My Story: How I Lost 45 Pounds Without Trying and Realized What Weight Was Really About

by Jessa Parker

I want to say first that I didn't start exercising, didn't join a gym (OK, I've joined 3 in my life and quit a few months later each time), and I didn't become super-buff. I didn't stop eating chocolate, go macrobiotic, or learn to fast. I didn't exercise any supreme force of will, and I didn't pay any money to join anything.

In fact, I still dislike most forms of exercise and eat lots of chocolate and rarely anything green or leafy.

Nothing about my diet or exercise has changed in the past 5 years.

Every diet or exercise plan I've ever tried lasted a few weeks at most. I'm just no good at self-deprivation. Which I now realize was probably my greatest asset in this journey. I wasn't able to force myself to lose weight, so I had to actually accept and look at the issue, which is the first step in any healing journey.

So this is not a story about trying to make yourself thin. This is a story about honoring the fat.

Throughout my life, I had the vague idea that my being overweight had emotional roots, and that I would eventually heal it, and the weight would drop off naturally.

And that is indeed what happened. Which to me says that the blueprint for our healing is inside us, and we often know more than we think we do about what we need and what our path will look like.

Of course, having that sense of what was true didn't mean I had any trust in it. I was afraid I would always be fat. And I hated it. I hated never liking how I looked, always trying to disguise my stomach pudge, debating to check the "about average" or the "few extra pounds" box on the online dating profiles. Knowing that anything above average would automatically disqualify me from most people's radar. And feeling hypocritical, because I wasn't attracted to overweight people either.

I'd occasionally get on a health-kick and decide that this time, I would make it happen.

This time, I'd commit to walking, running, going to the gym, eating those damn vegetables. Learning to cook. Yeah, right. That never happened. A few weeks later I'd always decide it wasn't worth it. Being fat was better than this. But I was never happy about it.

But I did gradually start to accept it. I read stopping eating compulsively through honoring my body's signals of when it was hungry and when it was full. I applied what I'd learned about healing and acceptance from my other emotional work, and stopped trying to fight myself. I did a lot of therapy, a lot of work on trust and my anger and fear and a lot of other issues. And gradually, I started to lose weight.

It felt like I just had less of an appetite for awhile.

It wasn't hard, wasn't forced--it was effortless.

This period went on for about a year. I'd lose weight for awhile, and then it would level off. Then it would start again, on its own. After losing about 45 pounds, it levelled off and haven't lost (or gained back!) any since.

A turning point came for me one day, sitting with myself in the shower, looking at my body.

I realized suddenly that the fat, and the compulsive eating that I used to do--that it had all served a purpose. That when I was a kid, I was in such a harsh environment that I couldn't deal with all the emotional responses running through my body. I couldn't possibly process all that at the time. So I would binge on candy, and feeling sick would distract me from the pain.

My weight gain was a healthy response in a way, a coping response, to a very unhealthy situation, which wasn't my fault.

Seeing it that way, I felt overwhelmingly grateful toward my body, for taking care of me in that situation, in the only way it knew how at the time. And I recognized that I was still fat, was still holding onto the weight, out of a kind of sense of safety or self-protection. And in that moment, I understood that, and gave myself permission to have that as long as I needed to. I stopped looking at my fat as a problem, and more like a kind of healing reaction.

Like a fever is in the body, this was an attempt at self-correction.

And that I would have it as long as I needed to, and that was OK. I stopped seeing my body as divided, as a thin person with a covering of fat. Instead I saw the fat as a part of me, as a vital and necessary response, as something good and as a sign of my wholeness rather than my brokenness. Instead of trying to eradicate it, I started to honor it.

I think fat is about different things for different people. For some it's about protection, for some it's about taking care of yourself, for some it's about learning to feel anger. Whatever it is about for you, what I'm suggesting is for you to go there. Look at that. Ask yourself, inside, what that might be. And then start healing it. Go as slow as you need to. And take care of yourself.

Whatever you believe in, know that you are meant to be happy and healthy

I believe that the things you need to heal with will show up when you start looking for them. I think whenever we turn toward our highest good, the Universe/God steps in and helps us work it out. The books, the people, the teachers, the experiences appear. We just have to take the first step, make the effort to turn toward the issue and not avoid it, and keep walking toward our own happiness.

It wasn't an overnight thing.

It's been a long long journey from when I was an overweight girl who hated herself to where I am now. I think that healing overweight can be a tremendous spiritual journey, if we recognize it as such.

My journey followed the path I always suspected it would. I just couldn't see exactly what I needed to learn until I learned it, and I was often impatient about it. I think in many ways we know what our healing will look like in vague form, it's written in our souls. So if you have a sense of that, trust that, follow that, and let it unfold.

~ Jessa