerating. This is exactly how I have thought my whole life. I really wish I were a better ice skater and would love to hold hands with the person I'm dating and skate for one hour each winter. That's it! But I'm not very good and I'm so afraid that if I fall, I won't look cute and silly, I'll look like a fat person who fell. It's sad even articulating this but I know other people must feel/have felt this same way.

I'm not perfectly content yet. I might never go ice skating. But I'm EXCITED to go to LA. I'm EXCITED to see my girlfriend and to hang out on the beach and to maybe go bike riding in her neighborhood. Not because I've found the magic cure to self-acceptance but simply because I've been able to sustain a HEALTHY lifestyle for months and months now. My focus is shifting from weight to just being healthy, just being happy.

What a difference a few months can make.

Getting in Touch

So it is's been awhile since I've posted last but only because I've been so busy focusing on getting ready for school. It's still mind-boggling to me that I am about to start classes to be a HEALTH counselor. That I will be counseling other people whose shoes I have been in how to eat, and live, intuitively.

You have no idea what it means to me to, for the first time, be getting in touch with what I actually need. I have turned to food as a means to fill the void (of friends, of an non-stimulating job, etc.), to shut out the critical voices (mine and other people's) and to be a constant in an ever-changing, chaotic world for decades. What I constantly seemed to forget was that after I finished bingeing I would still feel that void or hear those voices or remember the instability. PLUS, I would then feel the shame, guilt, and anger at myself for overeating. So I, in the end, made myself feel WORSE.

Not to mention that on the physical side, eating foods laden with salt, sugar, and bad forms of fat and/or overeating contributed to my lack of energy, lethargy, lack of desire to exercise, etc. If I felt tired in the afternoon at work, I, like a lot of Americans, wanted to grab the nearest cookie or, if I felt really bored (as I often do at my current job), I would just want to eat crackers as a way to feel my life was more interesting. Funny thing is that I always ended up feeling full, thirsty, more lethargic, and just plain gross on top of all the negative emotions I was trying not to feel.

The point of all this being that over 26 years, I have learned how to be completely out-of-touch with how I actually feel and what my body actually needs. As human beings, we are so complexly and beautifully designed to need very specific nutrients at specific times and to know instinctively what those foods are. But because of our focus on being thinner and thinner in the 20th century, we have lost touch with what we actually need to consume to be healthy and to be a weight that works for us. Also, we have lost ourselves in the desire to buy more, own more, have more money, work more hours, go, go, go, multi-task, multi-task, multi-task and we've stashed our emotions so deep down that it makes us uncomfortable to just sit with those feelings.

Guess what? I'm not doing it anymore! Let me repeat that: I'm not doing it, anymore!! Every day that I drop some weight, every day that I call a friend or write in my journal instead of opening up a box of crackers, every day that I choose to eat a piece of fruit over a piece of cake, I realize that I've turned a corner and I can't ever turn back. For the first time, I don't want to. I don't miss those days.

This is a bigger shift than I even realize sometimes. I have been overweight, unconfident, lethargic, unsatisfied, and living below the level of happiness and satisfaction that I deserve, since I was a child. You get to the point where you think that a) things will never change and b) this is all you are capable of being and feeling. That's a very powerful and taxing thought to have, even if you're having it unconsciously. I realize now that I'm not alone. More people than I even realize are living just below that level of health and happiness. Not so sick and depressed that they feel compelled to seek help, but not nearly at the level they could be. We are a nation of people living mediocre lives.

I'm a shining example that you can change. You can change! It's so easy to think that this is status quo, forever. But it's not. I'm not saying that change is easy but when you start to make changes, you start realizing how much better you feel. You start to realize that you can feel better. You can have more energy, sleep better, think more positively, love yourself better because you're taking more care of yourself.

When you start to live from a more intuitive place, you really start peeling the film from your eyes. Life has possibility! You are capable! You are beautiful and worth it! It becomes about more than just food, about way more than just losing weight. Living intuitively applies to every aspect of one's life. Start with the food piece, see how it evolves.

If you don't believe this, just ask me. I know from incredibly personal experience.