I often joke that if we're lucky enough, one morning we'll wake up and be so sick of our own shit that we're willing to do something about it.
But, it's not a joke. And it's one of the most difficult things to do.
True change means facing our pattens, our habits, and our beliefs and really teasing them apart. When we keep repeating behaviors that yield bad results, why do we do it? That's the key question.
I'm not just doing coach-speak right now. I've lived this. I spent my first 24 years overweight - sometimes by a little but most of the time by a lot. I was 185 pounds by the time I was 14. And I can tell you that I believed I was fat. I was medically overweight, but I just believed deep down that I was a fat person. That's just the way it was. I'd been heavy since I was about 5, so my entire life I heard "You're just bigger." I accepted that to be true because that's all I knew.
What changed? I was fortunate enough to have a collision of events that opened my mind. I attempted to lose weight for the umpteenth time by taking aerobics in college. I'd always been too embarrassed to try to exercise but I had to fulfill gym requirements to graduate. While I didn't drop loads of weight, I realized that I could keep up and actually enjoy it. I even considered becoming a TA for the class but my insecurities won out. Still, I felt better than ever and began to understand that maybe, just maybe, I wasn't just a certain way.
Then, I went to Venezuela and had very little money. I didn't want to eat at restaurants but I also didn't have a full kitchen, so everything I ate was very very fresh. Breakfast was just a bowl of fruit, dinner was a simple sandwich. Having little money also meant that excursions were limited to going to the nearby beach - all day, swimming at the beach. By the end of the month, I'd dropped about 10 pounds without even trying and felt stronger than I ever had.
And that's when it hit: I'm not just bigger. I'm not naturally fat. I'm actually a kind of small person, so everything I'd accepted to be true... wasn't. That understanding blew my world open because I began to explore what else I believed to be true that might not be.
I'm not suggesting that everything in my life fixed itself overnight - far from it. Really digging down and changing those beliefs is painful and unbelievably difficult... but it can happen. It's worth doing. In my mind, I felt that there was no alternative.
Working towards radical change isn't about judgment. Being so overweight didn't make me a bad person, but it did make me a person who constantly felt shitty about herself and made poor choices from that mindset. When we think so little of ourselves, we often feel we don't deserve any better than whatever crap job or relationship we're in. That's the true danger of not exploring our beliefs.
Another way to frame this is that being overweight was not the problem - it was a symptom. This could be applied to any habit we have that yields poor results - staying stuck in bad jobs, staying stuck in debt, staying stuck in unhappy relationships - they all seem outwardly to be the problem, but the problem is actually our beliefs about life, our worth, and what we're capable of. That's what radical change is about. Losing 50+ pounds is great and all, but it would not sustainable at all unless I deeply understood that I was capable of being healthier - and that I deserved to be.
No one is born with any more or less value than anyone else. But at some point in our formative years, we internalize what we think we deserve. The truth is we deserve just as much as anyone else. We also are not entitled to any bit more than anyone else. Unfortunately, our society does have systems that separate us out and drill in who "should" have what, but ultimately it's on us: how to we want to do this? Shouldn't we all love ourselves enough to want the best? And, why do we continue cycles that yield less than that?
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