Month: July 2015 (Page 2 of 2)

A shaming, destructive, and painful memory from the past flew into view recently with an immediate surprise; it triggered nothing. I felt nothing, no judgment, no opinion, no emotion wrapped around the memory. Peace suddenly arose and surrounded the thought normally met with anger, resentment, and sadness. Instead of grabbing the nearest Oreo®, I sat peacefully, aware of transition, healing, and a nothingness I did not know was possible. This newly occupied space of past hurt, regret, and pain, simply nullified into letting go, transitioning into a “knowing” of surrender, peace, and non-reaction. Relieved from non-triggered emotional response, uncertain prior of the form it would materialize into awareness. Today that “knowing” arrived and I let go.

Changing, healing, and mending of the heart happen sometimes silently. Does transformation require consciousness to process healing into being? My current experience concludes healing hovers, infiltrates, and assembles silently, invisibly, and undetected, until thoughts, emotions, and actions accustomed to pulling a lever no longer trigger an explosion of pain, worry, or divisiveness. When what would normally be reactive reverses, a “letting go” occupies the space. Peace, self-respect, and self-love replace the self-loathing, outward hatred, and stored, hoarded anger. Great supply of resentment releases and the heart softens.

While loving others and myself simultaneously, I let go. Lacking judgment, resentment, and anger, I let go. Without control, tightening, and fear, I let go. Insight, consciousness, and introspection occupy my mind, I let go. Transformation in silence, simply being, and undisturbed, I let go. Releasing the weight, the emotional baggage, and the past, I let go. Cleansing the closet, the old, and the ancient, I let go. Losing shame, yet acquiring resilience, I let go. Allowing, opening, and soothing the heart, I let go. Through peace, healing, and stillness, I let go. The “knowing” is living open heartedly, feeling a sense of belonging, self-worth, and peace.

A healed and wholehearted existence translates to living authentically. Knowing what others think of me no longer matters encompasses my life. Cultivating self‐compassion, releasing perfection, and engaging in vulnerability to connect with others, eliminating numbing of emotions and feeling of powerlessness, and cultivating gratitude, joy, and peace, enables the release. Self-love, respect, and acceptance, while letting go, replaces uncertainty. By simply being my authentic self, the nothingness suddenly existed, stillness presided, and I let go. Broken pieces of me, the shards of pain, and tarnished past, curiously mended. The void filled, and a foundation formed to let go. Time, process, and digging, healed deep wounds, but “letting go” set me free.

Weight loss management is a daily grind of continuous mindfulness, food preparation, motivation, and movement. Each requires a combination of skills. Culinary and time-consuming, emotional and psychological, and physical coordination and stamina, meet a plethora of needs to glide smoothly through the journey. The continuity is a path of patience, energy, and accountability, the payoff is rewarding, uplifting, and worthy of the effort. Weight loss, emotional stability, and physical strength combine for a life of continuous comfort, health, and well-being, within a body that walks with swagger, energy, and self-worth.

Preparing food is a constant when eating “clean,” a term that here means unprocessed, real food. Most American food supply is a hodgepodge of hollow, deflated, nutrient-deprived ingredients that typically include simple sugars, gluten, or dairy. Most processed foods convert limited energy, disturb natural digestion, and contribute to inflammation and disease. “Food as fuel,” is a chosen mindset of acquiring unprocessed, untainted, and “clean” options, to utilize its efficient conversion to energy for brain functioning and physical movement. What enters our bodies is a compelling, contributing factor to feeling good. Assuring macronutrients of lean proteins, vegetable-type carbohydrates, and healthy fats are included, well-being rests at the end of that rainbow of foods. Time to prepare and money to purchase quality, “clean” food is required.

Besides preparing food, healing the inner quandaries that stall success, are imperative. Emotional baggage carried by the masses of people with weight challenges, is healing pending. Without addressing reasons behind bingeing, numbing emotions with food, and psychological pieces that contribute to overeating, the unhealthy uses of food, a root cause of excess weight, continues to plague weight loss, contributing to failure of maintaining a healthy weight. Why weight loss challenges churn throughout one’s life, whether for physical or psychological needs and reasons, journeys without clarity, reminders, and motivational building blocks can detour efforts. Inner healing, emotional stability, and motivation are necessities for long lasting change and success.

