Losing weight is soul-crushing; it involves deprivation, shame, and guilt.
Most weight loss programs, fads or diets require restricting calories, omitting food groups from your diet, and the sting of failure every time you step on that scale and it fails to reflect your monumental efforts of deprivation.
This leads to a downward spiral of negative self-talk and damages your self-worth. When your scale becomes the measure of your self-worth, you will be defeated no matter what the number.
The secret to my weight loss and why I’ve managed to lose 65 pounds and maintain my weight loss over the course of thirteen years and three pregnancies is not an answer most people would expect. It wasn’t Jenny Craig, or Weight Watchers, or the Atkins Diet, or the cabbage soup diet, or the Ideal Protein diet, or weight loss pills like Hydroxycut. Of course, over the years I tried some of these programs, but like most “dieters” I’d lose the weight and it would come back.
My weight loss was soul work. It was healing from childhood trauma, learning self-love, and reframing my relationship with my body. No weight loss coach or points system can do this work. It involved going to therapy, digging up and processing all the painful memories of my mother fat shaming me, being bullied at school, and my hateful thought process about my body.
It was the realization that fad diets and pills were my forms of punishment for hating myself. It was also healing my relationship with food and learning how to use food, not as a coping mechanism, but as a healing force in my life.
In the Women Warriors program, we use the Medicine Wheel teaching because, through my experience, I learned good health is about the interconnectedness of our mind, body, and spirit. It is the teaching that without balance in all of these areas, we can never be healthy. When I only focused on the physical aspect of my well being – my weight – I was never successful in keeping it off.
I love the traditional cultural teaching that women are sacred life-givers, and we need to honor our bodies; our bodies are a celebration of our strength and the inherent beauty of our roles as Mothers, sisters, daughters, and aunties.
These teachings are in juxtaposition to popular cultures view of deprivation, and whipping ourselves into the ideal body aesthetic – thigh gaps, six-packs, and as a recent Cosmo headline states “#Buttgoals shape an epic ass in just 8 minutes a day.”
As a mother of three daughters ages 8, 6, and 5, I am aware of the importance of role modeling and teaching healthy habits. My collaborator on Women Warriors and obesity expert, Dr. Sonja Wicklum states you should never put children on a diet or restrict what they eat, such as limiting carbohydrates.
I eat the food I expect my girls to eat including fruits and vegetable at every meal, and I teach them that food is fuel for our body. Also, I bring them with me to the running track. I make it a fun experience and I talk about how we’re building muscle and gaining strength. Finally, I never use the word “fat” and I never make negative comments about my body or other women’s bodies.
A core message that we share with our participants is that the process of losing and gaining weight is very complex. We should never oversimplify this process or judge others based on their weight. Also, my weight loss is the exception and not the rule. There are many anecdotal stories of weight loss that are misleading and harmful. For example, extreme weight loss stories from the contestants of the Biggest Loser.
Today, I’m grateful for this journey because it fuels my passion – providing free fitness classes, and nutrition education, with an emphasis on holistic health with Women Warriors. This quote by George Leonard rings true for me every day: “The work we do on ourselves is the work we do on the world.”