Weight and watch

My good friend Sahana shares some amazing quotes on Facebook and on many occasion I’ve found them aptly reflecting my present state of mind.

Recently there was one which said, “Life has no remote. Get up and change it yourself!”

Well said!

Life is a brilliant teacher. Its patient enough to give subtle hints coaxing you to make choices. After repeated attempts if you still miss the point then sometimes it hits you smack on the face! And if that too fails to move you then there is always YouTube – a treasure trove of information, Pandora’s Box to finding almost anything! What I truly like is listening to people share their personal stories – experiences and journeys through the difficult phases of their life, the harsh truth that motivated them enough to ‘get up and change’ their lives.

In my attempt to changing gears in my own life I’ve been following Breelovesbeauty, Plusmodelinthemaking, amongst others.  Each of them has struggled with the challenge to lose weight and I can see myself in them. They don’t only share their successes but highlight their failures too. Their emotional journey to becoming a better person, forgiving themselves and moving on, to being happy tug a chord within. They share what have been their triggers to gain weight and how they’ve motivated themselves to lose the same.

I was touched listening to Valerie Bertinelli, Marie Osmond and Star Jones on the Oprah Winfrey show  talk about their journey of losing weight while in the public eye. Marie Osmond rightly pointed out that as women ‘we always compare our worst to everyone’s best’ – bang on! That’s precisely why my eyes are invariably drawn towards the narrow waist, tight butt, well-toned arms or sharp jaw lines. Immediately after I’m reminded of my muffin top, flabby arms and invisible jaw line? Why do I measure my self worth that way?

Losing weight is so much more than just losing excess body fat – it’s a life changing experience. It not only means finding a new physical you but an attempt to gathering the strength to emotionally accept that new you in your head. Everyone who’s lost weight has had days when they’ve felt overweight in their mind making it their worst nightmare. That experience has sometimes had the power to set them back till they’ve become mentally strong to snap out of it.

Our physical self is as much responsible for making us the person we are. But more importantly, it’s our emotional well-being that can either make us or break us. Therefore our emotional health not only needs help before beginning the weight loss journey but all the way through so we can actually break the habit of using food to over compensate for every bad experience. Guess that’s why maintaining the new weight is so much more difficult than losing weight. Achieving success means it’s imperative to becoming emotionally strong as one becomes physically fit.

In response to the question of how she dealt with infertility and her husband’s cancer, singer Celine Dion in The Dr Oz Show said, ‘every obstacle that life throws at you is an opportunity for you to grow’.

That’s what I’d like to take away today, while I struggle to lose weight. I weigh a gross 86 kgs! I have a long way to go to reach my target weight – 54 kgs. I weighed that much only a few years ago. Some might advise that I shouldn’t aim for that because of my age or for my height that isn’t correct. But, I’ve learnt another important lesson from these girls – ‘go with what you believe works for you’.

Thus today, I aspire to be ‘me’ again!