Exercise as the final component pushes the body to increase lean muscle, strength, and endurance. Deleting fat reveals the muscular layers that contour the body, displaying beautiful curvature beneath. Increased muscle mass through weight baring exercises and interval-training classes enable the protection of the skeletal walls, empower the body, and increase strength. With exercise, endorphins rise, enhance mood, emotion, and energy. Additionally it suppresses appetite, optimizes well-being, and requires food as fuel to prepare and recover for and from workouts. As part of weight loss management, exercise engages the core that strengthens the back, aids in digestion, and maintains posture.

Edibles, emotions, and exercise are a conglomerate of weight loss management. A sustainable lifestyle requires consistency, persistence, and perseverance. Obstacles, distractions, and challenges that sidetrack the route are learning opportunities. These interruptions teach resilience, offer personal growth situations, and potential problem solving solutions that reroute, but with good decisions return us to our chosen avenue. Weight loss management focuses on food choices, emotional motivation, and movement with a sustainable lifestyle to maintain the journey. Preparing nutrients for fuel, prompting our inner child to heal, and prodding the body to move and strengthen, merge into permanent evolution. Progression toward a sustainable weight loss solution is about healthy food preparation, prompting emotional healing, and prodding physically for strength, opportunities for well-being.

Sometimes the weight loss journey is steady. Although altering intense exercise classes and changing foods may improve weight loss rate, continuity remains. Keeping high amounts of “clean” food churning the metabolism, maintaining movement through exercise and food preparation in motion, and tracking food in My Fitness Pal, these cumulative actions beckon the scale to balance into submission. Clearing the closet, purchasing jeans, and celebrating with a new haircut, roundup rewards that help the mind catch up with bodily changes highlighting success.

Seeing becomes believing change occurred while you were sleeping, exercising, and eating “clean.” The remedy of stagnation, boredom, and motivation restlessness, requires regularity of daily processes, reminders of reasons for the weight loss journey, celebrating non-scale successes, and a caring, continuous flow of community support. “Steady On” only functions effectively with continued focus, eyes on the ultimate prize, and the “Why” the journey began initially.

Keeping the goals, attention, and process alive with diligent consistency, the finish line remains in sight. Detours exist, but fewer rather than greater; scales fluctuate to achieve correction for water, but eventually dip lower; and life events happen, temporarily affecting efforts replaced by resiliency and a return to the prior path. Staying the course and continuing along steadily, movement occurs over time. A monotony of longevity may cause you to question your path, stop to take stock, and abandon the course, but with choice and backing the basic elements of change, you return to be, steady on.

After an exhaustive number of years losing and gaining the same pounds, new expectations round this final phase. No longer is it acceptable to live in fear of rebounding weight, engaging in perfection tactics of all or nothing, and maintaining a closet occupying five different pant sizes awaiting fluctuations. Instead I headline “slow and steady wins the weight loss race,” while recognizing detours, struggles, and seesawing pounds from water retention, constipation, or hormonal imbalances are part of the journey. While disabling the power of the scale and empowering non-scale victories by the way clothes fit, how strong, energized, and happy I feel from the integral healing happening, the weight descends. Within my heart a void disappears, old perceptions and beliefs depart, and the past mends fully, making this weight loss journey a different avenue.

Like a horse of a different color, this process looks, and feels like nothing I have seen nor experienced. My past repeated pounds spotlighted inner healing left undone. While now processing, mending, and releasing emotional baggage that weighed me down, healing materializes and the void dissipates, changing food’s purpose. With food as fuel, emotions expressed, the feeling of wholeness needs nothing to fill; self-love, self-respect, and self-worth nullify the old needs. Moving into freedom from fears and liberating the lightness of being, suffering ceases. Excess weight did not translate to an issue about physical weight, but rather directly representative of pain and suffering, a darkened heart, deepening depression, and a life in need of inner healing.

When healing arrives, a healthy relationship with food, body, and soul replaces the prior process of weight loss and unhealthy lifestyles. Food as a numbing agent from expressing emotions; destructive, disrespectful treatment by feeding the body unhealthy edibles and contributing to atrophying and unused muscles; and damaging, weakened self-worth that believed it was not worthy enough for forgiveness, healing, and change; all contributed to repeatable poundage. Transcending, deepening self-respect, and transforming through inner healing, replaced the old, and brought in weight loss of a different nature, foreign, yet comforting, consoling, and kind to my senses. I have arrived at a healed version of myself, a self-actualized knowing who I was meant to be. Weight loss of a different color, paints a new picture of the journey ahead.

