I weighed myself this morning and I’m at a plateau. How do I know? Well, I’ve been dancing in the same weight range for a few weeks now. I go down a pound then I go up. Every time I get on the scale I think that it’s going down. I feel good, lighter, freer. But that’s not translating to lower numbers on the scale. I wish I could say I am completely chill about it but I’m not. I’m frustrated. I guess it could be worse. It certainly has been in the past. I’d be on some cockamamie diet and I’d weigh myself and if I was up a little I’d freak out and, well, of course the thing failed, right? And then I’d eat and it would all be over.

That’s not the case anymore. Without meaning to, I gave up the drama of the body scale like I gave up my dependence to sugar and flour. The detox was gradual but here I am 4 1/2 months into this new way of life and the scale has loosened it’s black grip on my happiness.

It truly owned me. It got so bad at one point that I threw my scale away in an attempt to get ahold of my emotions and take control of something I had no idea how to control; my weight. It didn’t work. I continued to gain weight, I just didn’t know how much until I got to the place last year that I was out of control regardless of the measuring device. My clothes had become the new evil and I couldn’t throw them all out because I was mad at them. Irrational. But all is, though I couldn’t see it until now.

I wasn’t expecting to be released from the mental torture of the scale. I wasn’t even trying. Because I needed to know how things were going in my new way of eating, I weighed myself once a week, no more. But as the months wore on I wanted more data so I started to weigh myself three times a week to see what I could learn about the foods I was choosing. It’s been very helpful. The information I’m getting is telling me that my body is responding to something I’m doing (or not doing, perhaps). It’s directing me to my food journal to find the clues that will help me unlock the next stage of my weight loss. How cool is that? And that I’m frustrated rather than spun out is so interesting to me. I’ve scored a serious non-scale victory that has nothing to do with my weight and everything to do with my mental freedom. Ironic that it’s the scale that is showing me that. I’m on this amazing quest to discover and live my best life and THIS is what it looks like.

​Adventure in action.

Someone asked me what it was that inspired me to lose weight. I could have said the expected... that I got sick of being uncomfortable in my skin, of my clothes not fitting, of feeling fat. While that would have been the black and white truth, it wasn’t the technicolor truth. The real, full-color truth is I finally surrendered.