Nearly two years and no word from me. What happened? Where do I begin? At the beginning of the end. I was doing great, losing weight, getting fit and sharing my successes with you. In July, I hit a weight loss milestone and felt unstoppable… right up until I stopped. It wasn’t a sudden halt, but rather a gradual slowing to a crawl. I had an off-week and gained a few pounds. I went out to brunch, went out to dinner, worked late and skipped the gym and gained a few more pounds. Brunch and dinner and working late and catching up on “Say Yes to the Dress” became more frequent, meal planning and gym time became less frequent, pounds came and went and came again. In October I found David and quickly fell in love, spending hours each night on the phone to California, dreaming and making plans for our future together. I could cop out and blame those late nights on the phone but they never stopped me from going to the gym in the afternoon. I could point to all sorts of external influences but, ultimately, I have always had distractions in my life, other things I could be doing. I had grown complacent, content to rest on my laurels and my routine was no longer a routine. The weight came back on slowly, creeping up steadily. I moved back to California, had to find a new gym and learn to cook for two instead of one. More convenient excuses – but excuses not reasons because I found a gym and hardly ever go; David’s constant complaint is that I feed him too much, not too little. No, not one damned thing stood in the way of my getting back on track except me and whatever imaginary roadblock I have erected between myself and my goal. And I quit blogging. I had nothing to say. Who would be inspired by this?

I had always been excited to share my wins, my goals and dreams with the world. Success is only half the story, only half the truth and half truths aren’t truths at all. The other half of the truth is failure; the stumbles, wrong turns and utter defeats. I could scarcely admit those to myself let alone divulge them to friends and strangers. I have been doing a lot of soul searching lately and have come to realize just how valuable failure is. I’d been internalizing my failures for months, ashamed and depressed and completely void of motivation. But failure is something we all share, it’s something we have all faced and overcome. I have learned so much more from the failures in my life than the successes. We celebrate each others victories but awkwardly brush off or ignore missteps – but I am blogging today because I want to celebrate my failure. My failure is a blessing. My failure is the launchpad for change, the source of insight. It is a powerful lesson in life and perseverance, in humility and picking oneself up by the bootstraps. So here I am, humbled and white-knuckling my bootstraps, ready to dust up the atmosphere and make lightning strike a third time.

My first step is facing my failures and that meant doing something I had been avoiding for months: getting on the scale. The second step is taking shame out of the equation, exploring my feelings with honesty and introspection and discovering how (and, more importantly, why) I got here. The third step is overhauling everything and beginning again. Instead of jumping on WordPress when the going is good, when I can joyfully share all the happy progress I have made, I am taking you on this journey from the very beginning – the unflattering, difficult-to-admit beginning: 40 pounds regained, buying larger pants, popping Pepcid to combat the return of my reflux; humiliated that I have moved the ring David gave me to my pinky finger for fear that I won’t be able to slide it off my ring finger; frustrated and discouraged and feeling that I have failed everyone who ever said they were inspired by me. While I have been blessed these past two years in so many ways – finding love, moving home to California, getting a great job, spending time with family and friends – I have also spent the better part of them feeling disheartened, apathetic and helpless in terms of my weight and health.  So there it is, the ugly truth is out… Jody lost and found and lost and a total mess but a hopeful mess.

I talk about myself a lot. Specifically, I talk about my weight loss, my fitness and my diet a lot. I think about it a lot, I write about it, I post on Facebook about it; I field questions and respond to comments about it a lot. As a humble wall flower-type person by nature, the phenomenon of simply putting my own needs first feels awkward and strangely egotistical; therefore, the broken-record of dialog makes me extremely self-conscious and, at times, distressed. I worry that I will be written off as vain and self-consumed, or worse, that others will believe I am pushing my lifestyle on them. As a result, I often feel compelled to apologize for these aspects of my life being ever present in conversation and I attempt to marginalize them in my interactions with friends. I can’t help but think everyone is sick to death of hearing about it. But it is time for me to stop making apologies.