Entering a chronic dieter’s closet, equates to a shopping experience where multiple sizes adorn the racks. My overflowing closet needs a considerable purge rather than a wearing. Organized by size and clothing type, the “skinny” clothes live in the back, the larger upfront. To beautify the space, green, fake-suede covered hangers prevent clothing slippage and create a color-coordinated closet. This visual emphasizes simplification, consistency, and overall organization. Believing this alleviates the painful experience of choosing clothes has instead stood as a reminder that greater issues exist at the forefront. Until I feel comfortable in my skin, no creative closet solutions alleviate the inner emotional turmoil and excess weight.

As the unvisited clothes in the back waste away upon hangers, and accumulate dust, inner emotional issues settle within my heart and heal gradually. Disappointment and despair led to keeping the closet door shut, but opening the door recently feels liberating. The closet left unaddressed now needs attention. Since the closet formally closed a few months ago, a healing and transformation of my mind and body have occurred, causing me to venture in, purge it, and release it from purgatory. Although some clothing fits presently, the closet remains a reminder of my past I no longer wish to revisit. That was the old me, today the new me stands taller, stronger, and freer.

Removing and donating the clothes to those in need is gratifying, and surely would have made sense three years prior. Unready to settle that score between my closet and generosity, I rationalized that the clothes could and would fit eventually; purchasing new was unnecessary and impractical. Now foolishly I realize the frugal error. Many an expert claims ridding oneself of any form of clutter makes room for the new. Yet I could not hear it once upon a time until readiness arrived. Today the purging cleanses and heals. A reckoning frees my senses and the closet opening, drained of its contents, allows its freedom.

Cleansing the closet, taking action, and removing its contents, releases the deep-rooted struggle between the past and present. Former careers highlighting a certain style, dresses worn to weddings, and a host of ensembles that never made it to any ball, are ready to fly into a slew of trash bags awaiting occupancy. Clearing the clothes consciousness awakens, enables a “knowing” the excess weight of the past is gone for good. The clothes confined within a space metaphorically represent imprisoned history. Alleviating its captivity is a commitment to lightening the emotional load of the past, making space for the new. Cleansing the closet is healthy action for healing.

Recognizing no cure exists, following a consistent, healthy lifestyle without a silver bullet to magically manifest instant weight loss, feels overwhelmingly unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and undeniably impossible. With a continuous, healthy approach including obstacles, self-sabotage, and deterrents as components along the path, we discover consistency, perseverance, and habit-forming practices that occupy the guide to sustainable weight loss. These roadblocks, rocky terrains, and slow speed are part of a long process of cumulative, gentle weight loss.

To commence upon a passage through life as your new way of being, a lifestyle of small steps inch toward accumulation of repeatable actions. Daily the initial intention to practice a particular path of eating, exercising, and self-care is executed. Focus, mindfulness, and intention guide the unexercised muscle to motivate, strengthen, and elongate. Each day flows into the next, until an ingrained, sharpened practice replaces former behaviors, where ritual and habit require less effort, yet continued dedication.

When obstacles loom, resilience to rebound, stand up, and dust the distraction off, is vital to the process. Learning to bounce back from the interruptions that rile us, the saboteurs that attempt to derail us, and the celebratory events of revelry that disengage our lifestyle practices, are training for triumph. The ability to adjust to obstacles in our path, engage our strength to persevere against the disabling opponents attempting to knock us down, ensure our success. Walking through, around, over and under these hurdles are struggles’ path to resilience.

Consistency over time is necessary for success, the following riddle demonstrates. Would you rather have three million dollars immediately or a penny initially that will double its total amount daily for 31 days. Many claim their three million, not recognizing that the latter choice results in more than ten million dollars. Slow and steady weight loss through consistent actions over time accumulates. While life is continuous, losing and maintaining weight over a year or two is a plan in patience, sustainability, and longevity. Particular practices utilizing cumulative results may not seem significant initially toward long lasting change, but compiled gain headway, seemingly miraculous over time.

