Love Not Lipo ... Live a Little, Love a Lot

The concepts I have talked about so far in this blog are uncomfortably obscure for those of us who have built our lives around managing our weight. So broad and sweeping in nature are my musings, in fact, that many of us are quite compelled right now to hit the “x” in the top right hand corner and get back to googling “low-points” recipes, acai, and what’s going on with Jessica Simpson’s weight these days.

For this blog to have maximum impact, and assist you in any real change process, you must truly be fed up living with your obsession with your body and the food you’re consuming. You must be tired of hearing your own voice provide a friend your analysis of what happened on weigh-day. You must be sick of your own thoughts keeping you awake at night trying to add up how many you calories your all-day grazing actually added up to. You must cringe when your hand slides over the jiggle of your belly, and when your bra cuts into your ribs no matter how many hours of cardio you did this week.

I am certainly not suggesting that people give up the behaviors that work towards a healthier way of life. I am not denouncing weight watchers, circuit training, or green tea. I am appealing to the group of you, who like me, find it easier to care for others than ourselves, who find it more interesting to focus on fixing the external than wondering about the internal, and who are living on a metaphorical treadmill…pounding away at life and feeling like we’re not getting any further along.

If you are not yet exhausted by this way of life, and these ingrained habits still function to shape and structure your day, and bring meaning to a purpose to your existence, this blog may not be life changing. I will go on record to predict however, that if you read the entries faithfully with at least a small measure of curiousity, seeds will be planted that will permanently alter your trajectory. Your weight is a symbol that something isn’t working. If your way of doing business thus far has not resolved your weight, logic dictates that something is missing. For those of you who are done fighting, it will be fun and potentially life-changing to go through this journey together. For the skeptics who still believe my blog is useless psychobabble, and will fight the good fight to do it “your way”, I hope you stick with me for the sake of voyeuristic curiousity and see how my science experiment turns out. Because speaking for me only, I am SO done fighting, and I can’t stop smiling because for the first time in my life I can just BE. It’s ironic that I always thought weight loss was accomplished by the struggle, and now I believe it’s accomplished in the surrender. Irony always makes me smile.

I believe it did all lead up to this day. What brought me here, was a culmination of many years of hurt, suffering, fear, perseverance, courage, and open mindedness. And why the hell July 5, 2010 is the day it all changed, is beyond me. This blog will pick up today on a journey that has already been in process for a long time, but the real hook here, the real crazy part, is that here in my first blog post ever, I am predicting that my merciless battle with my weight will resolve itself from this point forward, starting today. It is my realization on this beautifully unbearable hot July day, as I walked in tandem with my stepfather down a bustling village street, that my pain and suffering are over for good. The details of the healing and the weight loss will unfold itself in each post moving forward, but I can give you the short answer today of how it will happen. Love.

If it possible for a baby to be born an addict, I was that baby. One time my mother told me that the nurse handed me to her for the first time, swaddled in an aqua blanket, mouth rhythmically and desperately sucking, before it had ever made first contact with the breast. That sense of urgency has been woven into my very fibers since that first day here on earth, and Food and I have done this dance ever since. By the sixth grade I had seen nutritionists, guidance counselors, and doctors and was familiar with the caloric content of most foods, carbohydrate exchanges, where I fell on the height/weight chart (off the chart for weight, middle of the road for height) the impact of hydration on weight loss, my feelings about other kids’ feelings about my weight, and the benefits of roasted chicken as compared to processed sandwich meats.

My weight has soared up the scale and plummeted down, often within the same week. I have gone days without eating, and I have consumed at least 5,000 calories in one sitting. One particularly startling snapshot in time involved a weekend excursion to Martha’s Vineyard. I left Friday, and returned to NY on Monday with a sun burn and a 14 pound weight gain as a souvenir. My penance for this debauchery always involved “cleansings” that essentially involved several days of food deprivation, water binges, purges, and starvation induced dizziness as a measure of success. Food was my first and deepest love, although many other addictions followed in close succession.

Through grueling work, I have slowly untangled myself from this web of dependence, and left behind some very dark chapters. It is only now that I feel I am truly ready to be set free from the grip that food still has on me. Although my eating behaviors much more appropriate at this point in my life, I belief I have held on to the last 50 or so pounds as a symbol of my inability to completely emancipate myself from my co-dependent relationship with food, and fully embrace the essence of the woman I was born to be. I invite you on this journey with me as I say “goodbye” by choosing everyday to love myself more than I love the food. By doing simply this, I predict this weight will finally vanish once and for all. This is a bold and very public hypothesis from a girl who has tried fifty other ways to lose this weight before she was ready.