My transformation is nearly always in the forefront of my mind, whether I am contemplating my next meal plan, deciding on my next workout or simply visualizing goals. Of course I think about other things – work, relationships, activities and all the normal things we all think about on a daily basis. I don’t always instigate conversations with others regarding my weight loss; although I always respond openly and graciously when people bring it up. This hasn’t always been the case. There have been times over the course of this journey when my focus shifted to other things and, by and large, the results have been detrimental to my progress. Both professional setbacks and relationship catastrophes have sent me down emotional rabbit holes, setting off bouts of yo-yoing between dedication and total apathy regarding my health and wellbeing. When the dust settled and I regained my composure in a lasting way at the end of last year, I discovered I had also regained 33 pounds. This is what happens when I let my foot off the gas – when I don’t make my weight loss, my fitness and my diet a priority.

I am truly passionate about the changes I have made in my life – not because I’m physically smaller, certainly not because I am closer to fitting into some nonsensical societal expectation of my body – but because I am so blissfully happy. It is a joyous experience to do things you’ve always wanted to do but never believed possible. It lifts the spirits to feel truly healthy and alive and to feel that the life stretched out before you is one of infinite possibilities. If I could have felt this way 110 pounds heavier, I would have stayed 110 pounds heavier, but I didn’t. I felt lethargic, weighed down both physically and spiritually, destined for nothing greater than mediocrity. I lived my life in black and white while yearning for a life in Technicolor. I wanted a life of adventure and my body at that size could never have carried me though that kind of life. But I do not share my story because I think anyone else needs to lose weight. It isn’t my aspiration to inspire people to get thin – I merely hope to inspire others to be or do whatever will make them as happy as this has made me. If someone wants to take the telling of my story and twist it, internalize it and make it seem as if it comes from a place of judgment—let’s set the record straight, it doesn’t.

It’s a funny thing how we each perceive the world through our own lens, run all we see, hear and experience through our own filters. My own hang-ups can influence the way I see myself, causing me to become self-conscious about how often I talk about this aspect of my life, allowing me to make assumptions about what others may be thinking or feeling about me. When I step back and look at my intent – my intent I see clearly, my intent comes from my love both for myself and for the people in my life – I realize I don’t need to check myself, to downplay my achievements or quickly change the subject and dodge being the topic of conversation. I needn’t feel ashamed that my success has become a sort of identifier for me. And, above all else, I have absolutely no reason to apologize.

Inevitably, whenever we set out to do something new, hopes and expectations arise. My weight loss journey was no different. Of course, I had lots of silly little superficial teen rom-com type hopes – the ugly ducking turning into a swan, mercilessly rebuffing the men who had rejected me out of hand in the past – the kinds of expectations, as it turns out, whose realities are strictly confined to Rachel Leigh Cook characters and spools of celluloid film. I also formed notions of what my body would and could become, had ideas for the changes I’d like to see – but they were limited, reigned-in. I felt just getting from a size 24 to a size 12 would be good enough. After all, that is a significant change. Having settled most of my life – on jobs that didn’t challenge me and relationships with people who didn’t deserve me – I set myself up years in advance to accept mediocre results. I settled for both literally and figuratively sitting and watching as life passed me by. I convinced myself that observing was the next best thing to participating. I can’t honestly think of a single situation in which settling has improved the quality of my life.

It would be easy to settle on my weight loss goals and expectations. I think it’s common to assume an obese person may lose weight, but they will never be a fit person. The best we can hope for is to be an average-sized, possibly slightly overweight body. Someone who is 15-20 pounds overweight can be expected to lose the weight and have a slim, athletic physique but, for some reason, a person 150-200 pounds overweight is rarely held to the same expectations. I bought into this belief, too. I had written myself off as heavily framed. From the very start of this process until recently, I was content to accept always being a bit chubby. Here I am now, a size 12 and suddenly I am questioning everything.

I was not a large child. In fact, I was quite the opposite. I was a lanky, spindly child with long lean limbs and knobby knees and elbows – the quintessential bean pole. Tall as I may have been for my age, I always had a delicate frame. The women in my family are all slender-framed women. Why, then, had I for so long settled on the idea that I am the family’s big-boned anomaly? Having this epiphany of sorts, I started researching body fat percentages and healthy weight ranges for women of my height and age regardless of weight histories. I pulled high school algebra from the dark, cobwebbed recesses of my brain and made calculations – what would my weight be at the average body fat percentage for women (25-31%)? What would be my weight be at fitness level (21-24%)? Is average good enough?

