The Weight: Guest Post by Allison Greene

 I am so happy to introduce you all to one of my absolute favorite people and someone I am so grateful to call friend, Allison Greene. I have known Allison forever from "back in the day" old Asheville and we have shared many similar paths since then. This post is about weight, an issue that SO many of us ladies grapple with and one that I am currently in battle with. Allison's candor in this post is so appreciated and I hope you all will enjoy.
XO Morgan

The Weight by Allison Greene

So I lost some weight...ok a lot of weight...an impressive amount. Impressive especially because I wasn't trying to lose weight at all...mind blowing because I have been “trying to lose weight” for most of my life, and only lost it when I gave up, sort of.

I thought I would go ahead and try to take a stab at explaining how I did it, or rather how I didn't do it, because I get asked A LOT. Usually by women that knew the “before” me and are shocked by the smaller version of me that they are encountering these days. Its almost a formula at this point it happens so often. Nice lady sees me out in the world, notices the weight loss and says something kind (usually.) “You've lost weight, you look great!” or “Whoa! You've lost some weight, haven't you? Good for you!” Then comes the inevitable question “how did you do it?” Then they all get this glassy eyed look on their face waiting to memorize whatever slim inducing wisdom I'm about to bestow upon them. What follows is a look of total disinterest, or disbelief when I say I didn't really “do” anything.

I know, it has to be hard, miserable, joy robbing work to lose weight. I was a card carrying member of this belief system for MY ENTIRE LIFE so I don't begrudge the skepticism. I also have stopped telling people that tapeworms were the culprit, or that I keep it really hot in my house. Sorry, I didn't know what to do with all the new attention, and my sense of humor is a little warped.

So here's what happened. I struggled with weight since I was eight years old. When I was eight I had some big life stuff happen, and it was a little too much for the eight year old brain I was working with. So I found food. It helped me not feel all that stuff I didn't know what to do with, and then I just kept using it. I found other things to not feel stuff too, and that worked really well for a long time. Until it stopped working, and the effects of constantly stuffing emotions led to a life and a body I didn't want.

What I also didn't want was to be an eighty year old woman still dragging my body issues behind me and blaming everything that I found displeasing in life on what my body looked like, because that was my default. I got it when I was eight.

Because I was blaming all my problems in life on what I looked like I was desperate to find a solution, and desperation tends to lead to willingness for me. Just like every person that has written an article similar to this before me, this is the point that I say I tried everything to lose weight. I'll spare you the details, but really everything. Usually the more miserable it might make me, the more hopeful I was, and sometimes it actually worked. I'd start seeing my collar bone again and bliss out over a shopping trip that would soon be happening in my mind. But inevitably I would hit a wall, or life would happen or I'd work really hard...step on a scale and get sucked out of bliss and into a state of panic or despair.

I hated everything about this. I hated the weight, I hated that it mattered to me, I hated that there were beautiful brilliant people that put themselves in the corner to hide their shame. I hated society for brainwashing me, I hated the powerlessness, I hated that I thought about it all the time, I hated. sleeveless shirts, I hated how unhappy most of my life had been.

Then one day I watched a documentary called “forks over knives” on Netflix because Game of Thrones didn't come in the mail on my day off. In a very nutshell summary it basically outlines why consuming animal products maybe isn't the best idea if you are hoping to be on the planet and feel good simultaneously. It was a compelling testimony, I recommend it highly. So I started trying to eat more vegetables and lay off the meat and cheese a bit. It was a challenge. Bad day for me equals lasagna, but I enjoyed trying to figure out ways to cook vegetables that made them taste good to me. My goal was to feel better, not lose weight. And I DID feel better, the chronic, debilitating pms that I'd had since I got my grown up lady bits diminished significantly, and I had a marked increase in energy.

Next I started going to yoga twice a week. At first, not getting psyched out by the sea of perfect yoga bodies surrounding me was more work then the actual class, but that changed pretty quickly. I stopped comparing myself to everyone around me and started actually doing what I was supposed to do, which was listen to my body and perfect the pose, not myself.

At this point I had noticed that I had started to lose weight, but I adamantly refused to weigh myself. Because my focus was to feel better, and I was, so why subject myself to those silly old rules and numbers that always squished my sunshine anyway.

The only other piece was that I tried to be nice to myself, say nice things to me even if I didn't believe it, and if anyone asked me to do something that involved a kind of physical activity that didn't make me feel homicidal, I said yes.

A few months ago, I went in for my yearly physical, which of course includes stepping on a scale. I stood there with my eyes closed like a 4 year old, and listened to the evil scraping of metal against metal as the oblivious to my plight nurse rated my soul. What came out of her mouth was a number that meant that I had lost forty pounds in the past year. Believe me, I was shocked, and ecstatic, and had a really hard time not completely losing what small grip on cool I have at this point in my life in the middle of a family practice.

I guess the moral of this story is that we are trained to believe that if you really really want something, you'd better be prepared to work really really hard for it. And in someways I think that's true for a lot of things. But if the point of you getting whatever it is that you want is because you think it will make you happy and your relentless pursuit of getting it is killing you, then stop it. You're not happy! Employ your inner hippie and chill out! Find something that makes you feel good, and focus on that for a while and see what happens, and if it doesn't work you can always go back to torturing yourself. So far I haven't had to.