How I Lost 40 Lbs & Healed My Relationship With My Body

This simple step profoundly changed my relationship with food, my body, and life itself.

“I hate you. I hate this. I hate me.”

My morning affirmations in the mirror. Staring at the extra weight I’d gained during chemo - which they told me was a good thing. Most people get small and frail, making the chemo even tougher. Not me. I had a steroid in my medicinal ‘cocktail’ of poisons that made me ravenously hungry. Food became my friend, my coping mechanism.

And all the while I thought that extra food was helping me. Until I got home, next to the impossibly-thin girls at college again. Only then I realized that food had tricked me. It had lied to me. It wasn’t my friend. I didn’t want any of this weight anymore. It was no longer a good thing.

I’ll tell you what didn’t work to lose the weight: starving. Sure, it would work for a while, but then I’d violently ping in the other direction and binge.

What else didn’t work?

• Fancy meal plans

• Diet foods

• Diet sodas to try to curb my appetite.

• Cigarettes (yes, I tried that too. It had a dual purpose; it let me spite God. It gave me a small sense of the carefree-ness everyone else my age got to have.)

No, it wasn’t any of those tactics.

What worked?

Rewiring the connection between my mind and my body first that finally helped me lose the weight.

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Admittedly, I got much heavier than the pictures below, but in all that pain, I threw many of those photos away.

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There was a tiny little wooden sign hung on the other side of downtown Spokane. Only about a foot wide, in big capital letters it said YOGA. Like a convenience store would say BEER, LOTTO, CIGARETTES. Just: YOGA.

That sign was my invitation.

DO NOT MISUNDERSTAND: I am not telling you to do yoga. In fact, don’t. The hot girls have kind of ruined it for all of us (looking at you, big brand clothing companies…)

I am telling you to listen for that little voice, that little inclination to go wherever your body is asking you to go in order to meet it and talk.

That is your invitation.

I had no interest in yoga. The idea of spending an entire hour with just my body on a thin mat sounded…horrible. Why would I ever want to do that? But that voice inside. She told me to go. The same voice that, when they told me ‘you have cancer, you are very sick, and we’re not sure what we’re going to do yet.’

She said, quietly but unmistakably: Tell them no. Tell them you aren’t going to die.

Now here she was saying: go inside that little studio, get on your knees, and pray.

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Why It Worked

Your invitation might be mountain biking, sitting by the ocean, or journaling. Whatever it takes to talk to your body. Here’s why it’s so important: