So about four weeks ago, I embarked on a new journey. I had over the last twelve months stacked on the weight. It was a number of reasons, comfort eating, being too busy to plan my meals, not really caring that much about how I looked and just being disconnected from my body and living in my head.

Suddenly, the realisation that even jumping off the cupboard to get into my jeans that were standing upright waiting for me, wasn’t going to work, because even then, I would not fit into them, spurred me into trying to find a new solution. Frankly, the old solutions of depriving myself, weighing food, obsessing about it and feeling enormous guilt about eating the ‘wrong’ things just were not an option. The thought of it made me nauseous, tired and just plain sad. So I made the decision to try something new. The Geneen Roth, “Woman, Food and God” resonated so hard, it almost hurt. I decided to give it a try. Four weeks on, it looks something like this…

I really have been eating only that which “fuels my loveliness”, I have stopped obsessing and having negative feelings to food. I have embraced eating what I feel like but really being present when I eat, so that I am not off with the pixies and still eating without the realisation that I am full. I have sat with emotions that are confronting instead of reaching for the chips, the chocolate or the ice cream. I have learned that emotions that are confronting only hang around until they are acknowledged and when they go, they leave a “lightness” that is pretty awesome. I have eaten the occasional thing which definitely does not fuel my loveliness and instead of feeling anxiety, guilt or failure, I have shrugged my shoulders and enjoyed whatever it was. The result, food is feeling a lot less emotionally charged, four kilograms have melted off me, probably about the same as what I would have lost on a heavy, miserable, constricting diet, except in this process I have found peace with the fridge, its contents and the content in my head.

Loving, no dieting! Just loving it…

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No Dieting

I love this poem by Derek Walcott:

The time will come when,
with elation you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored for another,
who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. 

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