health plan

My clothes shopping is infrequent but rigidly scheduled (every October and every other April) and directly tied to writers conferences. The Festival of Faith and Writing is biennial and convenes in April, while Breathe Christian Writers Conference (sponsored by my writer’s group, The Guild) is every October. Wanting to look fresh at these events gets me to the mall.

This past April I found myself waiting until the very last minute. Only a funeral a week before Festival, forced my hand. I had a nice, black dress to wear, but I didn’t have any dress pants for the visitation. Fortunately my sister Torey was able to go shopping with me (I NEVER shop without her) and while we were at it I picked up a few things to wear to Festival.

Only afterwards did I question why I had put it off so long. Did I plan to go a day or two before? That was ridiculous, even for a non-shopper like me.

Pictured above is my nightstand from before. The sooty book in the center is “Thin Within” a book I had been going through in the days before the fire and read that last night. “A Grace Oriented Approach to Lasting Weight Loss” is the subtitle. It’s a Christian book breaking down why a person over eats and a guide for how to break that habit. The idea is to prayerfully work through why you might be overeating and recognize how you are while, slowly and compassionately, breaking the cycles at play.

Six years ago, I lost 30 pounds by eating when I was hungry and stopping before I was too full, and by walking several days a week. A series of events occurred which precipitated me breaking these habits and slowly to gain back the extra pounds.

Six months before the fire I was poking around the nooks and crannies of my life and faced two sources of discontent: my weight and the lack of organization in our home. It’s a good life when the things that trouble you are completely within your control. I knew that and was thankful, and I got to work. I went room by room through the house de-cluttering and reorganizing, and I got back in the habit of exercising regularly and making better food choices. My home was almost entirely in order the day the fire was set; with my body, I had made a solid start with hope for the future.

After the fire, care for the one was unnecessary and for the other it just sort of fell away.

I was reluctant to replace anything the first year or so but especially clothes because I wasn’t the size I wished to be and ought to be losing weight. I was clear on this. But it was only when I wondered why I had waited until the very last minute this past April—to less than a week before—that something became apparent: I had been holding off to give myself time to get smaller. Up until the week before the conference I had been on the verge of losing 30 pounds.

Mind you, I had been doing absolutely nothing to promote this endeavor, but I was holding this delusion as a possibility to the very last moment. And then I saw it for what it was and how ludicrous my thinking had been.

That’s what they call an aha moment. That I could be so self-deluded troubled me.

Soon after my brother announced he wanted to shoot a documentary about my son Christopher in June. I considered being thusly immortalized, if only for a few seconds (it’s a short documentary) and said, “Hail, no.”

That’s what they call a catalyst.

Short story: fourteen weeks ago I started a health plan and have since lost 27 pounds. I have a bit more to go— I’m finessing that—but I feel good, my energy is up and I’m more comfortable in my own skin again, in its every meaning.

I would like to talk about this some more and tell you my back story. Despite the fact that I’ve only been overweight a fraction of my life, I’ve been worried about my body since I was seven, and there were some precipitating events there too. I wasn’t abused, but I was raised in a veritable hothouse for mental disorders regarding eating and weight. That’s a story for another day.

So here I am truly on the verge of losing 30 pounds and it’s great.