I have spent my life and my weight loss journey waiting to arrive at a destination of predetermined acceptability by dieting and restricting in a myriad of ways. Short term success was always followed by extended periods of significant weight gain as I spent my time eating, overeating, and bingeing.
What I’ve come to realize is that the journey is the destination. I know that this is one of those pat statements that elicits eye rolls, but bear with me. I am always arriving to meet myself wherever I happen to be. The great realization is that I will always have opportunities to learn more about myself and to know myself better, to wholeheartedly appreciate, love, and nurture myself.
The point of the journey is not to achieve a certain number on the scale and be done with it.
The point is to experience everything – every great achievement and every great failure, to know sorrow and to know joy, to keep showing up, even when I don’t want to, to be full of compassion for myself and others, and to approach myself -my thoughts, feelings, and actions – with curiosity. I get to figure it out today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. I get to keep figuring out what it means to live my best, most authentic life.
Throughout the years, there were numerous times when I thought I’d figured it out. For a very long time, figuring it out meant finding the perfect diet or food plan. First, I thought I just needed to limit my calories, and then I thought I needed to limit my fat grams. Later, I thought the answer was prepackaged Jenny Craig food. After that, I thought it was counting my WW points. In between, I thought it was limiting my sugar intake, eating yogurt, eating anything I wanted whenever I wanted, hiring a trainer and working out six days per week, eating popcorn to curb cravings, drinking protein shakes, getting extra vitamins and minerals, and so on.
Every time I regained the weight I was devastated because I made it mean that there was something wrong with me. I made it mean that I was weak, that I was missing something. It was too painful, so I escaped by eating, overeating, and bingeing. Never quite giving up, but close. Then I would summon up the will to try again. Rinse and repeat, over and over.
So, what was different this time?
I lost the first 25 – 30 pounds by not trying, by not intentionally setting out to lose them. Keep in mind, I was still in a desperate place, but I began to do things for myself in spite of my seeming inability to lose weight.
Here is what I did that resulted in a 25 – 30 pound loss over 15 months:
~I began giving the dog an extra walk in the morning (something I’d given up for a few years).
~I drank 16 – 24 ounces of water with lime or lemon first thing in the morning.
~I went for a one mile walk at lunch every day.
~I consumed more greens and wild blueberries in a nutritional support shake every day.
~I started a meditation practice.
~I started a daily gratitude practice.
~I began listening to informative and uplifting podcasts on my way to work and during my walks. Think Oprah and naturopathic doctor Stephen Cabral’s The Cabral Concept.
None of these things, in and of themselves, will produce weight loss.
Even together, they won’t necessarily result in weight loss.
More importantly, they were acts of genuine self-care. Self care begets self care. The more I showed up for myself, the more these things became nonnegotiable, the better I felt about myself. The better I felt about myself, the less likely I was to eat, overeat, and binge to soothe myself. I think of this period as priming the pump. Unbeknownst to myself, I was setting myself up to approach intentional weight loss with a healthy and realistic mindset.
This is why I am adamant that my clients establish a foundation of self-care essentials – nonnegotiables – for themselves.
This is important work. The things I began to do for myself weren’t because I was thin and suddenly deserving of them. I didn’t do these things in order to lose weight. I did these things because I am worthy of being the mentally, emotionally, and physically healthiest person I can be for me. Full stop.
And when I treated myself like a worthy person, I became even more willing to do even more to help myself. That’s when I was able to do the work of losing weight for good.