Amy’s Journey- A Guest Blog Post About Recovery

I’m a pretty impatient person. I don’t really understand people who enjoy the journey… I just want to get to the destination. I just want to be THERE … that illusive place where satisfaction and contentment live. I’ve learned that is part of my nature and I’m best served to learn how to work within it and manage it, and stop fighting it.

When I started working with Sarah @ MarciRD, I had that same mindset. I wanted my struggle with food to end – like after a visit or two. 🙂 I needed to be fixed, healed, whatever – I just wanted to be done with 30 years of battling with food. Imagine my surprise when 2 years later, I am still walking through that door to a neat little office in Cambridge to talk with Sarah.

My first ever visit I was introduced to Intuitive Eating and what it meant to let go of the diet mentality. Of what it meant to give myself permission to eat anything I wanted (at this point I felt scared to death and giddy at the same time!). What do you mean I can eat what I want? What kind of diet it this? Where are the rules, the restrictions? Oh so thankfully, they are out the door with IE. I have found peace with marshmallow fluff. Oreos no longer hold power over me!! I learned to sit, eat, and enjoy food. To really taste food – and use all my senses at a meal. To slow down. And to listen to my body, and trust that it would tell me when I was full. All of this is the complete opposite of what the diet industry tells us – that we need “them”, their plan, and their regiment and without it we’ll never do it, or we’ll fail. It’s a lie! There is piece inside of us that knows what we need. We just have to be quiet and listen for that voice to come out! And really, we have to be willing to take the journey … ugh. And do the work. Bigger ugh.

I have shed a lot of tears in Sarah’s office, doing the work. I have laughed, gotten frustrated with myself, fallen back into old habits, been angry with myself and so much more, more times that I can count. Eventually, I listened. I learned. I changed the way I talked to myself. I started paying attention to how different foods made me feel after I ate them. I dug in and figured out why I had struggled for so many years in the yo-yo diet world … why I binged on certain foods. I forgave the little girl who started sneaking food when she was only 10, and the mom who put her on a diet at that same age. It makes a lot more sense now. I started living true to my nature and honoring the woman I am today. I began being grateful for my fat! Imagine? Because for all the things I went through as a little girl into my teen years, all I got was fat… and it could have been so much worse. I stopped fighting against my fat and started being grateful for all that I am and all I have learned along the way. Aye yiyi … I started enjoying the journey.

I want to leave you with a paragraph from one of my favorite books, Imagine Heaven by John Burke. What if you saw yourself in a way that was loving, full of grace and full of forgiveness?