the complicated topics of happiness + weight + body image

A few weeks ago, I wrote about taking on the Whole30 challenge. Well, that lasted approximately 4.5 days. While on a freelancing assignment in the first week, my lunch options were a sandwich or a sandwich. I chose a sandwich. All morning on the tour I mulled over it, convincing myself I'd just eat the roast beef off of it and drink a bottle of water. The decision of what I could eat of my lunch weighed heavy on mind for five hours. For 5 hours I let food cripple me; I felt guilty for not bringing boiled eggs or something Whole30 approved, and I felt guiltier for what I might eat before I even made the decision. By 2:00pm when lunch arrived, I was too hungry, disliked myself, and to justify that, I said the diet was stupid and who cares, and I ate the whole damn sandwich.

That's not how I want to live. 

Since then, I've been thinking and putting words down on paper and in word documents about my weight, body image, and happiness. Because I know that they're all linked. They're intrinsically linked, reliant on one another, each one a domino effect of the other. Too often the way I wrote it just now is how the dominoes are arranged in my mind: my weight impacts my body image which translates to happy I am (read: not very).

That's a backwards way to live.

I've always secretly struggled with my weight. I've always been a terribly confident person so few people ever know. From the time I was picked out of my first day of Vacation Bible School at age 6 with kids I'd never met to play leading roles in the church's theater group, I've been sure of myself. Beneath that confidence, though, I've always wondered what it would be like to have the kind of body meant for a bikini.

That's really not how I want to live. 

Body dysmorphia is an interesting thing. Usually, those afflicted with it imagine themselves as larger than they really are. I've always pictured myself as smaller. And then I'm shocked when I see pictures that shine a giant spotlight on my less-than-ideally-sized parts. It's self-preservation - when I think I'm smaller than I am, that innate confidence flourishes. I see and feel what I think I look like and can worry a little less about how I actually look.

That's not an authentic way to live. 

And then I moved abroad for the first time. I lost 20 pounds in South Africa, and I came back high from my first deep breath of the world, and I felt new in my skin and pretty. I needed another hit.

When I moved to Japan two years later, I lost another 20 pounds. I ran a mile almost every day, and I took a weekly karate class. I cooked almost every night in my kitchen overlooking mountains and rice fields, and I watched what my body was capable of expand and grow. I didn't try to lose weight in either place; I was the happiest I'd ever been both times, and it showed on the outside and inside. When I left, I felt a strong, unbreakable connection between living abroad and a positive body image.

That's an impossible way to live. 

In the last three years living in DC, back from Japan, I've gained 20 pounds. I don't like pictures of myself. I've gone on the first diets of my entire life - I've tried an "eat like I still live in Japan" diet that failed because that's not my reality. And then there was Whole30 that left me feeling incomplete and crippled, dependent on food instead of invigorated and joyful by it.

I can't live like this. 

My truth is that when I'm happiest, I'm healthiest. When I gain weight, I know that I'm not at my happiest. The things that bring me the most joy are also what keep me the healthiest: being outside, exploring, adventuring, wonderment. My goal for my life is to find the job, the place to live, the career - all those necessary extras - that make me stand in true awe and feel a sense of wonder at something every single day. When that happens my body image and weight will never guide my choices again.

That's how I want to live.