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.