About That Weight Loss (Part 3/6)

Why We Keep Finding That Weight We’ve Lost

Welcome to Part 3 of About That Weight Loss. In Part 1, I shared some of my own life-long struggle with weight loss and dysmorphic body image and in Part 2 I shared how any hopes I had of keeping a healthy weight went out the window when my mom got sick and I became her primary caregiver.

Which brings us to 2006, at the end of August,

(just around now, gee, I wonder why this topic popped up for me to write about)

when she passed away and, after the funeral and estate dealings had been wrapped up…

(and if you ever want to be convinced why, as a middle-class property owner you need proper estate planning, you just let me know)

… I was left feeling broken and empty.

Strangely, it felt like I had lost my job and I was no longer sure what I was here for.

I was in what I now affectionately call the abyss.

All I knew for sure was that life was very brief and very fragile and that it was much too brief and fragile to waste any of itbeing less than I was meant to be.

I started researching life purpose.

I started thinking about what I wanted my funeral to look and sound like.

What did I want my obituary to say?

What did I want to have accomplished by the end?

I continued to personal train on a limited basis and made the decision that I was going to be the ‘fat’ Trainer and prove to themthat you could succeed even if you weren’t a skinny bunny.

And I did. But I didn’t care as much anymore about proving them wrong.

I went back to University for International Studies to get some higher grades

(my Biology and Engineering grades were far from stellar)

because I had decided that my life purpose was:

1) to go into the relationship desert and stop dating ‘boys pretending to be men’ who said they wanted me but really only wanted the image of me they thought they were getting and who continued to tell me, in various ways, that I was ‘too much effort’ and ‘not worth it’. I read enough books to realize that if that type of person was consistently showing up it was all about me. I was manifesting them. I said ‘nuts to that’ and swore off dating… y’know, forever, and

2) to become a lawyer specializing in International Human Rights, go work at the United Nations, and save the world.

I was accepted into law school at just about the time I fell in love with the big, yummy man 

(a package deal with three pre-teen kids)

and my life changed radically again.

And my weight continued to increase until, one day in 2009, I realized that I was sleeping about 18 hours per day, I was lacking motivation, I could barely walk down Main Street, and that something was very, very wrong.

I went to my awesome Dr., had all the blood tests done and it turned out that I had developed a serious B12 deficiency. Shocks of grey hair. Cavities in my teeth. Exhaustion. Fuzzy thinking. Weight gain.

All of it.

In essence, my body was shutting down and rejecting the nutrition it needed to survive.

That got my attention.

I realized I needed to rest. And replenish. And finally, finally grieve and come to terms with the loss of my mom.

(yeah, 3 years later… what? that is a completely healthy reaction)

I started … very tentatively … very slowly … to realize that I needed to STOP living the way I was living and START finding a new way to exist in the world.

A way where I wasn’t hating myself and forcing myself and making myself wrong every single moment of every day.

I needed to learn how to be in the world peacefully and be at peace in my own body.

I needed to learn how to – gasp! – love myself.

Like, really love myself.

Because I was done with always hating myself and the stress it created.

That’s when I stumbled into NLP and into Jesus.

(that’s also around the time my father died)

That’s when I started to learn that:

1) I was worthy. I was loved. I was want-able.

2) There was something I could do about all the baggage I was carrying around with me so I could have peace and be free.

That’s when I started to undo decades of ‘shame programming’ and beliefs around my broken-ness and uselessness.

That’s when I realized that the ‘depth’ I wanted to have with my weight loss clients way back when was possible – but now I had the tools to go super-deep and undo the damage that was making them hide behind pounds and pounds of fat.

That’s when hope came (back?) into my life.

That’s when I started to believe that it really was possible to be happy – even after trauma, even after so much loss that it felt like it would kill you.

That’s when I started to believe that I could be loved by a very good man.

That’s when I started to believe that I lived in a world where there could bea very good man. In other words, that they weren’t all stinkers.

That’s when, ultimately, I started to believe that a vessel that has been shattered can be repaired and renewed with such divine skill that not only is it usable again, it is more beautiful and more resilient than before the shock.

That’s wabi sabi– the art of finding beauty in impermanence and imperfection and the surrender to, and acceptance of, the natural cycles of life and death.

The only constant is change. The only permanence is impermanence.

In Part 4, we’re going into the nitty gritty (finally!) of weight loss and why it’s so darned hard to do and to maintain and some ideas on how you can make it work for you.