Untethering

I forgot to do what I knew I was supposed to do to lose weight. 

I’m not talking about eating right and exercising; that’s a given. What I mean is first changing the story in my brain, stopping the old tapes that play over and over on loop, keeping me trapped in the past and in an oversized body. 

I kept believing that losing weight was the golden ticket to happiness—that I would finally be this healthy, vibrant, talented, successful person when I could fit into a size 6 again. But that equation is backwards. It’s not “Lose Weight then Become Her.” 

The formula is actually:

“Become Her then Lose Weight.”

I can’t become the thin, healthy, vibrant person in my body until I become a thin, healthy, vibrant person in my mind.

The equation is the same for everything. Whatever we want, we first must become the person that has it, the soul that embodies it. That’s how we obtain it. That’s how we become it.

I knew this lesson well from my days of being a sick person. A few years ago, at the height of the Chiari pain and near constant illness, I lived as a sick person. I owned illness like some claimed a talent or skill. I had the monopoly, the patent, on being sick, and I was damn good at it. 

I became the master because, for a long time, it was all I could do. 

The day I condemned my husband for complaining about getting a cold (sick? He doesn’t know sick. Who is he kidding? Nobody’s sick like me…) I realized I had a problem. I had woven being ill into the fibers of my being. Being sick wasn’t just what I was, it became who I was. And if I ever wanted to get well, I needed to unravel those strands PRONTO. 

Years have passed and I’m no longer a sick person. I still have a Chiari malformation in my brain but it doesn’t rule my life. Even though I still have occasional symptoms, my decisions aren’t based on how they will coincide with being sick or in pain. I have successfully untethered from that persona and moved onto something else. 

As stark as this wellness lesson has been, I kept pushing weight to the background, as if the rolls around my midsection didn’t have to follow the same rules as the Chiari. It was easier to criticize myself for years of poor choices and whine over the numbers on the scale that never moved in the right direction, than start to unravel the twisted strands of psyche that supported being fat. The weight, it seemed, had made itself at home and wasn’t going to leave easily. 

But why would it? Why vacate when I lived and breathed fat? As much as I’ve felt like a stranger in my own skin under these layers that make it hard to do things like climb a flight of stairs or tie my shoes, I’ve allowed the overweight condition to become me. I make all my decisions—from what to wear to how to spend my time, and everything in between—based on the size of my body. I honor the weight with these choices and give it my undivided attention every day. Without realizing it or meaning to, I’ve been living to be fat. 

As uncomfortable as life is under this mass, I’ll never be able to shed the hefty outer layers until I untether from them. As before, I need to unravel the overweight persona one strand at a time until we are entirely disconnected. I must stop identifying—thinking, feeling, eating, living, breathing, walking, dressing, speaking—like an overweight person. The only way to become that healthy, vital version of myself is to Become Her NOW in this body, at this size.

Let the untethering begin.