I finally had my epiphany.

I've been watching you amazing people share your insight and triumphs for years, and I've read so many stories in which something finally clicks for somebody and they're able to enter a completely new head space. Their relationship with their body changed, their relationship with food changed, they got some kind of answer. It's beautiful to watch, and each time I wished so badly that I'd have an experience like that.

Part of me, the sad and critical part, figured it would never happen. For a variety of reasons. I'm too smart to have the "obvious" realization that i need to love myself, for example. Or that i'm too broken to ever reach (or even deserve) that kind of achievement.

Another part of me, which is a much quieter and smaller part, never stopped hoping that something would click so strongly that I'd feel moved to sit writing this on my phone. I wanted an experience powerful enough to make me think that sharing it might help somebody, and that the possibility of it helping somebody was large enough to overshadow the terror I feel at writing anything personal online. Somebody might think I wanted to draw attention to myself! The horror!

So here's what happened. I'm on a trip for grad school and I ordered a salad for lunch without any actual reason to. And i liked the salad, and it was satisfying. With no battle, no longing for other options, no stop for mcnuggets on my way home, no pressure from myself or others to get the healthy option.

I ate a salad and had the same experience i might have had if I'd eaten a steak with French fries and a giant dessert, except afterwards i felt happy and content instead of fat, ashamed, and determined to do better next time.

And when i noticed this, i wondered: what changed? How could I have this experience every time?

And you know what changed? I started being honest with myself about how I was actually feeling about stuff in my life. Not food stuff or exercise stuff, but stuff like "i'm not just happy that my brother is getting married, i'm also furious that my parents are paying for his wedding when they wouldn't pay for mine."

And that honesty allowed me to recognize that i'm not a shitty person for having jealous feelings and resentment when i want to be happy for my beloved brother, I'm just a person who is sad because she thinks her parents don't love her. Now i can examine that fear and decide what to do with it instead of feeling like shit every time it came up.

And guess what I've been doing instead of examining the feelings that hurt me? I've been ignoring those feelings, giving them a fake name, and eating everything in sight to compensate.

So the reason that salad tasted like a big mac is because they tasted the same all along. Food is food. Flavors are stimulating. The difference between them, aside from the 800 calories or so, is that the big mac made me feel like shit. Which was the goal all along. I wanted to make myself feel like shit because I hated myself for having feelings i didn't want, like resentment and anger and jealousy. When I finally really starting recognizing those feelings instead of swallowing them and judging myself, which is what i mean when i talk about "being honest with myself," i could see that they were really grief and fear.

My epiphany today is that eating food that makes me feel awful about myself is a symptom. It has never been the problem, and that's why I've failed to get healthy despite trying all my life. When i'm eating like shit it's a sign that i'm not paying attention to my feelings. The sheer effort i've gone through to be healthy, be pretty, be sexy, be anything but angry, is fucking staggering when i'm faced with how easy it was to eat a salad for lunch. It was easy because I was happy.

So to the person reading yet another accomplishment story and wishing they could feel that way, i guess i should say that i've felt the same way every single time i've read a post like this one. I wish i could have found that small quiet part of me that thought i might deserve to be happy and healthy. The reason I couldn't is that the giant asshole voice who believes i'm shit was screaming at the top of her lungs in my ear the whole time, and that's not my fault. If you're feeling cynical right now and are thinking "this lady is using every cliche in the book and she also stopped capitalizing her I's like five paragraphs ago," yep I'm saying that in my head now, too, and worse. But I'm listening to the voice that says "fuck it, speak your truth" instead.

submitted by /u/Marge_Inovera
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from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2TLZVQK