As I celebrate 14 years on the permanent weight loss road, my own little “self” anniversary, I’m making it a point to look back as well as forward.

Reflection is only useful if it brings greater awareness. Speaking from the beginning stages of weight loss, one of my newer clients asked me, “Oh, don’t you look back and feel bad for those days when you could enjoy eating anything you wanted?”

She was earnest, and honest, but looking through the lens of her own fears. And, no, the pleasures I feel and create today don’t even compare to pepperoni pizza. They couldn’t come close to that meaningless little chocolate truffle. No, they’re not even on the same planet.

Sure, food can be a pleasure but, when your senses are tuned into life, you are constantly creating heightened states of energy, ecstasy, and expansion — within your soul, not just your body.

Obviously, my permanent weight loss journey became more about self-love than about food.

It’s deeply personal work, wrought from the inside out and from the top (mind/brain) down.

No one can know the black holes and leaky heart wounds you have filled in with sheer tenacity and persistence.

Others may deduce you are in control when your size dwindles, unable to see that, actually, more importantly, you’ve surrendered to your true self.

At your core, you know you are the only one who can hold yourself in esteem, or make the opposite choice and feed your self to the wolves, your body to fat, and your children to addicted lives, creating the interdependence all over again.

We all have choice, even when we pretend we do not.

We can continue to be hard on ourselves, bullying ourselves fatter and clinging to a thin shred of nobility we associate with struggle. With self-hate, we get to play victim and victimizer.

How convenient.

Never leave home.

Just suffer.

But playing victim can only run to one conclusion: martyrdom.  A deeper dungeon.  A darker hole.  More fat.

The point of reflection is that you cannot know these things when you start out on the journey.  You think it will be about calories and counting and measurement and comparison.  And, when you leave all those things behind, something remarkable happens.

Love fills up the dark spots.

A true heart always heals itself.

Deep down, we all know what to do.

 

_____________

Pat Barone, MCC, a Master Certified Coach and Soul Awareness Healer with 14 years’ success sustaining a 92-lb weight loss, is on a mission to rescue well-meaning folks from ignorant media, the money-hungry weight loss industry and the mainstream medical community, all of whom misunderstand the nature of true change.