Hello Tumblr!
This is a window… a real window. Sometimes I will be posting things for you to see into my world… and more specifically into my struggle to reach 120 lbs. Sometimes it will be a window for me to throw things out of… to get the ridiculous or the destructive out of my head and heart.
A little bit about me… I’m a woman who wants to be everything all at once. I want to live hundreds of different lives, accomplish hundreds of different things… I want to know more people, love more people, watch more sunrises, listen to more music, and experience more things than can be done in one lifetime. But I’m taking a crack at it.
And my weight is holding me back. Has always held me back, really. I don’t remember a time when I felt beautiful or confident in my body… moments when I did, but never a span of time. And I’m tired of it. There have been reasons I was overweight…. for a long time in my life eating was a coping mechanism for stress. I am a perfectionist by nature and generally excel at things I attempt. I don’t make that statement out of pride… I actually have mixed feelings on the value of being perfect at anything. Either way being perfect is a lot of stress and comes with a lot of expectations. Somehow in my mind I became terrified at some point of being beautiful. Succeeding in this area somehow made (and sometimes still makes) me feel like I will have to be perfect at everything… and that would be too much pressure. It’s like I’m keeping this major area of my life imperfect on purpose to balance out all the excellence of the other areas and keep the outside world’s expectations of me in check. I realize this is irrational. But it’s an emotional truth to me and has real implications for my life. So it’s real for me even if it is not rational.
I currently weight roughly 176 lbs. My goal weight is 120 lbs. I realize this is very thin. However, it is in my healthy BMI range (barely) and I’ve always been a fan of a nice round number and good, hard challenge. I anticipate that I’ll reach my goal, maintain my weight at 120 for a while and then settle comfortably somewhere in the upper 120s or lower 130s. I have no unrealistic expectation that 120 lbs is a sustainable weight. I like food. I like life. And I like it when life isn’t consumed with thinking about how I can’t have food.
As I mentioned above, food and weight used to be inextricably wrapped up in my head and heart with my self-worth, my fear of failure, and my constant background anxiety at the awareness of a writhing and pervasive darkness within me that I avoided at all costs. That is no longer (for the most part) true. About two years ago I started going to a church in Minneapolis and it’s changed everything. Not the church, but my relationship with God.
I know my worth. God made me. God doesn’t screw up. The way that I am is exactly the way he intended for me to be. It is the way I need to be to be effective as a tool to reach others for Him. I am still afraid to fail, but not because I am afraid of the world’s judgment (as I was before). I am afraid to fail the people who need me and the God who calls me to achieve great things. But it is a sweet kind of fear… a motivating kind of fear. And I am reconciled to failure, in a way. I have no expectations of perfection. I trust the Lord to know my heart and if I follow Him with all my might, He will not count my human weakness against me. And I am not afraid of the darkness within me. I have confronted this darkness and Christ’s sacrifice has overcome it. He overcomes it daily, actually. It’s not a one-shot deal. I wrestle with sin, rebellion, etc. daily. Some days I win, some days I lose, but every day I love the Lord. And there is more joy in that than I can describe.
But my weight is still an issue for me. There’s something very intricate about feeling sexy as a female… and I want to feel that way more often… not just worthy as a person, but as a woman. There’s a joy in being feminine that I have been too afraid to pursue before, but that I crave. I want it. And I can’t get past this weight thing to feel that way. Also, I want to feel healthy. I have PCOS, which basically means two things. First, my body processes insulin similar to how a diabetic does. Which means that when I eat crap my energy levels are all over the map. Second, I’m basically infertile when I’m overweight. And I want to have kids in the next five years or so. So I need to get things under control. That’s what this tumblr is about…. rediscovering my femininity… not hiding from what I want. Thanks for stopping by.
