Total Weight Makeover

"This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson


I barely greeted Mary in the waiting room as she brushed her large framed body past me, marching to my office out of breath fretting, while mumbling she was ten minutes late.  Mary contacted my office a few months ago desperate to lose weight and get a grip on her obsessive volume eating. Mary is most focused on losing weight and less interested in the spiritual and emotional piece of her recovery journey. More than once she (and most of my eating disordered patients) requested to see my heavy pictures to confirm I truly once experienced the caged in desperation she did—that like her, nothing mattered to me except being thin. Reluctantly,  I pulled out two.


In the photo below I was 29 years old and on the upswing again with my weight. I recall gritting my teeth and saying to my best friend Yvonne, who was taking the photo, "Do you have to take a picture of a beached whale?" I rarely got roped into taking pictures because they represented my truth. I was fat. And with that truth I bought into the idea fat meant dumb—a total loser. What I didn't get during that photo shoot was that I was a sad young woman distracted with obsessions of food and weight to avoid living in the present life at hand. 

When I was twelve I began to notice I  spent the largest part of every day thinking about what I wanted to eat that I shouldn't and what I should eat that I didn't. The weight piled on and the diet sagas began. My obsession with weight was more sensational than anything that happened between me and boys, money, or girlfriends. I was totally absorbed in me so I could not be hurt by another person.


When I looked deeply into Mary's sad eyes I saw my own reflection of a once desperate me. I so wanted to save her, to pull her out of the misery she's swallowed up in—to convince her there is a better way than jumping on one diet after another.  Mary, like many compulsive eaters, believes if she loses weight she'll attract a desirable man and that all of her "issues" will miraculously disappear. But truth be told, what she's really doing is numbing out with food to avoid the chance of being rejected by someone, hence blaming the problem on the weight. A true vicious cycle. Mary claims she wants to experience blissful love but blames her excess weight from making her dreams come true.


Is this truly what's going on? Mary's rejected by men because of her body? Or is Mary blocking her emotions to men with food. Mary doesn't know how to engage herself with a person, only with food. Oh sure Mary had sexual encounters and short stint relationships but she avoided intimacy—surrendering totally to another with deliberateness to face, rather than run from, the worst of herself. She didn't dare allow herself to be vulnerable to another, instead she blamed food and her obsession with her body to take over present living. As long as Mary eats compulsively, her life is about what she eats, how much she eats, how much she weighs, and what she will look like, dress like, when she stops addictive eating. A scenario I was once quite familiar with.


Yes, it's true Mary grieves her unhappy childhood and will never be able to re-write the script. She missed it: a mother's love, a father's acceptance, sleep overs with girlfriends, the feeling that she mattered—that she was important to someone—anyone.  No, she will never get the childhood do-over she's been screaming about for fifty five years. Screaming and flailing fists is not emotional, spiritual, or physical healing.  Emotional, spiritual, and physical healing is another story—a different journey.


The first step in Mary's healing is to own the truth of her childhood story and acknowledge her losses—grieve about them. And to  know she is not her story. She doesn't have to define her existence as the little girl who was abused and never got the love she so yearned for, hence making it the same adult story.  To no longer identity with the lost child and begin living in the present instead of living in reaction to the past.

My second photo, I reluctantly showed Mary, was of me sitting under an orange tree on a breezy spring afternoon in South Florida trying to hide my body behind the baby—so ashamed to once again get caught in a picture. 


My focus today is on living my best healthy life not my weight or what I ate or failed to eat. I now recognize that my obsession with diets and weight was a game—it wasn't being thin I wanted, it was getting thin. It was a game of diet-binge-diet, only to once again binge.  I  would rush out to purchase a pile of junk food shoveling it into my mouth as fast as I could while simultaneously reading the newest diet book on the market. Mary does the same thing.


I want for Mary what I now know—and that is, diets don't work nor does diet mentality. When Mary lets go of the focus on her weight and the newest diet offered and instead puts her attention on spiritual and emotional recovery her gift is physical recovery. It works every time, all the time.


The last photo, which again I reluctantly bring to you the reader, is how I look today. Although I am not my body, that I'm much more than a frame, people want to see and know that it's possible to reach a "normal" weight (whatever that might be for you) without putting the attention on the weight.


This is the miracle.


Put your attention on your spiritual recovery; daily eat three meals and a half-meal consisting of foods that are whole and balanced; run, dance, walk, or do jumping jacks (whatever moves you); and connect to the Divine Source—and watch—watch for the miracle.










http://weightcontroltherapy.com/

Nope, I Didn’t Eat the Chocolate Bunny Ears...

