Becoming Right Sized...by Liimu

Well, my baby is turning one in exactly one week and I have lost a total of three pounds since I came home from the hospital. Three pounds! Well, that's not exactly true. I've lost and gained the same ten pounds at least twice. Which is why I've been working very hard to re-learn how to eat intuitively. I've apparently come to the end of the line as far as diets are concerned. They simply no longer work for me.

I actually grieved this fact in my therapist's office this week. Cried big, fat alligator tears over the fact that I had to mourn the loss of the illusion of control. That's what I held on to all those years I tried the latest and greatest fad diet - the grapefruit diet, the 9-day diet, the Scarsdale diet, SlimFast, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Body for Life, you name it...I've tried it. Don't get me wrong. They all worked - temporarily. But the problem is that none of them taught me what I really needed to know, which is how to learn to trust my body and feed it when, what and how much it actually needs. What I'm learning now is that it's not about being in control, it's about being in charge. (Thank you, Michelle May.) There's a huge difference between the two, no pun intended.

So, I've been trying to relearn all over again how to trust my body's hunger and satiety cues the way I did when I was, oh, I don't know...seven? I've been doing a lot of reading, which seems to be helping, albeit slowly. I've read Naturally Thin, by Bethenny Frankel, Women, Food and God, by Geneen Roth, Intuitive Eating, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, and most recently, Eat What You Love, Love What you Eat, by Michelle May. They all have been extemely helpful and enlightening and slowly but surely, I feel like the diet fog is lifting. For the first time in a very long time, I'm actually hearing the voice in my head that's talking crazy to me all the time, telling me I need to eat twice as much as I need or that chocolate will solve all my problems. For the first time in a very long time, I'm actually waiting to eat until I'm hungry and paying attention while I do it, rather than reading a book. Because of that, I'm able to tell when I'm full and I don't mind stopping.

Unlike all those wonderful women, however, it hasn't yet led me to some miraculous weight loss, I'm not going to lie. Because of this, I have been tempted time and time again to fall back on a diet - maybe one of the really good ones, I tell myself, like Weight Watchers or Body for Life. Or, maybe I'll just count calories. Up till now, I have resisted the urge. It feels like I was on this roller coaster ride for years that was way more scary than fun and I finally got off. And even though I can look at the people at the top of the hill and hear their screams and tell myself it's thrilling, I know if it were me, it would just be screaming. I can't do it anymore. It was making me sick. It was making me unhappy. And the truth is, I'd rather be fat, sane and happy than thin, crazy and miserable.

So just for today, I'm a little thick around the middle. I still have beautiful hair, great cheekbones and sexy legs (even if they are supersized at the moment). But on any given day, I am making wonderfully healthy choices for my body - like juicing green vegetables, beets and carrots every day, roasting cauliflower and cabbage and eating that for lunch and dinner, using my crockpot to make yummy soups, and adding new foods like ezekiel bread and avocado to my diet on a regular basis. So, whatever size I end up becoming is just going to have to be good enough. I'd love if it were a size 10, but we'll just have to wait and see.