My Journey

“Am I more than just the sum of every high and every low?”

Lauren Daigle

Much like the way I’ve joined and rejoined different weight loss programs over the years, I’ve started this blog several times before getting here. I’m a yo-yo dieter and a yo-yo blogger. I bounce up and down between so many intoxicating highs and menacing lows that it feels as though my fraying string is about to disintegrate. And I fear one day I will fall without the ability to get back up.

I’ve tried losing weight more times than I can count using many different popular (and some not-so-popular) weight loss programs, fads, and supplements, and while I have succeeded in losing some of the weight, I have never managed to either reach my goal or keep the weight off. I must have joined Weight Watchers over a dozen times, each time hanging my head in shame as I slumped through the doors of the studio only to face the same guide who would weigh me in and congratulate me for returning even though I had gained over twenty pounds since my last weigh in. Although she was positive and encouraging, I knew she knew I would fail again and disappear for a while only to return having gained even more weight. I hated walking through those studio doors heavier than I was when I first started. I hated having to face that guide and the leaders who knew I had failed…once again.

I tried other programs, weight loss supplements, acupuncture, gym memberships, exercise, personal trainers, books, food journals, energy healing, past life regression, crystals, hypnosis, etc. Every fall when I packed away my summer clothes, I told myself I wouldn’t fit into them the following summer, that they would be too big. This is the last time I will have to pack away my fat clothes, I would say to myself. Not only do I still have those fat clothes, but I also have newer ones, bigger ones, that I buy every summer. And I feel like a failure.

Similarly, I’ve told myself I was going to be a writer, that one day I would have a blog, write a NY Times Bestseller, and repeatedly sign my name across the inside cover of my life-changing and inspiring memoir at my book signings. I’ve started a blog on several different occasions having paid for domain names and hosting to never even log in to either account. I haven’t written that memoir either. Yet, here I am, trying again, standing up after having fallen so many times that every bone in my body should have broken from the repeated impact. But, I persist. I tell myself progress is not linear. I tell myself that success doesn’t mean there will be no bumps along the way. I tell myself I am only 44 years old and I have plenty of time left to recover, feel good, and write that memoir. I pick my head up and bask in the concept that I am strong enough to try again, to put myself out there for the world to see even though the fear of failure has the potential to paralyze me. And yet, I persist.

Today, I am focusing on my desires and my capabilities, not my failures and unfulfilled dreams. I am putting aside my many attempts to diet and lose weight and my many attempts to start this blog and write that book. Today, I put aside the fear of failure and the shame. I am putting the yo-yo down and releasing the extreme highs and lows that bring me from pure ecstasy to utter misery in mere minutes. Today, I release the shame that tells me I am a fat pig, a repeated failure, a waste of life, a fake, and a wannabe and I embrace all the gray that exists between the black and white as I linger in the steady and constant.

I realize now the excess weight on my body is a symptom of an eating disorder I didn’t understand or even wanted to admit I had. I had been focusing for so long on healing the anxiety and losing the weight that I didn’t see how they are interconnected. I understand now that my journey cannot simply be about weight loss. It has to be about recovery. I hope you will follow me on my journey of recovery and love, one in which I learn to heal from Binge Eating Disorder and anxiety and learn to love myself and my body.