As one who has struggled with weight, with what seems, like my entire life I, too, have been on the dieting yo-yo for many, many years. I couldn't understand where my metabolism went. I was too young (although they all say once you hit the age of 30 it goes downhill) to struggle so intensely with weight gain and weight loss. But, alas, I jumped on the dieting bandwagon trying one fad thing after another trying to achieve... what? What was I trying to achieve? Throughout the years I couldn't even tell you what my goal was regarding weight. I just wanted to be smaller. I couldn't even tell you why other than I needed to fit in to my current clothes or "all the cool kids where doing it" or dare I say I searched for unachievable sense of self worth in a number.
I'm not going to go in to the back history of all my dieting and weight woes. I want to tell you the story of how I'm living NOW. The past is the past and I'm living in food freedom right now and forever.
Anyone else wonder how we have every dieting program and pill on the market at our disposal and yet still battle with obesity? The restrictive dieting industry doesn't make money because their products work long term. They make their money because we are a "I want it now" society and look for instant results with painful long term consequences. Go ahead - pause a moment and think about it - I'll wait.
My precious friend Becca gently nudged me on a couple of occasions to visit the site GoKaleo on Facebook after several food/weight related conversations. I would go to the site, but didn't have a chunk of time to invest in really reading who/what this was all about. Until one day, the day that changed every day after that. The day I was liberated from dieting woes, psychological food battles, sacrifices to the Scale god, and our cultures general lack of respect for health. I could really get on board with what Amber (GoKaleo) was saying because she wasn't selling a gimmick, a product, or another restrictive way of living. She was shouting for people everywhere to WAKE UP to dieting industry's sacrificing your life for their dollar. She backed up her knowledge with evidence and she spoke truth not just regarding physical matters, but heart matters as well. She encourages you to love your body and throw off the cultural standard of achieving "smallness" through restrictive diets. She essentially tells you to get up, get moving, and EAT THE FOOD!!! I won't go in to all the details of her extremely knowledgeable site, because I'm going to encourage you to do that. www.gokaleo.com
I learned that for more than a decade I had put my life and health on the line by trying to adhere to this incomprehensible standard of what my body should look like - always neglecting the way it should FEEL like. I'm absolutely saddened to look back and think of what I robbed my family of with me riding the dieting roller coaster. I'm just so thrilled and thankful that I discovered the proper way to living healthfully while my daughter is still at a young and impressionable age. She will never again have to see her mother on a restrictive diet.
What she will witness is me caring for my body is the most ideal way. She will see me STRONG because I will lift things. I will lift HEAVY things. She will see me eat salads, cupcakes, steak, fish, soups, peanut M&M's, chicken, vegetables, fruits, and cookies. And she will see me eat those things on MY terms, not under the influence of restriction. She will see that I'm not a victim to what I can't eat, but that I'm empowered to choose what I consume for the sake of living a full, abundant life. I will teach my daughter that it is better to be fit than it is to be thin. I will teach her that she has the control - not the food. I will teach her to be strong!
After a few days of being under the proper influence of how to eat I made the joke "I have a feeling we are going to get to the end of this depressed/anxiety filled life and realize that we were just hungry the whole time."
I actually don't think that's much of a joke anymore.
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