Anyone who has ever been on a weight loss journey will be able to relate to this. You build up your motivation, you get your meal plan figured out, you download your apps and select your workouts. You are 100% ready to begin your weight loss efforts, so you choose your start date. Then, that start date comes around and something derails you. This is far from my first experience with this. It has happened time and time again. I’m ready to go and BOOM a kid gets sick, or BOOM it’s a holiday weekend, or BOOM there’s a function that you need to go to, or BOOM there’s a day that ends in “y” just showing up and ruining your mojo. In this instance, it was a stomach bug. The irony isn’t lost on me that I was totally ready to start my health journey (because this isn’t solely about weight loss anymore), and BOOM, my body decided to reject everything that I put into it. I feel like my body hates me, truly. I’m not sure where I went wrong or what I did to offend it, but seriously, it’s not a fan of me. Just in case you don’t believe me, here are a few examples that illustrate my point.
I had three pregnancies. In the first, I progressed normally, no one could visualize that I was pregnant (while I was wearing scrubs, anyway) until I was about six months along. After I had my son, my body bounced back like it’s supposed to. In my second pregnancy, I was showing by six weeks. While my body didn’t bounce back quite as well after my second son, it was still obvious that I used to be pregnant and then I was no longer pregnant. By my third baby, I felt like my body just gave up. I’m pretty sure that I started showing minutes after implantation. As for my post-partem body, it kind of felt like my abdomen was giving me a big, “f-you”. It was like saying, “look lady, if you’re going to keep getting pregnant, I’m done stretching back and forth like a rubber band. From hence forth you will look like you’re perpetually 5-6 months pregnant. That’s your life now. You did this.”
When I didn’t get pregnant again, my body had to figure out new ways to torture me. My favorite foods were bread and pastries. So, naturally, several years after having my daughter, I developed a gluten sensitivity. I removed gluten from my diet for one month to see if it would help regulate the insane allergies that I was having. After that month, I didn’t really notice a difference in my allergy symptoms, so I just resumed eating as I normally did. Nope! Can’t do that anymore! Now, the bread products that I love cause intense migraines and joint pain. Woo-hoo! Naturally, I thought this was just a fluke initially, so I trialed it over the course of a few weeks and sure enough—when I ate foods high in gluten—particularly my favorites like pizza and pasta, I would wake up the next day with a migraine and intense joint pain in my wrists, knees, ankles, hips, and sometimes my shoulders. As if that wasn’t enough, shortly thereafter I realized that I had a dairy issue. Sadly, I had spent years writing off digestive issues and recurring diarrhea as anxiety. I lived with anxiety every day for years, so I was no stranger to the “nervous stomach”. During COVID lockdowns and shelter in place mandates, I was one of those few people in the world who was doing well. A natural introvert and a proud homebody, it was like I had been training for this my entire life! Stay home with your family and don’t leave your house? OK! I was living my best life! Since my anxiety was at an all time low, I really took stock of how my stomach reacted to dairy foods. So, just like I did with gluten, I decided to do a little elimination diet and some trial-and-error work. The results—you guessed it! A wide range of dairy products make me shit my guts out. See ya later ice cream, cottage cheese, cream cheese, and coffee creamers! Didn’t like any of you anyway! Who wants to do things like eat apple pie a-la-mode? Not this girl!
Now, in the trial of Lorie vs. her body, I rest my case. My body hates me. The aforementioned GI bug that derailed my health journey lasted for at least 10 days and by then, we were rolling into Thanksgiving. Why start now, right? Wait until after the holiday. Now, here I am, almost a week since Thanksgiving and I feel like I’m just starting to get back on track. Let’s be real, though, when I say that, what I really mean is that my mental state is finally coming back around. I know that this isn’t a phenomenon unique to myself. When you’ve struggled with your weight and body image for most of your life it’s difficult to find the motivation to start again. You tell yourself that you’ve been down this road before and you gained all of the weight back, or the diet wasn’t sustainable, or a life issue came along, and you just couldn’t devote time to meal planning or exercise. It happens. That’s just life, right? So, you end up in a vicious mental cycle. You don’t like how you look or how you feel, so you decide to do something about it and in flood all of the past experiences where you failed. Sometimes, you even give up before you start only to revisit the same thought process weeks, months, or years later.
