Saturday, March 8, 2014

BECOMING WHO I AM

When I first started the "50 Pounds to Passion" blog a little over a year ago, I was focusing on all the things weighing me down, and holding me back, and what I needed to give up in order to find my passion. I lost 40 pounds of weight, and began to question if this was the way I wanted to be: always half hunger, struggling, losing and sometimes missing out. Life sort of got boring. It was like, true enlightenment lay just around the corner, after more meditation and yoga and raw foods. Was this who I wanted to be? A health fanatic(!).

Where was the fun and joy of life? I returned to my old and comfortable patterns. It was good to be me again. Like so many other people who had lost weight, the pounds came creeping back. And in a way I welcomed those pounds. There is a certain anesthesia to eating and being comfortably fat. No one sees you. You don't need to "be anybody" or "anything" because no one expects anything. When you are fat, you are invisible. People are comfortable around you because you offer "no threat". When you are fat you are not asked to move to the front of the line, more like you are asked to step to the side as you are somehow in the way. And when others treat you this way, it's really easy to start treating yourself way too. When you are not respected, you begin to disrespect yourself. Then, feeling disrespected, its easy to find comfort in more food. "You might as well your tell yourself", you wont be going back to the misery of starving and being fat too. It's just too much to bear.

Then once the weight is all back, the idea of beginning again is so overwhelming and frustrating that putting a frozen pizza in the oven, or taking a carton out of the fridge seem like a much nicer option. It is around this time that the mind begins its complicated journey of twists and turns in an attempt to re-imagine how and when and where to start again. Navigating the world of diet advice is like unraveling a the mystery of a rubic's cube. And all the while you get fatter, and friends and strangers offer advice designed to enlighten you. The all potato diet, wheat grass, no eating after 3, more water, no sugar, no flour, no meat, raw only, vegan! Oh and lose it slowly! (which means do everything differently for weeks, but see no results, but "know you are changing on the inside".) 

It's all too much. I realized I can't diet. I can't lose anything. It's not in our nature to lose. We live in an an acquire culture. It is our nature to want more and to want what we want now. And so with this in mind, I realized that the only way to get what I want to to have it now, in the present moment.

What does that mean? It means that I have to get into being healthy today, for the purpose of being healthier today (not in some imagined future perfect world). Being healthy today means making choices that reflect my perfect self.
I need to take the action required to be the closest to who I have always envisioned myself to be, the person I was put on this earth to be. I know deep in my heart that that person is not a fat, self loathing, depressed being, but rather an active, fully engaged, happy person. To that end, I can be that person to the best of my ability today. The object of my desire the, is not some distant thing that i will someday be, it is rather who I am becoming in this moment.

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