“Clean” eating without calorie restriction, boot camp classes that draw improvement in small increments at every workout, and emotional healing of the inner self gradually, conjoin to create copious outcomes. With continuous consistency, patience, and persistence, achievement and goals are attainable and sustainable. The reliability of “steady and consistent wins the race” is a proven strategy to the finish line, where maintenance awaits. Quick fixes may establish immediate gratification, but long-term success is about consistency. Although challenging, accruing, compounding, and simple, repeatable actions lead to weight loss success.

Rewriting our stories, changing our lives, and altering circumstances, is foreign for many. We settle into a comfort zone, build foundations within boundaries, and score the lines of our existence within margins. Past constraints, limited beliefs, and former decisions prime our present choices. Reacting to our current predicaments is one way to live, while another is to reframe, observe our lives through a different lens, and rewrite the tale. Whether weight loss, career change, or engaging in new relationships, when inspiring change by steering, rerouting, or shifting our story, a constantly improving life unfolds.

A limited, adjusted, and worn path initially created awaits change. Complacent, steady, and experienced, its route no longer fosters spark for travel, like creativity gone dry, inspiration without energy, and a desert without water. A familiar, comfortable, and habitual existence, walking a treadmill of emotions and actions, is the well-travelled road. Yet when the wheels spin and no traction connects with the ground, navigating inspirational, fresh energy awaits renewal. Rewriting the path, repaving the journey, and reframing the picture before you, readies rejuvenation.

Realizing life is not happening to you, but you are happening to it, empowers the gears to turn and engage proactively. Spark, initiated by inspiration, pumps from our hearts, and pours from our soul to ignite our passions to share, connect, and offer our gifts to humanity. Drawing our senses to the surface, either one by one, or as a symphony, enables stillness to preempt passion to catch fire.

Arriving at moment-by-moment meditation is a practice achieved when tuning into the senses, eliminating the mind, and awakening the heart. Focus upon one sense to reach the original entry point into the present moment, gradually welcoming in another sense, one at a time, until time stands still tunneling awakened intuition. This communicates “right” action, inspired thought, and knowledge, for the next step forward. Trusting the stepping-stones is part of that process, like knowing the road continues long past where the car headlights’ projection ends.

Most of us sit in the shadows of our lives, wondering how, why, and how to engage with the dreams of our yesteryears. Rewriting our stories is engaging in stillness long enough to hear the familiar tune you already know innately, the recognizable notes born into your soul that shone in your childhood and lost their way. Life purpose, ingrained in our DNA, awaiting expression, revelation, and implementation loses touch with our knowing. This song, the melody of meaning, sings perfectly within our hearts, eventually feeling like emptiness when lay dormant too long. Reaching into our core, ascending upon talents within, is like coming home, with the guardian of your galaxy wondering why you waited and lingered as long as you did.

Transforming our stories and altering the future, awaits and beckons if we are silent enough to listen. Hear its call, and your music has the forum to play brilliantly. Deny its existence and the heart deadens slowly, regret surfacing at life’s end. The power to reframe our lives is not about changing who are, but becoming our intended selves, following one’s heart, and playing the soul’s tune. Preempted for greatness and wired for connection embody the brilliance to chime together as one. Without the birthed stories of one another coming to fruition, we shortchange life’s greater vision. Answer the call, and breathe life into your story, the destined tale that began when you took your first breath.

Observing my son in action, nothing weighs him down. Effortless excitement leaps into a present-moment thrill, and he flies with wings that lift him from any doom that lies beneath. Bright lightness of being gradually dims as he ages, as life circumstance threatens the freedom of his imagination, the security of his emotional well-being, and limits his natural response for play, song, and movement. His innocence knows nothing of such possibility, a naiveté fragile enough to shatter by the meddling of his surrounding world.

Yet interference of great magnitude has affected us all. Parents, teachers, and the environment generating boundaries around the freedom of expression, begin to deteriorate one’s truth, imagination, and wonder. The weight of these limits begins to press upon expectations, cognitive functioning, and emotional stability. Our wings begin to crumple under duress, eliminating fearless flight. Ego, competition, and the mind replace living from the heart, intuition, and essence. Grounded until an awakening, the mending of the disruption, deterioration, and dilution of our spirit, navigate back to our original form, enabling our life purpose to rise. Without the inner healing, a weight burdens us, preventing a life with ultimate meaning.

