Weight and Worth
Round and round and round we go….I wish someone had told me a long time ago that chasing symptoms like weight is a never-ending cat and mouse game with no satisfying conclusion and a lot of possible downsides. Let me elaborate.
From the time I can remember, I have always felt fat. Growing up, weight was a focus not only in my family, but everywhere I looked. I was inundated with images of stick thin models on every magazine cover and billboard, and somewhere in my young brain the idea that weight and worth are entwined rooted down deep. Until my forties, I chased that elusive ideal weight with highs when the scale validated my worth and deep lows and shame when it didn’t.
In my early forties, I thought I had dialed in the winning recipe – I fell in love with mountain trail running and discovered that if you paired it with a calorie restricted diet you could shed weight effortlessly. I got down to the lowest weight I’ve been since high school, and I felt for one shining moment like I had arrived.
Health vs. Weight
However, that light quickly dimmed in the face of serious health issues that led to a cancer screening and began to stack into an alarming list of symptoms. Suddenly, that all superior voice of the scale began to lose it’s authority and for the first time in my life I understood what good health really means. I made a bold decision and threw out my scale. I vowed moving forward that my goal would be taking care of my health with the belief that if that was my focus, everything else would fall in line as it’s meant to be. This is and will always be the founding principle by which I operate.
When health fails, we quickly learn how little all the rest matters. When health flourishes, we feel alive, we thrive, joy is in our essence, sleep is our friend, and life has a new, deeper meaning and purpose. From good health, we become who we are meant to be and that looks different on everyone - a healthy body does not come in a predetermined weight and size, and every body is different. This leads me to two key points.
Key Fundamental Concepts
- We are all bio-individual which means even great health information may not work for you. The key isn’t to take someone else’s health and wellness program and adopt it as yours, but to learn what works for YOU.
- To know what works for you, you must understand communication from your body. This does not happen overnight. This requires you to:
- Tune into your body. Take time to recognize how you feel, what feels good, what doesn’t, what’s working, what’s not. Symptoms are great communication from your body and once you dial into this - and look at them as something to learn from instead of smother or ignore - they become a language between you and your body that opens up so many doors of understanding.
- Be patient and try new and different things knowing some things will work, some won’t but in doing this you truly learn what works for YOU.
Ditch the Scale
Chasing weight is a dis-empowering goal. Weight will never be the same day-to-day, fluctuating weight is not a sign of failure, and weight alone isn’t a sign of anything more than, well, a number. Weight doesn’t tell us anything about our health or wellness. It can be a useful tool for some people and I’m not saying everyone should throw out their scale, but I am suggesting it’s time we change the focus to what really matters, what can actually bring us joy - sustainably - and what truly holds its worth in weight – our health.
Xoxo,
Laura Lynne
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