This story is about global solutions. I wrote my first story from the angle of rheumatoid arthritis, and now I want to share my story on weight loss.
We have it backwards. In the calculus of weight loss and health, I was a failure at losing weight first. I had to get healthy first and then the weight went away by itself.
My road to what I now feel safe calling “permanent weight loss” started many years ago. It was riddled with bottlenecks, wrong turns and frustrations and ultimate failure for most of the journey. No matter what diet I tried, I didn’t keep lost weight lost and I didn’t learn what I really should be doing to be successful.
Two years ago I was deathly ill and under crushing stress from a family crisis. As a result I developed serious health conditions including hyperthyroidism, tachycardia (racing heart), and rheumatoid arthritis! Add to that the overweight that resulted from years of yoyo dieting, and I had a life-threatening dilemma. Isn’t it amazing what a grand teacher crisis is? Over the course of 16 months and fearing for my very life, I made the change that was strangely the hardest of my entire life to initiate but the easiest and most pleasurable to maintain! I gave up my inflammatory foods.
Health first, then weight loss.
My demons were wheat, dairy, and sugar. Any time I would crave food that I knew to be highly inflammatory for me, I concentrated on my intention. I named it: To live a vital, healthy life with no more pain, debilitating fatigue, or brain fog! The choices were clear and became easier to make over time, particularly with social support. I wanted to be healthy and I needed to make the right choices.
If you are stuck in a body that resists your every effort to lose weight, I hope you will be able to hear that weight loss became effortless once I started doing things in the right order. But it took discovering my personal, global solution: Identifying the foods that were inflammatory in my particular body and excising them from my life. Twenty-five pounds later, I’m still losing and not thinking about it much because that would be doing things in the wrong order. I am instead keeping celebration of life and vibrant health foremost in my mind.
The best way for me to reinforce my own learning is to teach it to others. I take great pleasure in helping people find their personal best way of eating, their personal global solutions. In fact, I’m facilitating a Suppers based on seasonal food preparation and helping people run their own experiments that will uncover their biologically individual needs for food. I want to help the world understand the simple formula:
Health first, then weight loss.