In all my time with my coaches, I never wanted to talk about something that has been an issue most of my life – my weight. I didn’t want to “waste” the time and money talking about that. I knew I wasn’t happy with it and saw that it was slowly weighing me down – pun intended – and keeping me from doing things I wanted to do, but still, I didn’t want to address it with them.
You see, I had tried to fix it on my own so many times. I remember being on a diet with my mom and sister in my early teens. The memories of iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing and a side of carrots still haunt me. Why must it always be ranch?! I don’t think I’ve ever been around my mom where she didn’t mention her own weight in terms of being unhappy with it. Maybe her managing a restaurant and us always having an abundance of food available to us, at all times, played a part.
I was probably a little overweight in middle school and through high school. Nothing that required any real problem-solving until I was about 19. From 16-19, I was engaged to a guy and he and I were practically married in every way save for the piece of paper. We were under my mother’s roof, but we did our own thing. Our own thing often involved fast food and playing beach bingo in the evenings. I hate even telling you that. What a weird thing to do for fun at that age. Let’s try not to think too much about what a weird living setup this was – at all – at 16.
I broke up with him, well, you know, because I was a damn child, but also because I had graduated high school and realized I did not want the life I had been living. (Sidenote- I also was in the early stages of realizing I was very, very gay). Looking over my new life, I noticed my weight. I thought I just got fat and happy with him. We ate fast food all the time and were pretty sedentary, so that made sense. I also think I started eating the same portion sizes as him. Did I mention he was 19-year-old dude in the Marine Corps? Oh yes, it gets even more delicious… I was dating/practically married to a 19-year-old Marine at 16. Um, moving on…
So at 19, I found my 5’ 6” self at 232lbs. The highest I had ever been. And I didn’t like it. I also felt like I had missed out on something being married-ish so young. I was also getting ready to go off to college and explore this newly opened up wide world as a budding little lesbian. Without really trying, I lost weight. Where most people gain the “Freshmen 15” early in college, I lost about 40 lbs. I think it was mainly from just being wide open and free for the first time. I was much more active and distracted with my booming social life to bother with eating. Oh, and I also wanted to get a date. That worked for awhile.
Fast forward to today, I’ve tried all the diets. Fen Phen in the 90s when I was 17 or so, Cabbage Soup diet, Atkins, Nutrisystem, Weight Watchers, South Beach Diet, Cigarette Diet (not technically a diet, I just often smoked instead of eating), Slim Fast Shakes, Low Carb, Keto and probably a few other totally unhealthy and insane diets. I had varying levels of success aka weight loss. My beloved primary care provider, who I had been seeing for 10+ years and respected whole-heartedly, even brought up the idea of weight loss surgery at one point.
I had accepted the fact that I was probably going to be overweight for the rest of my life. It wasn’t terrible. I liked who I was, most of the time. Life was excellent and improving in so many ways now that I had a deeper understanding of where my emotions and thoughts come from and what to do with them, so to speak. From working with my coaches and reflecting, I gained insight into my wellbeing and realized absolutely nothing was wrong with me. I didn’t have a fundamental flaw that made me not be able to lose weight, or any of the other obstacles that seemed insurmountable. And if there’s not something wrong with me on some emotional level that I need to fix, well shit, that was a relief. Do you know how exhausting it is to think you have to fix yourself BEFORE you can tackle something like making healthy changes? It’s like there’s double the work to do. First, I need to fix my psychology (good luck with that!) and then if you have any energy left… Eat less! Make sure it’s healthier food! Move more! Hydrate! Learn to cook! Etc etc. Yeah, no wonder you don’t have it in you and it feels pretty hopeless.
But, if there’s nothing wrong with you, you can scoot right past all the mental anguish and do the thing you want to do. In this case, for me, it was lose weight so I can move through life with more physical ease and address some health issues that was making life challenging. In addition, I knew that losing weight would help me be more in my life and stop holding myself back from doing things that physically were hard to do, but I really wanted to do. I wanted to stop living such a small, contracted life.
Without the noise in my head of trying to figure out “what’s wrong with me”, I was able to quieten down and just… be. I knew from experience that from this quieter space, I could hear my own wisdom. So I thought to myself, yeah, I really do want to lose weight and improve my health and went along with my day. Later, the thought popped into my head “Call your doctor and ask for help losing weight”. So I did.
I didn’t feel like shit about myself first. I didn’t hate my body. I didn’t feel ashamed or hit “rock bottom” before I made the call. I cannot reiterate enough how much that that type of thinking not only is completely debilitating and NOT good for motivation, but it is completely unnecessary in the change-making-process. Thinking and believing those thoughts doesn’t help you, it just hurts. Who performs their best when their minds are at their worst? No one, right?
When I saw that nothing was wrong with me, I was able to view “losing weight” as just another goal I had in mind. No different than when I wanted to finish my college degree, or move to the country and have all the animals, or travel in an RV fulltime, or move around the country with my travel nurse wife. It didn’t have the burden, the weight, or the significance that “LOSING WEIGHT!” had in the past. Being overweight didn’t MEAN anything about me. It didn’t mean anything about my worth as a human. It didn’t mean anything about my ability to make good choices. It didn’t mean I wasn’t disciplined. There were no conclusions to be drawn from the fact that I had a larger body. From this perspective, the idea of losing weight seemed easy for the first time in my life. And when the thought alone wasn’t exhausting, I felt up to the challenge!
This is a completely different experience of weight loss than I’ve ever encountered. I’m not taking things personally – IE think there’s something wrong with me – when I have a shit day and eat an ice cream bar. I don’t consider it a derailment or that I’ve fallen off the wagon. It’s just not that big of a deal to me. It’s sustainable now. Things are so much lighter when the noise in your head settles down.
I never sought coaching to help with my weight. I was pleased that my coaching had helped me see things differently in my relationship with my wife and our communication and marriage was and is rock solid. I was bouncing back quicker and more resilient than ever. I was happy. And when I was sad, it was okay to be sad. I knew all moods pass. All thoughts move on and are replaced by new ones in a moment. We’re never stuck with a feeling. My coaching business was moving forward and I gained clarity and understood my mission in it. But this weight insight snuck up on me. I felt like it must have been working itself out on the backburner. Somehow, without even really trying, I saw something new. I had an insight about “losing weight” that I hadn’t had before, and just like that, my life took an unexpected turn!
