Today I made a change in my life, and a much overdue one at that. I am gaining accountability with my weight. Losing weight it is going to be one of the most terrifying things I have done. I suppose like many people I am a person of great dichotomy. One of the biggest being a craving for attention and for being "special" and one of wishing to be invisible and to live in anonymity. The result of this has been that I have been a spectator in my own life for a very long time. How does this pertain to losing weight? Hmmm, that is a long story. Then again with me pretty much everything is a long story. What can I say? My background is mainly Irish and I have a love affair going on with words.
My weight has been my shield and my barrier. It has been my defense for more years than I care to admit. While I do wish to feel special and unique I've also wanted, more than I want to be special, to be invisible. I looked around and realized the easiest way to become invisible is to be heavy. When a person reaches a certain weight, that person is no longer seen, not really. What is seen is the weight. Nobody notices the person, only the fat. People will look over, look around, look through, look away, but generally do not look at a heavy person. This makes for the closest thing to invisibility I could find, apart from a personal cloaking device (yes, I am a nerd and I love sci-fi stuff).
As a child, in a place my parents thought I should have been safe, and by a person whom my parents thought could be trusted, I was sexually abused. This can mess a person up in so many ways. One of the results of this is that at one time I never felt good enough and that if people got close enough they would see that there was something 'wrong' with me and so I tried to be somebody, anybody, other than myself. So not only did this mess up my self-image, but trying to be somebody I was not also messed up how I thought other people saw me. God has done some amazing things in healing me. I know that the closer I get to God the closer I get to who I really am. I also seemed to accept without question the assessment of others as to who I am. Now I've learned, through God, to only be me and not try to be who I think others want me to be. However, before that time, instead of allowing God to be my defense and defender I used my weight to keep people away and from getting close to me.
I came back to my faith in God three weeks before I found out I was pregnant. I was 37 when I conceived and pretty much giving up on everything. When one gets to that age one does not think a child is in the future. It would be an understatement to say that I was shocked. However, God has used being a mother as part of my healing and giving me the amazing blessing of my daughter He brought me from rock bottom to places I never thought I'd be. During my pregnancy God brought me on quite the journey. It was during that time that God dredged up a lot of my past for me to deal with so that it would not be toxic and affect my child when she was born. It was during that time that I began to start to see myself as God sees me. I still have problems believing that, to Him, I am beautiful. How can a fat woman be beautiful? I have tried to be invisible for so long, so that nobody would see me, not the real me. However, God's patience, love and mercy are amazing things. I know the most accurate "mirror" I have of who I am is God and how I am reflected in Him. This is an ongoing process.
As part of this process God is calling me out on my weight and is not going to let me hide behind it anymore. He is also stressing to me the responsibility I have as a parent to be healthier for my daughter, and that my responsibility to her is not only in being an example morally, ethically, spiritually, and in integrity, but also physically in how I live my life before her. In the past when I have lost weight and men started to pay attention to me it would terrify me and I would gain back the weight I had lost and then pack on some more pounds for good measure. Some build their walls internally. I built mine pound by pound. This time losing weight is going to be very different. This time around it will be very difficult, not so much because of my warped thinking that God is starting to heal, but also because this time around I have hypothyroidism and it will be very difficult physically to lose that weight. With this in mind, because I need accountability in this and because of the physical difficulty in losing weight I have made the first steps in dealing with this problem. I bought a membership to the YMCA. I had my first meeting today in starting the first of what will be, for me, a series of twelve week weight loss challenges. This involves a weekly weigh-in (the accountability). I am also booking a personal trainer whom I've already told that she has my permission to call me out if I start making excuses or play it easy. I am an incredibly stubborn woman. My stubbornness has cost me in the past. It is time to turn that stubbornness into determination and make it work for me rather than against me.
So, now is the time of my metamorphosis, as I allow God to change me inside and outside. So, if you've stuck with this entry this far, I'm letting you know the purpose of this blog is to write an account of my journey in weight loss, as well as my journey spiritually and personally. The easiest part of this journey will be that I am learning I don't have to prove my worth to anyone anymore. My worth is not found in the size of clothes I wear, or how other people perceive me, but is found in the loving eyes of a God who sees me, already, as beautiful. Yeah, I know, it is something, at least for me, a lot easier to write down in a blog than to actually believe. I know God is working in me though to see that truth. It involves a metamorphosis from the inner being to the outward being. It involves losing that outward defense I've used for years and it scares me to lose that. It comes down to the question though of do I, or do I not trust God. I choose to trust. Metamorphosis.
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