Releasing with Love

and yes, it's a risk

Many of you wonderful subscribers have been here with me not only since the start of this specific weight loss journey blog, but for the many journals that came before this. I started my life as an online presence back in 1997 which pre-dates the births of some of my now adult kids. For most of that time, I often had an online weight loss journal of some kind.

My significant struggle with weight loss goes back much further than that. It’s funny to write that because my brain goes into an interesting word tumble. Is my struggle with weight loss or weight gain? In truth, it is both. I don’t struggle at all to gain weight. It comes easy to me, but I struggle with knowing that I will likely get bigger if I do not constantly and intently focus on what I eat.

I struggle with weight loss because it feels like I must go to heroic measures to make it happen, even to the most modest degree. Although that was the case for most of my life since I was in grade school, the most intense weight gain happened just before my first divorce in 1991. Over the following year, I gained just over eighty pounds. I have not weighed under 200 pounds since 1992 when I got pregnant with Delena, my fourth child.

I would love to weight only 200 pounds now.

In late May of 1980, I was devastated after my second pregnancy to find that I was up to a whopping 131 pounds from 119 in August 1979. The only time after that where I remember feeling good about my body was a brief year or two around 1985-1986. Even then, I felt frantic to stay that way and worked my body hard to make that happen.

Around 1987 or so, I sustained an injury while running, a dumb little thing where a thigh seam of my leggings tore a bit and I got a painful chafing burn. I stopped running for a week to heal and never started up again.

From then until now, I have watched in horror as I got bigger and bigger. People around me were equally horrified, wondering how I could let such a travesty occur. How could I do something so offensive as to get fat?

Back in the early 90s, I was painfully unhappy, both because of the weight gain and because of how my life had turned out and where it was heading. None of it was anything good. Some of this was directly due to dumb choices I made and some of it was because I had no idea how to stand up to certain kinds of abuse going on.

Nothing in my life prepared me for dealing with all I was experiencing and I comforted myself through eating. Eating brought me moments of joy and not exercising felt like I was rebelling against something. I was fighting against the wrong things, but I was fighting.

From there, it never stopped. I never again felt OK, no matter how much I weighed. I lost and regained 10-15 pounds probably a hundred or more times, then I would gain it back and more. Reliably and without fail, that is what happens, regardless of the eating or exercise plan or whatever supplements I use.

I do tons of shadow work to not feel like my body is the enemy and still, the feeling persists that I am in constant conflict with what my body does or needs. I tell myself that my cravings and appetite come from false signals coming from a broken body.

What am I eating to fill? What do I need to soothe? Where do the cravings come from? It is as though my mind and spirt know that I am safe, that I no longer have any threat or trauma to which I should respond, but my body did not yet get the message.

From the simplest “calories in, calories out” approach requiring no fancy tools to the highest technology of current weight loss medication, I have run the gamut, stopping only at weight loss surgery because my insurance did not cover it. I was never unhealthy enough to justify it to the insurance company.

Even that should have gotten my attention: We could get you weight loss surgery but you are too healthy to qualify.

I started the (public) journey this time because my body hurt and I could not do the things I wanted to do. That is still the case in some ways. I gained, I lost, I regained, I lost, I gained back more, I lost…

I have spent weeks working on this idea, which is why I have not updated. My insurance ended and my current insurance is for catastrophic events only. I can revisit medical assistance in two and a half years when I qualify for Medicare.

For now, I have to go it alone and I have concluded that I am sick to my very soul of fighting with such a prominent part of myself: the part of me that everyone sees.

That is the hardest part about being obese: everyone sees it and everyone knows. You can’t be obese in the shadows unless you never leave your home and never see anyone. You can be a closet drinker, closet gambler, even a closet drug addict, but you can’t be a closet fat person unless you cut yourself away from everyone else.

Everyone sees, everyone knows, and everyone forms an opinion about how you look, what you wear, what you do, what you eat, and how you move.

When you lose weight, even your most supportive friends and loved ones say with astonishment, “You look GREAT!” and the other side of that wonderful praise is “and you looked so shitty before!”

I have obsessed over weighing 255.8 pounds vs 255.3 pounds. I have meticulously counted macros and calories and Weight Watcher points. I have stabbed myself in the belly with a needle daily for most days of the past year. I have gone out to breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, studying the menu, trying to estimate the counts and to pick what would do the least damage. I have gone to restaurants and skipped eating because nothing on the menu fit into my eating plan.

I have missed gatherings because I felt weak and knew that if I went where good food was served, I would cave in and I wanted so much to be successful.

I don’t want to go wild and consume mass amount of refined sugar and deep-fried food and transfats. I have no urge to binge eat. That isn’t what makes the average person fat anyway. Studies show that it is not the binge eating that causes ongoing weight gain in most cases, but the extra 100-200 calories consumed a day that goes over a person’s caloric needs. It isn’t the tubs of ice cream, it’s as simple as the extra roll or the additional serving of lasagna several times a week.

I still go to the gym twice a week without fail and work the circuit, making sure to work out arms, legs, and core. I’ve upped my resistance weight on the machines many times and now, I can set the resistance weight higher than most of the other people using the machines on the circuit I use.

I can go up the stairs one after another rather than one at a time, but I do still have to hold onto the railing for balance (Meniere’s) and going down is still tough due to the vertigo.

I will continue going to the gym and now that the weather is nicer, I will add in walks and maybe work up to running again. I bought a nice little backpack large enough to carry my phone and my bear spray.

I have not weighed in two weeks or so and doubt that I will. I stood my scale up on end and slid it next to the bathroom vanity so it does not look at me accusingly. I suspect I am now around 260.

I eat what I want, but I stop and make sure I am eating mindfully before I put anything in my mouth. I don’t track calories or macros, but I focus on whole foods and proteins. I eat more chicken than beef. I rarely eat pasta.

I gave up the fight. I surrendered. This decision came from a series of card readings I had that emphasized, “Release with love.” I meditated and evaluated and deep-dived looking for what I needed to release and the message persisted after I released all the obvious and even some of the less obvious attachments.

For my CUSP planting this year at Spring Equinox, I chose “Happy & healthy relationships, happy & healthy home, and happy & healthy body.” I planted with the idea that if I planted a happy and healthy body, weight loss was a given. Within days of planting, I knew I had to release my weight loss expectations and my attachment to those outcomes. I had to find some way to trust and love my body again.

It feels counterintuitive and weird. I’m uncomfortable with how other people might feel about this choice and I know that is part of my upcoming shadow work as well. I’m afraid of getting even bigger and that is also part of the shadow work. It all feels a bit breathless after all this time. Before, even when I was not actively working toward weight loss, I felt guilty, knowing I should be doing the work.

Why? I should be doing the work so that people believe I am doing what I ought to be doing? So that I am healthy and live longer, presumably? So that I look more like people expect me to look and want me to look? So that I feel better physically?

It’s such a complicated and nuanced situation of societal expectation and personal goals that I don’t completely know how to unravel all of it.

Maybe I will come back to it later, but right now, all indications are that I need to take a break from this fixation and this ongoing cycle of expectation and hope and failure. I need to define success and failure and all that lies between in some other way.

I got off the merry-go-round and now I am trying to find my footing on solid ground again.

Thank you for being here with me and bearing witness to my journey. Whatever your personal life and body goals might be, I wish you the very best of success and every happiness.