Epiphany

Reading this morning (avoiding work, but this find was a gift, so well worth it), I came across a post from Skinny Sara in which she talks about the moment she made the decision to lose weight and get healthy. It's a beautiful post and put me in mind of something in the AA Big Book (what doesn't? I've thought about that, I refer to it so much, but then I realized that it's a book about life and so it makes sense.)

Anyway, Sara writes that it wasn't enough that her weight ~ at close to 400 pounds ~ was killing her, that she was suffocating and struggling to breathe, that her swollen feet were cracking and finding shoes was an impossibility. The thing that got her was when someone she respected asked her offhandedly about whether or not her weight had impeded her success in business.

In answering that question, Sara came to this: "Every bite of food I’d shoved into my mouth, every moment I’d given up, every place I hadn’t gone, and every experience I’d avoided because my overweight body made it too difficult or even impossible to contemplate, was my own fault. It was a realization long overdue, and one that could have been fraught with self-pity and sent me spiraling deeper into hopeless despair. Instead, it was the first glimmer of hope I’d felt in years. After the words were spoken, it made perfect sense to me: If the life I was living and the body I was living it in were a direct result of my own choices, if I had done this to myself, if the fault was my own, that meant that the power to change it was also mine. . . . And that was it. That was the moment I decided that I could do this. So I am."

That speaks to me on so many levels, thank you Sara. And it takes me to that phrase in the Big Book that is the essence of freedom: "So our problems, we think, are basically of our own making." That is a freedom because if I am in charge and my problems are my own, then I am free to make changes. If my problems are the result of some other, some outside circumstance, some other place, something else, then I am powerless to effect a change.

If I got myself here ~ not my sad childhood or abuse or mistreatment or genetics or this or that or any of the myriad of reasons why we end up overweight ~ then I can get myself out. No excuses, no blame, just responsibility and action. Of course the past and our life experiences play into it, but the bottom line is all of that is over. What am I going to do today? Am I going to eat and put it off one more day? Or will I make decisions today that will lead me to a healthy fit future? I got myself here. I did it. That means I can change it. And like Sara, I am.