Freeing our souls from the outside expectations, allowing a heart-centered moral compass to rule our behavior, and unleashing the intuition that guides each of us, lighten the heaviness that weighs us down. Materialized excess pounds act as a reminder to return to our original path of purpose and essence. Releasing the physical weight and this metaphoric boulder signifies a heart’s freedom and reveals a path to present-moment living where stillness, presence, and intuition live. With wisdom, the release of captivity from judgment, and freedom to follow the essence of who we are, allow our wings to resurface. Flight follows, weight of life dissipates, and we soar. The heart opens, essence illuminates, and we fly effortlessly.

Waiting, waiting, waiting, and physically shrinking gradually like removing a layer of paint daily, is a game of patience, perseverance, and faith. Dedication to a lifestyle change necessitates focus, commitment, and allegiance to a plan. Doubt dubs itself within the mix debating effort’s utility. Pounds dropping excruciatingly slowly and inconsistently, wave a flag to surrender, yet faith continues devotion to the weight loss game. Variables cause weight to zigzag, coast, and teeter like the scales of justice uncertain of which direction to lean. Digestion and metabolism, individual chemistry, and food sensitivities play roles in the results. Yet in the end, it is a “weighting” game.

After a month, culminating in six-tenths of a pound lost without roaming from the food plan, active exercise performed four days per week, and feeling unstressed, slim patience emerges. Weekly tweaking food choices and rotating exercise classes to foster change, scarce results illuminate persistence. Although slow weight loss, experts claim remains off longer than quick loss, these sluggish pounds demotivate. Asked if clothes are looser, body stronger, or inches gone and unfortunately, these non-scale outcomes are too small to measure. Water retention, constipation, and/or hormonal imbalances established from a slothful thyroid might contribute to the crawling, inch-by-inch process.

Although disappointed, a “staying the course” attitude backs the belief that justice will come when scales lean in my favor with a positive verdict. The fifth week deliberated a 3.8-pound verdict, looser pants, and leaner body validates the process. Singing praise for such slow results requires patience and conviction that the process is working even when invisible to the naked eye. The challenging waiting game make the rewards feel significant. When motivation wanes, and memories for choosing this lifestyle dissipate from the forefront of one’s mind, wavering between why proceed versus the ease of not, commences. Mindfully remembering “why” you began is vital for the weight loss journey to healing, patience, and continuity in a waiting game.

Within a lifestyle, no ending exists. Process continues, sustains, and ventures onto a non-linear path. Small vicissitudes, a few moments of regression, and the scale dipping downward, weight loss accumulates into a foundation for maintenance, expertise, and confidence continuing the journey. It replaces doubt, rebounded weight, and fear of old weight ascending again. The repeatable diets concluding in pounds lost and gained do not outweigh the measurable effect on confidence and experience built within a lifestyle destined for future weight maintenance. Diets are temporary; lifestyles are forever. Within this process, the extended time for inner healing has an opportunity to occur, guarding against weight recurrence. Deprivation, no sustainability, and metabolic slowdowns from restricted calories prevent diets from elongated success.

With no magic pill, a lifestyle is sustainable with support, self-care, and self-respect for what enters the body. Food for fuel as a motto, self-love as an internal compass, and increasing physical strength and energy, beam a spotlight on a lifelong plan. Time is an elixir that enables patience to meet expectations gradually. Maintaining this lifestyle is a new normal; boundaries are set surrounding social situations, and non-negotiable actions force eventual results, encouraging the numbers to drop on the scale. When living the lifestyle of “clean” eating consistently, slow is the speed required, and waiting, waiting, waiting is the game worth winning.

Without a pill to swallow, a quick fix to reduce excess pounds, or a fat shredding machine, I discovered the key to unlock the weight loss secret. No easy way exists, yet boot camp classes, community support, and consumption of real, “clean” food lead a successful path. Decades delving through diet discoveries, spending money to pay for fake food, and weight loss programs meeting and greeting the masses of unhappy, hefty humans fighting the persistent pounds, my final wakeup call arrived. Feeling desperate to heal from the hollowness of self-doubt, low self-worth, and the self-deprecating reaction to an overweight body, my search led to inward healing and a reevaluation of “real” food. Uncomfortable in my skin, wanting to eliminate my exterior from everyone’s view, and disappear and alleviate the pain of the past, I felt rock bottom beneath me.

