Everything That Happened When I Fed My Body
This was my year of Eat, Pray, Love only without the prayers and love.
My knowledge of my body, for a long time, consisted of ideas like I shouldn’t go swimming right after eating and if I had liquor before beer, I was in the clear.
It never looked how I thought it should. Well, how every magazine and commercial told me it should. Too flat here. Too squishy there. I’ve consistently felt betrayed by my body for one reason or another.
I’ve always understood the basic concept that comprises our overarching rule of food consumption. Eat more calories than you need, gain weight. Eat less, lose weight. It’s so simple. Regardless, I have been screwing this up for a long time.
For my entire 30s, I gained and lost the same 20 pounds about a dozen times. I starved my body and then neglected it only to hate it again. I’d try to find perfection in some magic pill that would promise to make me love myself again. It was like running your car on fumes and revving the engine into the red at the same time.
My 40s have been spent repairing that old car. I’ve been much kinder to it but the love was still hard to find. I learned that picking up heavy things and putting them down repeatedly was much more productive than abusing my body with…