On April 11, in 1998, Holy Saturday the eve before Easter, my Mom had a massive stroke. My life has never been the same. She lived on four more years paralyzed until she passed away on February 7, 2002.

Time does go on, I’ve learned.

This past Sunday Easter morning I walked my dog Sage, and of course without fail my mind wandered, as I recalled the night I got the call from dad that mom had a stroke, but quickly I was distracted by loud commotion. A small child bellowed, “It’s mine!”  Looking his way, evidence of melted chocolate oozed down his lower lip dribbling to his chin. His frantic Mom seized the chocolate earless bunny, which brought on the rage, in her attempt to salvage his Easter outfit.

This scene was all too familiar, with the exception it was this little boy rather than me, a grown woman stuffing chocolate into my mouth as fast as I could—and don’t anybody dare try and take it away from me. Back in my eating frenzy days I was like a wild animal gnarling and hissing to protect my goods. As I marched on past the little teary eyed boy, personal memories continued to flood my thoughts as I replayed chocolate binge eating often brought on Easter morning with baskets of available goodies.  

Today, for me, times have changed. Easter this year fell on April 8 and I moved through it like it was any other day with food—I honored it as a holy day filled with grace and serenity. Before mom’s stroke, we spent every Easter together on the west coast at our family-owned beach home, with my then young son Benjamin, where I feasted on anything and everything I could get my hands on to eat.

Yes, I recall all the good times and the not so good times as I walked on.

I fought excessive weight and binge eating most of my life from adolescence to well into my thirties. At times I was a hundred pounds over my "normal" weight. Up and down I went. I think it was my Mom's weight that prompted me to focus on my own health and weight. I believe her obesity shortened her life. I believe today I understand weight and eating disorders as a result of my Mom's life and my genetic line. I also understand we don't have to take our gene pool as the written law.
We can change it!

As a result of my compulsive eating, it was inevitable I’d be at risk of severe obesity, which put me at a greater risk of obesity-related problems, such as heart disease, diabetes, liver disease, and possible colon cancer—with the enormous amounts of foods passing through my digestive tract, not intended to process at such a drastic rate. As I neared 235 pounds on my five-foot, six-inch frame, I knew I was in deep trouble in every respect.

I learned for me I could make choices and live my life in a healthier manner, or...I could struggle forever. I decided to change my thinking. I believe in the power of the mind. I believe we can be anything we want to be. I decided to put my energy into learning about the subconscious mind and made a shift. I found hypnosis and my connection to a Higher Energy great tools to assist with the changing of the mind and ultimate change with my relationship with food; hence the weight corrected.

I began my self-healing through changing my thought pattern stating, “I am thin” as opposed to “I’m fat” and began to visualize and imagine a thin me—to "be" thin and ultimately act thin which opened and connected me to my Divine Source with miraculous results. My food choices slowly changed and sugar, flour, and wheat were eliminated. It was a slow process of progress not perfection. In time, slowly and steadily, my weight corrected, cravings disappeared, and I became quite happy living my best life.

Today, my weight ranges between 136 and 140 pounds. I went from dire obesity to a weight considered normal for my height. My motivation for earning a master’s in mental health and a PhD in addictions was to work with the eating disordered–to bring help and hope through hypnosis and psychotherapy to the many who fight this insidious disease every breathing moment of their lives.

While I worked on the initial gathering and digestion of information for my dissertation—and ultimately, In God’s Hand: Release the Obsession with Food, I took several long weekend retreats in the little sleepy town of Madeira Beach, Florida and stayed at my family beach house—the very same house I shared many Easters with mom—filled with childhood memories of losses and new beginnings, tears and laughter, binges and diets. I took long walks along the seashore, steeped in self-reflection over what I’d discovered from my research and from re-reading personal accounts of the various stages of my eating disorder, both in full bloom and in recovery.

On this anniversary week of my Mom's massive stroke, I think about what if Mom would have caught the blessing I did, and she ate clean and healthy. Would she be here today? Who knows! I know I can't go back and do the “what ifs,” but I can live in the now and learn from her mistakes and spread the news there is recovery for all.

My own spirituality and recovery from addictive eating has enhanced new ways of accepting my life of living in my world and of understanding that this is my life—living vigilant, ever awake and alert, abstaining from trigger foods, in constant search of spiritual growth.



http://weightcontroltherapy.com/

Photos taken by: Lisa Ortigara Crego