My maximum weight leaped upward by a dozen pounds while writing my first memoir. Although my editor gave me two thumbs up for writing ability, the manuscript needed major editing for its second draft including organization, dialogue, and a reduction of 25,000 words. Beginning the editing process with hopes of completion within a few months, I stalled within weeks purely paralyzed, inactive, and dead-ended. Reacquainting, rehashing, and repeatedly revisiting my past to complete a second draft felt overwhelmingly disabling. My attention and focus diluted quickly from memoir to motherhood, volunteerism, and friendships, establishing a great distance from my writing and prevention of releasing my past into the hands of readers.

Gravity of failure weighed heavily; excess pounds plagued my inner peace, refusing their release. Depression and a downward spiral of disappointment damaged and delayed my writing career. The dangling inspiration of my book lay dying, my inner strength dissipating, and the weight, a symptom declaring my resignation, wore itself upon me, a reminder of healing in need of resolution. My extensive work to mend the broken pieces of myself lay dormant, though ready to leap forward when the healing came knocking. Yet I sat in squalor with my thoughts, numbing the emotions in need of expression. While my writing took a rest, my passion shadowed into darkness, the shining light of community volunteerism, motherhood, and fostering friendships were illuminated. From the outside, life looked favorable, while the inner healing lingered again.

One year later, the sun shining and spring awakening, I request a sign and support from anyone, anything, and any avenue, to thwart the inner pain that beckons healing. Feeling despair, depressed, and drowning just below the surface, an angel in the form of a stranger shares honestly and openly with me about her journey to shedding pounds, joining a community of like-minded souls, and eating “clean.” I take action with open arms, and engage with her supportive weight loss and fitness community. The healthy lifestyle espoused I embrace wholeheartedly. No shortcuts exist, but simple, not easy processes to strengthen my mind, body, and spirit. Connection between those searching for meaning, healing, and personal growth makes the journey welcoming, while my patience for shredding pounds increases and the journey has no official ending. Healing the shattered pieces of my inner self, returning to my passion of writing, and accessing self-love, self-acceptance, and self-respect for all that I am, supports sustainable weight maintenance long after the weight is gone, allowing a lifestyle to transpose itself into everyday living.

Like hiking up a mountain to a false peak, an appearance of the summit, the weight loss journey to the top contains fraudulent peaks. Acquiring additional knowledge with each arrival at the apparent top, another summit climb continues. Before victory is declared, the weight loss journey requires further information, experience, and strength for a sustainable climb to the summit that enables us to admire the view and remain for life’s duration at the peak.

Climbing a peak in Colorado summers ago, a thunderstorm arrived as we summited; we sprinted down the mountain as hail and buckets of rain began to fall. The necessity of weight loss, maintenance tools to remain upon the peak when storms arise is beneficial. Without the resolution of deep-seeded, emotional baggage, symptomatic weight gain and a protective layers result. Summit views are short lived as hazardous storms approach without inner healing. Pounds revisit like hale in full force, causing a run for cover, and a sprint down the mountain.

To weather the storms, finding weight loss tools for the weight gain afflicted is essential. Emotional healing guiding heart, mind, and body, enables successful weight maintenance. Utilizing food for emotional purposes rather than fuel must alter for ultimate success. Losing weight only to gain it back and then some, is a club not worth joining. The gravity of physical weight does not dissolve without resolving emotional trauma, unfelt emotions, and unhealed parts, necessary components as the pounds plummet.

Healing psychological wounds, filling the emotional voids, and addressing lack of self-worth, are imperative pieces to weight loss’ puzzle. When sustainability finds its space within the cycle of weight maintenance, inner healing has halted the hefty recoil of weight gain. Present or past emotional baggage deliberates heavily like the world weighing upon us. Reaching the root cause of the weight enables a host of healing to take place. Routing around these resolutions, losing the weight with only physical awareness, remains a battle lost and won repeatedly, each time with greater difficulty.

Without addressing the emotional, internal, and weighted issues causing the underlying pounds, band aiding the symptoms will not cure the “dis-ease.” Healing within when pounds plummet is what constitutes true victory and sustains weight loss permanence. Reaching deep, discovering the void of love, pain of loss, or childhood traumas, is when weight maintenance and healing are possible. Ignore the brokenness and inevitably, pounds reappear. Inner healing releases the beast of burden within a weighted life, preventing the visit to false peaks. The view from the summit is extraordinary, weathering the storms within is necessary to remain there.