#65, How I Finally Did Things Differently and Lost My Weight for Good

I never thought I would live like I live today. I just expected to go on some sort of ultra restrictive diet, lose my weight, and be done with the unhealthy food that landed me there. Even with high cholesterol I couldn’t muster the will-power to eat in a healthy way longer than a few months at a time. 

Today I love the way I eat. It doesn’t feel hard at all. It feels supportive and loving. To get here I had to do things very differently than I had ever done before. I had to learn to listen to my body, stop giving food moral values, and deal with stress and hardship on a deeper level. 

Listening to my body was an amazing move forward. Did you know that our bodies give us reliable physical hunger signals? It took me some trial and error, but eventually I was able to identify and trust my body’s requests for food, water, and sleep and differentiate those needs from emotional desires for comfort. My body was no longer an enemy, but a trusted vessel hand-crafted by God. 

Next, I stopped giving food moral value. Food is an inanimate object, giving no significance to how loved I am by God. Once shame was taken out of the equation, I began to truly notice instead the way food made me feel and how it tasted. I noticed how different quantities had effects on my energy levels and different ingredients affected my digestion. My mind went from the black-and-white judge to the curious scientist, eager to understand how my life interacted with the things I put into my mouth.

Lastly, I learned to deal with stress and hardship. Before I was either comforting myself with food (or alcohol), or I wasn’t comforting myself at all. I would knuckle down, determined to be “good” then count down the days or hours until I could take the pressure valve off and allow myself to appease the pain. It was awful. Instead, I learned to take emotional cravings for food as a warning that my heart, soul, and body needed deep care. Slowly, I learned to embrace the unique person God made me into, and trust the different ways that I could nurture my soul without food. 

That’s it. Those three things, learning to listen to my body, no longer giving food moral values, and dealing with stress and hardship on a deeper level, allowed me to live in freedom and peace around food. I love helping women find this freedom and peace, too. It is life-changing.

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