Where I am currently at, I don’t particularly love the way my body feels. I recently had an extensive ankle surgery. I was unable to walk for 4 weeks, then I had a partial weight bearing status for another 4 weeks, and I have been able to progress from there. In starting physical therapy for my ankle I realized a few things. First, my endurance had really taken a hit. Working as a healthcare provider, I’ve given this speech to many people. The longer you were down, the longer it’s going to take to feel like yourself again. We had a saying in the rehab community—for every day spent in bed, plan on three days to recover from it. It’s a different thing all together when you’re experiencing it first hand, though. So, quite literally, I have had to work on building my endurance back to just getting through the day without a nap, to slowly incorporating the things that I used to do everyday, like laundry, dishes, packing lunches, facilitating the kids’ routines, etc. It’s been an extremely slow process, but I’m about 75% of the way there. The second thing I noticed was how out of shape my body really is. I was surprised that light-resistance exercise bands made my muscles sore or that I could only do 10-20 reps of an exercise before needing to take a break. Everyday I think to myself that, “tomorrow, I’ll start stretching” or “this weekend, I’ll get back on the stationary bike”. Has any of that actually happened? Nope. Why? Because it would require me to get my butt out of bed at least an hour earlier than I currently do. I have given it plenty of thought and getting up and exercising earlier in the mornings would be the best fit for my schedule. The problem is that I hate getting up in the mornings. Like, I really hate it. I will take my snooze button, snuggles. and warm blankets, over sneakers and a sports bra any day! So, needless to say, I’m already beginning my experience with low motivation because I don’t think that I will be able to sustain an earlier wake up time and I have a healthy dose of reluctance to trying it to begin with. So, now we have reluctance and low motivation in addition to a generally bad attitude from our past failures. Great! This is a great place to start.
I don’t think that’s where the story ends, though. I feel confident in saying that I have poor discipline when it comes to my health efforts. Thanks to my ADHD brain, I have to devote extra discipline to things like doing my job effectively and efficiently, making sure that my kids stick to their routines, and running a household. So, where can I let go? Where can I relax a little? Self-care, in any format, is the first thing to come off of the list. Whether that’s getting a shower on a given day, spending time with friends, or even buying myself a fancy coffee and actually sitting down to enjoy it, if it’s a me thing, it’ll be the first to go. So, creating a work out routine, or just a self-care routine in general, and committing to it in a consistent way, feels out of reach. It might not be so bad if our body compositions changed they way they do on TV. You know what I’m talking about, “After doing the Burntastic fattiness program for 4 weeks Kathy lost a staggering 40lbs!” Yeah, that didn’t happen, or at least not in 4 weeks, but it’s how they sell us, right? The results we’re looking for in a quick time frame. Unfortunately, in real life, we have to not only be disciplined enough to be consistent, but we also have to be persistent. Let’s say that your goal is to lose weight, as mine has been so many times over. You’re using the scale as your primary tracking method because, hello, it keeps track of your weight! Weight is rarely a reliable measure of your success, though. You can gain and lose “weight” for a myriad of reasons that have nothing to do with actually losing body fat. The scale might be up a pound or two because you’re bloated, or you have your period, you might lose a pound or two because you’re more hydrated, thus peeing more, one day over another.
If you’re like me, then you’ve had those times where you’ve stuck to a program for a number of weeks only to jump on the scale and see that it hasn’t gone down, or worse, it’s gone up. Then you rage quit your program, right? Why am I putting myself through all of this if it’s not making a difference anyway? For example, during COVID, I had the time to implement a diet and work out program and stick to it. At the end of a 12-week cycle, I weighed myself and I hadn’t lost a darn thing. Mind you, I was enjoying the exercises, my body felt stronger, I felt healthier, my body felt better, and I was proud of myself for being consistent for 12 weeks! None of that mattered when I saw that number on the scale. All of the positives that I gained were immediately washed away. Persistence leaves, or perhaps more accurately, we let it go because we’re so focused on one measure of “success”. If I had the fortitude to persist in my program 4 years ago, my body might be in a very different place right now, but I’ll never know.
