The Things I Hunger For: Reflections of Healing and My Weight Loss Journey

I recently had a meeting regarding my capstone
project for my graduate program. I am in the home stretch of completing this degree, about only 15 weeks to go and this last phase is the implementation phase. My capstone work is focused on providing healing and mental health resources for recently incarcerated women who are reintegrating into their communities. This project is a combination of my lived experiences with trauma, and grief, and healing and the tools that I have picked up over my last two years as a grad student. So at this meeting, we were discussing some of the challenges the women who will participate in my program face and how healing mechanisms will hopefully improve their quality of life. I found myself speaking so passionately about the need for access to healing resources and the powerful impact it can have on behavior change. Because healing changes not just what you do, but who you are. I found myself showing these women so much compassion and love for their journeys, and struggles, and impassioned in my calling to make a difference in their lives.

And then I went home and later that night and beat myself up about having had Target brand trail mix for dinner instead of the perfectly prepped salad sitting in my fridge. I stressed about the weigh in I had coming up in a couple of days as part of a challenge I had signed up for with some of the women from the office. I couldn't find the same level of compassion that I had so willingly extended to the women in my capstone program. This has eaten away at me for a couple of days (no pun intended) and I have decided that like the women in my program, I too will embark on a healing journey.

I will practice what I teach.

For some people weight loss is about access to healthy foods, or developing workout habits. For me it is about healing. It is about a life time of trauma and grief and what it means to shed it simultaneously with the weight.

I want to love myself more deeply on the other side of having lost the weight.

So much of my life has been made up of losing things I was not ready to. My birthparents, my son, my innocence, my childhood, my health. I have a lifetime of practice of grasping and holding on followed by traumatic goodbyes and very little practice in voluntarily letting things go.

I cannot physically carry my pain any longer. 

After Mateo died, I spent the following couple of years bringing myself back to life. Resurrecting. Healing. I have created a healing toolbox that works for me, one that I turn to throughout the ebb and flow of my still present grief. But I have a toolbox. Part of the work of my capstone is asking these women to build their own and asking them to believe they have the power to become whole again. I need to believe that I can do that as well. I can run my fingers over the scars of my child loss and point to the places that healed because of therapy, or mediation, or friends who stayed up on the phone with me all night while I cried. My community brought me back to life because I believed that it was possible even when I didn't know how.

I have to believe that I can heal from my weight related grief and trauma as well.

So I am going to try even though I don't exactly know all the hows. Because I am asking these women to try to hold on to their sobriety, and their dignity, and their responsibilities while coming back to life. I am asking them to face their past, and their fears, and heal their traumas. If I can believe in their ability to succeed, and I do, I need to start believing in my own.

This blog will be a reflection of this journey. It won't be about numbers on a scale or inches off my waist. It's about allowing there to be more of me emotionally and spiritually as there becomes less of me physically.

It's about discovering the things I truly hunger for.