Foreshadows of My Shadows: I Felt “Fat” First
Change has been a complex process for me. And, losing half my weight has been one of the most complex processes of my lifetime. I have had to understand myself differently, including my childhood.
Mainstream weight loss often points to trauma, usually childhood, as the reason people gain and struggle with their weight. I understand why that is, but that is too big of a topic for this post. For now, all I will say is this: that is not my story. My story is my hunger drive and its truths.
I never thought I would find my answers. Several years in, I still defy my own expectations. Understanding the why of myself makes ongoing success possible.
Feeling the Force of Addictive Foods: My Hunger Drive and Childhood
Weight has been a lifelong struggle for me, starting in my childhood. Third grade is my first memory of obesity — even if obesity was not yet part of my reality. This was the year that foreshadowed my future struggle with weight.
Because of the way food in the standard American diet makes me feel, I felt obese before I was obese.
In childhood, this feeling was closely connected with eating potato chips, candy, and pizza without being able to stop. In truth, I could list hundreds of foods that have caused me problems.
The common denominator: all these foods are riven with salt, oil, sugar, and other processed ingredients. Because of the way hunger works in me, these additives dysregulate my hunger drive and make it nearly impossible for me to stop eating these foods.
Finding My Why: The Golden Circle in the Center of Myself
Understanding the truth of my hunger drive has empowered me. Now that I see my hunger drive, it is impossible to unsee it. I am no longer flailing in vain, no longer searching to find an answer around my weight.
My only hope for long-term success has come from drilling into the why of myself, the why of my hunger, the why of what it means to Eat When Hungry. The why of myself is my golden center, the reason I can live surrounded by the foods that are my undoing.
In my golden center, feelings of health and well-being are reified into a holistic sensuality that I had never experienced or imagined. And, these incredible feelings only come from removing all processed foods, including trace amounts of seasonings and spices, and replacing them with whole plants.
When I do this, profound feelings of health, wellness, and wellbeing permeate all aspects of my life, bringing out a better version of myself. That being said, this is not an easy journey. And, I fail often around these standards of success.
But, this is the most worthwhile of journeys and a success beyond what I ever expected. I live gratefully and wish this beautiful sensuality of wellness for everyone. Life still wouldn’t be fair, but the world would be a better place.
Acting in My Own Best Interests
The foods that led to my weight loss also prevent and reverse lifestyle diseases — powerful reasons to act, regardless of my weight. And, the number of lifestyle diseases is far higher than I ever imagined.
I feel fortunate to have found my personal pathway to act in my own best interests, despite the challenges of my lifestyle.
My action plan is much simpler to say than to do: Eat Plants. Avoid Processed Foods.
Processed foods permeate society, and I do best when I eat the simplest of foods with nothing added. Even in the plant-based world, I live at an extreme — an irony because I live with a broad view of self-improvement around my narrow way of eating.
In Transform Shadows, my goal is to celebrate and uplift the self-improvement journey in all its stages and to embrace openly human fallibility and failures as a necessary part of a successful self-improvement journey. This means avoiding all-or-nothing thinking and patterns when they are destructive.
Choosing My Health: How to Use My Energy
Staying away from processed foods takes a lot of energy. But, the end result is worth my efforts, including my failures. I truly feel better than I have at any other point in my life, including third grade.
Sometimes, people wonder why I go to so much work to center my health, wellness, and weight maintenance. The fact is: the work I am doing is not more work, it is just different work, using a different form of energy.
Obesity stole a lot of my energy. Morbid obesity, which is a truth of my life, was physically painful. Morbid obesity was emotionally painful. Morbid obesity meant being ruled by unhealthy foods, hating their authoritarian power over me, and not knowing how to extricate myself from their clenches. To be clear, I did not hate myself or my life; I hated the fact that I could not solve this problem in my life.
Healthy living provides a much more positive use of the same amount of energy, and that feels better in all areas of my life. I aspire to live in the golden center of my why as much as possible because this is where living feels best. I come in and out of that success, failing more often than I would like.
Finding My Power: The Ongoing Journey into My Shadows
Finding my power has been the journey into myself, the journey in and out my shadows. My shadows still live within me, and my best chance at long-term success is to name, face, understand, fight, reframe, and occasionally transcend my shadows.
These are my processes of making and sustaining change, my processes of shadow boxing, of fighting myself for myself. When I use these processes around my why, that is when I experience success.
No strategy in the world was going to help me if I did not journey into my shadows, to understand the why of myself.
Understanding creates my change, and my personal strategies emerge from that understanding. And, that is the story I am telling: the story of my hunger drive, how I understand and act on this why in the center of myself. The understanding makes me see all aspects of myself differently, including my childhood.
The why’s of myself came in snippets of insights, from many places. No one person, no one program, no one doctor, no one success story, and no one way of thinking helped me find my truths.
I found my truths scattered across several worlds. Truly, I am still stunned to have pieced together the puzzle of myself into a healthy weight range, to defy my own expectations.
Sharing My Story
Learning how to lose weight and maintain weight loss has taken me decades to understand, and I am just starting to tell my story. My story will not be the complete answer for anyone; nor should it be. But, maybe part of it will help someone.
At the root of human survival is the hunger drive, and this is a truth we all share. My own journey tells me this: there are more multifaceted dimensions about how this truth plays out in each one of us, more layers than I ever realized. No wonder I failed. Over and over again.
Part of what I have come to understand is that my hunger drive and my body sit at the ends of a lot of extremes.
In some ways, these extremes may make my story an effective example for learning. My success has come in untangling these extreme dimensions of my hunger drive to understand the cause-effect relationships taking place in my body.
In my body, little things make a big difference. I balance on a narrow ledge, a razor’s ledge of safety and success. The wrong foods quickly land me back on a razor’s edge of fallibility and failure.
My daily actions make all the difference in living in this place of safety, this fragile edge between a healthy weight and an unhealthy weight, between hope and resignation, between energy and lethargy, between healthy and unhealthy living.
By making my extremes visible, perhaps I will add some small insight that may help someone else untangle their own hunger drive. This process of understanding my hunger drive took me several years of focused efforts; it was not a quick or easy answer, but it has been the right answer for me.
I have learned much that is not part of mainstream stories around weight and weight loss. Truth be told, even in the plant-based world, most public narratives seem too simplistic in relation to my own experiences.
An important start to my story can be found in Eat When Hungry, in my Signature Series with Dr. Doug Lisle. In the first episode of this series, we discuss all the factors I had to learn in order to succeed in losing half my weight and to understand my hunger drive.
In my first episode of Eat When Hungry with Dr. Doug Lisle, I share an overview of my journey to lose half my weight.
Succeeding in a World Designed for Failure
Succeeding to lose half my weight and overhauling my lifestyle includes the following ongoing processes:
Understanding myself
Changing myself through reflection, action, and mindset
Learning about addictive foods and their impact on my hunger drive
Adopting a plant-based lifestyle
Discovering the multifaceted dimensions of my hunger drive
Navigating shifts in my identity
Delving into these areas of my journey will continue to be the focus of my work.
Follow Me
Follow my story in real time on Facebook at Transform Shadows or on Instagram at transform_shadows where I share small snippets of my life regularly.
Video Correction: It was hard to stop (not start) eating the candy. Starting to eat the candy was always easy, but stopping not so much ... lol.
Watch My Short Video Clip with Dr. Lisle Linked Below.
Scroll further to see my Venn diagrams that are my story, my syllabus for the body of work I want to create in this space, and my pathway to success, to transform shadows.