The last things that I think are paramount in a health journey are expectation and disillusionment. These are like the fraternal twins of the diet world. They’re different, but they come out together. I visited my goal weight for a minute around 25 years old when my wedding was my “thinspiration” as they say. Even though the scale told me that I had reached my goal, my body still didn’t look the way I thought it should or would when I got there. My expectations weren’t met. Then comes disillusionment. You were able to persist through your program fueled by the mental image of what you would look like when you hit your goals. When you get to that target and your mental image is still different from the image in the mirror, you start to question why you’re doing what you’re doing. There’s a sadness to it as the realization you’re your mental image and true image may never align. Turns out, I’m always going to have curves. I can’t make my hips less wide, I can’t take my 5’7’’ frame and make myself small and petite, nor can I take an hour-glass shape and make it more streamlined. Around the time I rage quit my last weight loss program, after a thorough tantrum that lasted several days and may or may not have involved an excessive amount of chocolate, I realized something.
My first realization was that I was defining my success and my failure as a person based on a number on the scale. It’s pretty sad to reduce yourself to someone who only has value when the number reflected back on the scale is one that you like. I had to really sit with that for a while. I realized how many times I said something like, “I’ll buy a new winter coat next year if I lose weight.” If you’ve been there, you know. We’re always making planes and delaying things, like buying ourselves new clothes, waiting for the magic moment when the excess weight is gone and we’ve earned being happy and proud of ourselves. What about right now, though? Life is too short for that way of thinking. You’re valued now. You are entitled to be happy right now, not 50 pounds from now. You’re allowed to be proud of yourself for working out 4 days in a week even if you don’t have a loss on the scale. In short, you deserve to love yourself just as you are right now. You don’t have to earn treating yourself well.
Being fully transparent, self-love is still a concept that I very much struggle with. I’m working on it, but it’s a completely new way of viewing myself and that takes some time to adjust to. I have been criticizing myself since I was a kid. I thought that the only way to motivate my weight loss journey was to berate and belittle myself. I was uncompromising and harsh. But….I was never able to hate myself thin, so why did I keep trying the same thing? That’s why I’m trying now to love myself healthy. I have been working on giving myself grace to enjoy holidays and special events. If I get off track, I remind myself that the track isn’t going anywhere, I can just hop right back on the next day or even the next meal. A big shift, though, has been working on myself as a whole human being. Keeping our minds healthy is just as important as having a healthy body. I owed it to myself to do the work of unraveling the maladaptive thought patterns that I had grown accustomed to. That’s not exactly easy work, but it is valuable work. I give myself space to feel my feelings. This might seem like a no-brainer, but I would consistently try to intellectualize my emotions. For example, when my latest trip down this road was derailed by the GI bug, I let myself feel how disappointed I was and I allowed myself to acknowledge that it kinda sucked to be sick. Before, I would have told myself things like, “it could always be worse” or “there are people fighting cancer out there, get over yourself”. While I still think having perspective is valuable, it’s also completely OK to let yourself feel how you feel. So, I let myself simmer in being bummed out for a day. Then, I was able to move on. Did it still suck to be spending so much quality time with my toilet? Yup, it sure did, but I had let those emotions go, so I just rolled into the next day without the weight of them holding me back.
Are there days when I tell myself that we’re in “fake it ‘till you make” situation? Where I force myself to find something I like about myself or to look in the mirror and make a positive comment on my body? Sure. I’m building a healthier mind set, though, and I think that’s the correct foundation for the wellness journey I envision for myself. I will not do it perfectly, and that’s fine. This doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing journey. So, my friends, what I want to get across is that we are worthy of taking care of ourselves. Worthiness is already yours, so claim it instead of fighting for it. Maybe that one little shift in thinking will make all the difference. I’m wishing you all the best on your path.