I Found 16 of My 52 Lost Pounds, and They’re on My Body
"Wake up every morning and choose yourself; Choose to see the best in yourself, regardless of what you did or didn’t do yesterday. See the best version of yourself, even if that version hasn’t come into fruition just yet."
Hello. I’m Dee, and I am an emotional eater. What’s an emotional eater? Well, it basically means that I am a drug addict, and food is my drug. I have always found it so interesting how some people vulgarly refer to drug users as junkies, while comfort food is just another word for “junk” food. The serotonin produces the same whether it’s drugs, food, or whatever you use to “feel better”. Therefore, junkie could be used to refer to many of us. Junk food has been a friend to me in the same respect of alcohol, sex, and men (we’ll save those for another day). These friendships make dealing with my internal griefs, insecurities, heartbreaks, and traumas so much easier. That has been my distorted truth for years. However, I have recently openly accepted that these friendships are toxic as hell. I’ve often found myself in a self-fulfilling prophecy of internal turmoil when linking up with these friends. I knew I had an issue with food when after a very difficult day of teaching, a few years ago, I left work and made my way to the Taco Bell drive-thru and ordered two Gordita Crunches, a hard taco, and a Mountain Dew Baja Blast Freeze. As I ate the meal, I felt better but I still didn’t feel good. I drove across town to visit my friend. Before I made it to her house, I had stopped at Cookout and ordered a Cookout Tray with two chicken quesadillas and a Cajun chicken wrap. If I’m not mistaken, I got a cookies and cream milkshake too. I ate all of this within an hour. I ate it and I felt better, but I still didn’t feel great.
Actually, I never feel great after I turn to food for a fix – I just feel better in the moment. I’m sure that is the same way drug addicts feel. That is why it is called a fix. It seemingly fixes things in the moment while simultaneously creating more damage: one relapse could ruin an entire year of sobriety. And it seems so unfair that one moment of weakness dominos into two and two into three, and before you know it, you are back to your old ways. For me, a druggie bonding moment, with high sodium and sugar filled meals provided by my plug (Postmates and Uber Eats), resulted in a 16-pound regression on my weight loss journey. Every relapse has a trigger. Mine was finishing my Doctorate Degree and coping with the loneliness that sometimes creeps in with singleness. I was crawling to the finish line while yearning for intimacy with a significant other. Some days I didn’t want to type my dissertation, but I wanted to graduate. I was staying up until three in the morning and getting up at eight in the morning to teach children. Some days I didn’t go to sleep at all. I didn’t have time to cook, so I Postmated or Ubered food. No good. Now, I feel myself undoing several successful milestones.
This has happened to me before while on my journey of emotional eating sobriety, so what’s different this time. This time, I am facing my problem rather than ignoring it and refusing to hold myself accountable. I learned long ago that refusing to seek truth allows the devil to create a deceitful truth for you in which you began to live by. This deceitful truth sounds like, you are fat and worthless again, why even try, just eat whatever you want, why go to the gym when you just ate an entire pizza. In order to combat this deceit, you must hold yourself accountable and face your truth. Accountability for me looks like calculating the hundreds of dollars I spent in the past two weeks on JUNK food. Accountability for me is identifying that stress may be a trigger but I choose how I respond to the trigger. Just because you are triggered, does not mean you must respond to the trigger in a self-harming toxic way. I am learning to form better habits around how I respond to stress that are unrelated to sex, men, alcohol, and food. I am learning to find ways to pour into myself and am rechanneling my relationship with those factors in a positive way: daily praise, worship, and bible study, sexual boundaries, fasting, journaling, nature walks, working out, and instead of ordering from Postmates and Uber Eats – Sis applied for a job and is now delivering for them. I’m in my bag and my creative corner, and out of my refrigerator.
In addition to accountability and the courage to get on the scale and say, “damn sis, we gotta’ get it back together”, self-compassion, grace, and unconditional self-love have helped me continuously work towards realigning myself with my self-love journey. Somewhere along the line, I lost sight of my weight-loss being about me loving and pouring into myself. It became about being praised by others about how good I look. In a sense, when I fell off track, I was upset about disappointing others. However, even though I love the support and accolades, this journey was never about everyone else. It has always been for and about me. I felt like since I had lost control, that I was weak. I felt like I was a disappointment who deserved to be punished by sitting in the misery of those 16 pounds, but self-compassion and grace say otherwise. Self-compassion and grace are what allow me to understand that although I am not perfect, I am still worth pursuing. Although my journey has not been straightly aligned, it is still worth traveling. I gained 16-pounds back but that does not mean that I do not deserve to continue striving for a healthy self-perceived beautiful body.
Unconditional self-love allows me to understand that imperfection shouldn’t yield giving up on myself. If we have the strength and courage to unconditionally love others though they have continuously failed us– it is only right that we redistribute most of that effort and love to ourselves. Wake up every morning and choose yourself; Choose to see the best in yourself, regardless of what you did or didn’t do yesterday. See the best version of yourself, even if that version hasn’t come into fruition just yet. Don’t give up on yourself and your goals, even if you fail every night and have to start over and try again ever morning. The pursuit matters more than the accomplishment. Be careful not to convince yourself that because your pursuit isn’t that you don’t deserve the accomplishment. The pursuit is where you learn the most and grow the most. Keep easing on down the yellow brick road like Dorothy Gale, just make it to the Oz.
Most importantly, self-compassion, grace and unconditional love have afforded me the honor of truly loving all facets of myself, regardless of what state I am in. There is beauty in the most imperfect areas of yourself and learning to love those areas is important. Mastering self-compassion, grace, and unconditional self-love is what stops a spiraling relapse in its tracks, and that is exactly what I am doing. I am gracefully forgiving myself and compassionately loving myself forward in my journey of emotional-eating sobriety, health, and self-love.
In the comments, tell me what you are self-compassionately, gracefully, and lovingly moving yourself towards today. You deserve it.
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