After an exhaustive number of years spent losing and gaining the same pounds and then some, new expectations round this final phase. No longer is it acceptable to live in fear of rebounding pounds, engaging in perfection tactics of all or nothing success or failure, and maintaining a closet occupying five different pant sizes awaiting the ups and downs. 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 travel along a different avenue.

Like a horse of a different color, this process looks and feels like none other I have experienced. My past, repeated pounds enhanced and highlighted inner healing left undone. Now while processing, mending, and releasing emotional baggage that has weighed me down, freedom has lightened my load. When healing takes place and voids are filled, food no longer is utilized the same way. Food as fuel, emotions expressed, the feeling of wholeness needing nothing but self-love, self-respect, and self-worth, the weighted effects are nullified. Moving into freedom from fears and liberating the lightness of being, suffering has ceased. Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar, and in my case, weight was not just weight, but representative of pain and suffering, darkening my heart, deepening depression, and deadening a life in need of 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 feeling emotions, destructive, disrespectful treatment of my body by feeding it unhealthy edibles and contributing to atrophying, unused muscles, and the damaging, weakened self-worth that believed it was not worthy enough for forgiveness, healing, and change, all contributed to repeatable poundage. The transcendence to recognize differently, a deepening respect for myself, and the process of transformation in healing has replaced the old, and brought in weight loss of a different nature, foreign, but comforting, consoling, and kind to my senses. I have arrived at a knowing that this healed version of myself is the me I was meant to be. Weight loss of a different color looks damn good on  me!