How to Lose Weight as A Recovering ‘Foodaholic’

First of all, you don’t lose weight – jokes on you, hahah! You don’t shed the fat. Not when you place yourself on a diet of boiled eggs and oranges. Not when you park your car and walk half the distance home from work. And not during that long, tortured month without rice – weeks and weeks of passing the kitchen, ignoring that imagined peppered ting on your tongue, the taste of burnt stew and rice rolling down your throat.

Of course, the hopelessness of your weight-loss quest will dawn on you one morning as you step out of the shower. You will see it in a sudden moment as the mirror unlocks new secrets about your body – the lose skin, the extra wiggle, the new lines stretched just above your shoulder, this human bag that houses you will also betray you, ballooning in size until there is a stranger staring back at you. And if the cue is not loud enough, if you are the early-morning-I-love-my-life-positive-thinker, the fact of your body will tease again as you struggle to enter your jeans. You will huff and puff, pant and sweat, and then, by the time you pull on the second pair, you will sink into the bed, relieved and exhausted.

You are on a mission to lose this weight, to shed this fat that quivers underneath your chin when you laugh, this one that has filled out your face and chest and even your toes!  So, you sentence yourself to a food-less existence, no dinner after 5. No breakfast before 10. No carbs. No sugar. A ketogenic fueled life. And then the greatest joke – no pounds falling off, all your kilograms holding on to you like a lifeline!

With every new diet you tell yourself, surely it will work this time. It’s the meat, get rid of it. No, it’s the carbs, get rid of it. And it’s the soda, and the stress, and the sugar, except maybe it’s also your mind?!!

Life is hard! And love is hard, and work and school and dreams are hard! But with all the milestones you have crossed, all the scars and bullets of your existence, every victory and every pain, none comes close to the grating anticipation of dropping two pounds!

So, second of all, relax! Breathe a little! Let the air flow freely through your lungs, feel the space and taste the freedom, it is yours. You are free!! Free enough to live and eat and not feel trapped in the guilt between. Free to accept the statement of your skin, to know it is allowed to take up space, that you do not have to shrink and hide, you are not a history to be erased, a fact to be denied. You are human and throbbing and alive and hungry, and your hunger is valid, a thing to be tended. Because, you are!

You are free to take each day as a gift, and to know that you do not need to have all the answers, you do not need to have the six packs. If you put in two push-ups, three squats or one needlessly embarassing cardio skit, those too are wins. And you are free also to want something different, to want a body that shrinks and bends, a body that does not vibrate when you put it in motion. And you are free to do the work, and hit the gym, and try this and that diet. As long as you always remember that you are free to simply be. Your body, big or small, high or low, loose or firm is what it is, a place that you can always call home!