Last night I read a post I originally wrote on February 13, 2008, about eight months into my weight loss journey. I thought I'd share it with you today - I hope you'll enjoy this peek into my past :-). I entitled this blog, "Clutter, Fat, and What's Eating Me (and You)?"
Part of the MF journey for me is figuring out how in the heck I managed to eat myself from a weight of 130 (in my 20’s and early 30’s) to my starting weight of 260. Knowing that 95% of dieters regain all of their weight, and often add additional pounds, has motivated me to figure out what happened and what I need to do to be a permanent resident of that 5% who DO keep the weight off.
Because I’ve seen this self-assessment as an integral part of my weight loss journey, I was interested to see that very thing addressed last night on “The Biggest Loser.” Trainer Jillian invited her psychotherapist mom to meet individually with each of the members on Jillian’s team so they could talk about the emotional issues that led to their obesity. The therapist made the point that if we don’t figure out why we eat and address those emotional issues, we WILL gain the weight back. It’s not just a matter of what we’re eating, we have to address what is eating US.
There is someone close to me who has been obese their entire adult life and needs to lose well over 100 pounds. They insist that they doesn’t emotionally eat and claim that the reason they are so overweight is because they enjoy food. Because I know this individual very well, I am pretty sure that that they are stuffing a lot of negative emotions, but I can’t point that out for them. And nobody else can point out MY reasons to me, or YOUR reasons to you. Each of us has to do the hard (and often painful) work for ourselves. It may involve working with a trained counselor, it may involve a lot of time in prayer, and it may involve a lot of blogging :-), but we owe it to ourselves to uncover the emotional triggers. When I am finding is that once the triggers are identified and confronted, they are also disarmed.
I’ve blogged before about my own realization that much of what I was literally stuffing was anger, particularly anger towards God when my life began to veer off of MY plan. I won’t rehash all of this now, except to say that there is great release and healing that happens when the issues are honestly confronted.
Now about the clutter . . .
I was fascinated to read an excerpt this morning from a new book by Peter Walsh entitled, “Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Big?” (excerpt posted on cbs.com). Walsh, a regular contributor to "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and the organizational expert on TLC's "Clean Sweep," talks about the connection between de-cluttering and losing weight, and offers practical strategies for de-cluttering your life and, by extension, shedding pounds. In the excerpt I read, he writes about the American obsession with “bigger is better” and our near-perfecting of the instant gratification syndrome. He makes the point that the clutter so many of us surround ourselves with represents something much deeper that’s going on in our lives.
As I spend time in God’s Word and in prayer, He continues to gently show me those things that I need to release to Him. In the process of doing that, I am able to embrace the true freedom that He offers. So the challenge to myself today is to continue to do the hard work of figuring out what exactly has been eating me and then getting rid of it – de-cluttering the emotional closets and garages in my life.
And while I’m doing all of this, I may just clean out my bedroom closet for good measure!
As I re-read this entry from over 18 months ago, I can only marvel at all I've learned and I praise God for how much He's helped me grow emotionally and spiritually (while I shrank physically!). It has been and continues to be an incredible journey!
Who's committed to an on-plan day today?
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