It's Okay to Fail

Here I am again. Another year on another diet. It’s exhausting. I spend so much energy thinking about food. What I shouldn’t eat. What I should eat. Is this too much sugar. Did I get enough protein. It’s literally exhausting. I just want to be free from concerns of food. This is such a first world problem. It just makes me feel so shallow to be this concern about my physique. Don’t get me wrong. We are supposed to care for the temple where the Spirit resides. But we can all go a little too far with things, can’t we? We either exalt our bodies or we exalt food. Neither of which gives long-term satisfaction. It’s not a new thing either. Yes, of course, photo centric apps like Instagram put all bodies front and center for the world to gawk at but bodies have been discussed and portrayed since the beginning of humanity.

I’ve done every diet out. My library is filled with diet books, cookbooks and other food related books. Well, I take that back. I haven’t done every diet - I couldn’t get with the Carnivore Diet. It just seems like a recipe for difficult poops and an increased body odor but that’s just my two cents. People are losing weight on it and that’s all we really want is to lose weight, be thin and seen as sexy. At the very least, not need to wear Spanx under that party dress.

In 2020, during the height of the Coronavirus, Sars-2 Pandemic - I practiced Intermittent Fasting (IF) along with calorie tracking. I was killing it. I’d gone from 170+ pounds to about 150+ pounds. I’d created a routine. It was working. But then, I got distracted. Good enough wasn’t good enough. Then, tragedy struck again - I lost my dad unexpectedly. That’s a story for another post. I thought I was doing fine. I was handling his death much better than my mother’s untimely death in 2008. But low and behold, I wasn’t “doing fine”. I was stuffing all the pain down with food - again.

I saw a picture of myself after a mission trip and I realized that I hadn’t stepped on the scale or the treadmill for that matter in months. So one cold morning, in the first quarter of 2021, I stepped on the scale in my birthday suit. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was heavier than I’d been at 5th daughters delivery. I was. I am 190lbs. I’m 5’2. Just typing it makes me lean back in my chair and exhale.

There is some part of me, this little genetic seed of fatness that is like, “Girl, just join the body positive folks and live your best obese life”. But then there’s this other part of me that really doesn’t like my sticky, moist, stuck rub of the upper part of these very stout thighs, a part that doesn’t enjoy buying “flowie” shirts to hide my “is she pregnant” belly bulge and a part of me doesn’t like the way I breathe heavy from just going up a few stairs. Now this is all about me. This is all my business that I’m sharing online because I am just compelled to share my journey for some strange reason. I have no problem with anyone who desires to live