The Weight of Weight: A Journey of Epic Proportions
For those of us who struggle with weight, the journey is one of epic proportions. The battles are hard-fought, hard-lost, and hard-won. In so many ways, the battles and victories feel supernatural in nature. And, even though I have been successful for several years, I still fight myself for myself during the inevitable ups and downs of my journey.
Many times, people think my health, wellness, and weight loss journey has been a one-and-done action. That is far from the case because this is a complex journey.
While I have lost half my weight and kept it off for more than three years, the process of maintenance is an ongoing journey, full of mental and physical actions that look and feel similar to the ones I used when losing weight.
Of course, I am thrilled to have lost half my weight. When I eat right, I am free from physical and psychological heaviness, which is the weight of weight.
The weight of weight is one of the most important reasons I decided to lose weight. My physical health weighed heavily on my mind, not just on my body.
I knew I was not acting in my own best interests. I knew that there were too many contradictions between healthy foods and the foods I was eating.
The unhealthy choices were having profound ramifications on my mind and my body. I wanted freedom from the mental and physical traps of my weight.
Psychological Freedom Was Closer Than I Thought
What is interesting about this journey is this: That feeling of psychological freedom was closer under the surface than it seemed.
I noticed that after a short time of eating unprocessed, whole plants and acting in my own best interests, the psychological heaviness lifted — even when I still had almost half my weight left to lose — a figure well into triple digits.
The transitional days of completely overhauling my diet and lifestyle were hard, much harder than where I am now. But, the nights and mornings became much easier, much sooner in the process than I anticipated.
The nights and mornings when I first woke up: These were the times when I always felt the weight of my weight most profoundly. And, this weight lifted (and lifts) quickly. (The weight of weight also descends quickly, too, which is part of why I write this.)
In this complex journey, how quickly I felt freedom was (and still is) empowering and liberating. Once I made the deep changes to act in my best interests, I felt this freedom early. I was no longer haunted by what I was eating and the knowledge that I needed to make a change.
The change was in motion, and that was freeing. A significant part of that freedom came (and still comes) from another place: learning about the short-term and long-term benefits of eating a whole foods, plant-based diet.
The stories of healing, health, and improved quality of living in the plant-based world are stunning, and that helped (and still helps) motivate me — especially as I started feeling these healthy and healing changes happen in real time.
The hope and freedom from the psychological heaviness came quickly when I acted in my own best interests — even as I struggled mightily to take these actions for myself.
I felt healthier before I became significantly healthier. This was one of the best of the quick wins early in my journey. Quick wins can be hard to find in a weight loss journey.
When I wobbled, I lost the feeling of freedom, and I wanted it back. And, when I wobble now, I lose the feeling, and I want it back.
Discovering a New Distortion Around My Weight
The psychological weight of weight works both ways. I learned this recently about myself.
When I don’t eat right for my body, I start feeling like my previous self – the shadows still exist in me. I feel twice my weight — without middle ground.
Recently, I had a few days where I added too many of my mild trigger foods into my life, and I did so for too many consecutive days.
One evening, I was sitting on the couch, and I realized that the weight of weight had come back in full force. Everything that I remembered about feeling at my highest weight flooded back: mentally and physically. The moment temporarily paralyzed me.
The feelings of being my largest size and living at my unhealthiest are also closer to the surface than they seem. And, learning this is a murky realization.
For me, a significant part of this journey has been uprooting my personal distortions around weight, and here was a new distortion that I had not yet knowingly experienced.
Living with my my shadows requires ongoing work, and the concept of Shadow Boxing works well in my journey. These are the ongoing mental processes that I use to navigate myself through the ups and downs of my journey: Name My Shadows, Face My Shadows, Understand My Shadows, Fight My Shadows, Reframe My Shadows, and when all goes well, Transcend My Shadows. I wish I stayed in transcendence. But, over time, I have learned how to spend more and more time in this space.
In that moment, I knew I had to fight that distortion because I could feel its seductive destructiveness to my health. This moment threatened to pull me back into the world of inaction.
For a while, I wanted to slip back into the silent resignation that the weight of my weight is too heavy for me to handle, to give in to a quiet defeat that this battle is too much for me to fight for the long term. I let myself feel these emotions.
And, then I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I wanted out of this trap again. And, I knew how to do it. My first line of defense is always the food. The food changes every aspect of how I feel.
I had to clean up my eating. The mild trigger foods had to go.
I realized that there is rarely middle ground on how I feel. I feel like my healthy self, or I feel like the person who weighs twice my weight. So typical of my journey: self-truths at the extremes.
The Epic Extremes of an Ongoing Journey
I share this information because this mental work is all part of the fluidity and ongoing nature of the process. I am several years in, and I am still doing new work around the same issues, so I can live at a healthy weight.
This is a complex journey – wherever I have been in the process, at whatever weight, whether in a trajectory of gaining, losing, or maintaining weight.
I have wanted to get to a point of effortless living with myself. And, while that may look true and be true some of the time, effortless living with my shadow selves remains a mirage.
When I am in the throes of the battle with the shadows of myself, I have to remind myself that I want to hold on to this personal victory. I often have a hard time hearing myself because I feel anything but victorious in these moments.
Other times, maintaining my new lifestyle and new weight actually is effortless. The range of emotions can feel epic in the extremes, like so many facets of my journey around weight.
This weekend is case in point.
Friday evening was full of failure as I define it currently. My shadow selves swallowed me. Such failure is fine for an isolated moment, but the pattern would be problematic over time and would take me right back up the scale. I know that, too, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Saturday was effortless — a day of true transcendence. My shadow selves were nowhere in sight. The person I was yesterday is the person I want to be every day, the way I want to live every day. While I know how to make this happen more frequently now, such effortless living is still ephemeral.
Today is like most days. I live as a work-in-progress where my shadow selves compete in a lighthearted tug-of-war within me — a competition that can become fierce at any moment. So far today, the trajectory of that competition is trending toward success, but that can turn quickly. Success and failure hang in the balance of my actions.
Living with My Shadow Selves
Keeping the weight off still is an internal battle against the shadows of myself, these shapeshifting forces that are paradoxically the most familiar and the most mysterious of forces.
And, this is the work of maintenance: knowing the shadow selves that exist within me; accepting them for what they are and how they have ruled my life; and using the best of myself to keep their unhealthy authoritarian power over me relegated to the shadows of my life.
My healthy self fights front and center, and the more I can understand about myself, the better I can wage this personal war when skirmishes, sieges, and battles with my shadow selves appear, sometimes seemingly out of nowhere.
This is the fluidity of the process — of always positioning my healthy self in relation to the unhealthy shadows that exist within me: fighting myself for myself.
Making a lifestyle change has not been a one-and-done event for me. And, like so many of the tough admissions about myself, knowing this liberates and empowers me, keeping my own agency and ability to make changes in my life at the center of my own journey.
While the battles and the victories seem superhuman at times, the fights are fought in the mundane arena of everyday actions. The weight of weight has mental and physical aspects: processes to work through and actions to take for living a healthy lifestyle.
Everyday actions exist at the center of the journey. Step-by-step, decision-by-decision, food-by-food, meal-by-meal, day-by-day: Create more successes than failures. These daily actions are where battles are fought, and they are where the victories emerge.
The victories of transforming shadows keep me shadow boxing to rise anew, again and again. Freedom from the weight of weight is a reality and an ideal worth the ongoing processes of naming, facing, understanding, fighting, reframing, and transcending my shadows.
