This Thanksgiving week, I feel especially grateful for my health and happiness.

Often, when I’m giving a speech or presenting a workshop, I make this statement:

“Today, I’m grateful I struggled with excess weight for thirty years.”

It seems I always have at least half an audience who become incredulous at that statement, but, now that I’m on the other side of struggle, it’s quite easy to see the life lessons I learned on my way to success:

1. The Adversary – My struggle gave me something to overcome. Long after I had relinquished the idea of perfection, and vanquished the number on the scale, and accepted my body, I knew I’d never feel right with myself if I was misusing food because it numbed my feelings and kept me from experiencing the full realm of human interaction. Having an adversary can add passion to the mission.

2. The Paradox – I was both hiding inside fat and more obvious to others as someone with an eating problem due to my excess weight. I became extremely sensitive to the judgment of others, and yet they could never match my own criticism towards myself. I wanted to be thin, and I wanted to prove my weight did not define me. My journey taught me how to hold paradox, so common in life.

3. The Lost Innocence – The diet and fitness industry is a vast field of liars, hawking methods which guarantee almost instant regain and keeping customers unaware they are becoming lifetime, lucrative customers. They lie FOR PROFIT. It was quite a lesson realizing most of what I read was dribble, that my doctor knew less than the hucksters, and that I was on my own with my poor food-assaulted body on this journey. It was a growing-up lesson I’ll never forget. I didn’t lose my innocence and belief in the powers that were supposed to protect the public in 1963 in Dallas, where the generation before me lost their childish beliefs. I lost mine between a pair of blow-up sweat-creating pants and high protein diets for which the author, Dr. Atkins, was banned from medicine.

4. The Complexity – I desperately wanted weight loss to be as simple as depicted in the diet books and fitness industry. I wanted to believe that a pill, potion, diet or exercise plan could fix me. But losing weight, and specifically losing it permanently, taught me nothing is simple within the human psyche.

Permanent weight loss is less about what we put in our mouths, and more about why.

Permanent weight loss could care less about the size of a body, but shows up when a body trusts its owner.

Permanent weight loss is not so much about willpower, but about empowerment.

Permanent weight loss runs from short dramatic bursts of energy and blooms beneath a combination of persistence and consistency.

When I say, today, I count myself grateful I had a food addiction, I’m not discounting the pain food addicts suffer.  Believe me, I felt incredible pain as I struggled and overcame the condition. And I understand what my clients are going through as they share their own journeys with me.

But perhaps the greatest life lesson I learned from permanent weight loss is that suffering is not a requirement of life, as much as it is a message to release what’s causing pain and move on.

Want to learn everything Pat learned as she healed her food addiction? Start with the first Four Vital Steps to Permanent Weight Loss – a free class via podcast here.