I find myself now, for the first time, unwilling to settle. As I pulled and sorted all my size 14 and 16 pants for the Goodwill this past weekend, I realized what I wanted. I have worked myself to exhaustion in the gym; I am deeply dedicated to a healthy, wholesome diet. What I truly want is not to be a size 12. What I want is to be the best possible version of myself, the most physically fit, athletic and vibrant version of myself. I want to be what I would have been had I never gained the weight in the first place. And, finally, I am starting to see that isn’t asking for too much. I was willing to fight for the now 107.5 pounds I have already lost. Now I know I have the mettle to fight for body composition of 21% body fat and 38 more pounds lost. While the naysayers may discourage me, tell me if I lose another 40 pounds “there will be nothing left,” I know differently. I know what 5’10” and 21% body fat should look like. I will have the gumption to not be complacent. Good enough may be good enough for others but it simply isn’t good enough for me anymore.

During my life as a dieter, I pored over fitness magazines hunting for anything that could help me to lose weight. I clipped diet plans, dog-eared advertisements for pills, supplements and meal replacers, took special note of anything that promised I would “lose five pounds in one week.” Then, in the backs of the magazines, I would find myself riveted by the success story articles – ordinary people just like me who had achieved my deepest hope. All the people in those articles, regardless of age, gender, starting weight or circumstance, had one thing in common. Each and every one attributed their success to lifestyle change. It took me a long time to learn exactly what that phrase meant.

A lifestyle change isn’t merely tweaking daily behaviors – it is modifying the beliefs and values that drive our behaviors. Most of us know, intuitively, the habits associated with a healthy lifestyle. We may try to cut corners, find gimmicks and quick fixes, seeking out the path of least resistance – what will make the greatest possible change with the least possible effort. However, we intrinsically know we need to eat proper portions of healthful, nourishing foods, become physically active and drink lots of water. Once you honestly and objectively assess which changes need to be made, plenty of nutritional and fitness-related information is mere keystrokes away. The key to finally beginning to make successful lifestyle changes for me was in changing the way I felt about foods, fitness and myself. Only then could I change my behavior and lose weight.

Changing one’s views on food is extremely problematic. We live in a food-obsessed culture. Holidays, milestones, weekends, and even moods all seem to require ceremonial or celebratory involvement of food. We reward and console ourselves (and each other) with food. We easily rationalize every bite. We live to eat and it’s killing us or, at the very least, making us miserable. I had to divorce myself from this way of thinking and state of mind. First and foremost, I mentally changed the objective of my diet. No longer is it geared toward satisfying a craving or participating in a social norm. It is to fuel my body as effectively as possible so that I might live life to the fullest, in optimal health and with as few physical limitations as possible. I love the foods I eat, I get excited about them (as anyone unfortunate enough to have to tolerate my steady stream of Facebook food photo uploads can attest), but I do not need them all to be multi-course masterpieces of culinary pyrotechnics. I changed my attitude about food and diet and learned to appreciate not only simpler foods but also a life simplified by the knocking down of food off its pedestal. I now view healthy foods and small, frequent meals as a joy and a delight, not as deprivation, punishment or suffering.

My ideas about exercise had to be overhauled as well. In the past, the first week at a new gym was invigorating but it soon became a tedious and felt like my penance for becoming fat. I loathed it and would start mentally searching for an excuse to skip it. Workouts, if done right, are physically exhausting, they can leave your muscles spent and sore. Workouts ate up an hour or more a day of time I would have preferred to spend on the couch watching Jeopardy reruns. It was expensive and inconvenient. Flip the attitude switch! Workouts may leave me physically depleted, but they also leave me mentally charged with a brain full of swirly happiness-inducing endorphins. I find the feeling of fatigued muscles delicious and savor the feeling of sweat dripping from the tip of my nose onto the treadmill speeding by beneath me. The gym is my time, uninterrupted by emails, social media and outside thoughts. Each time I go, I challenge myself to push my body to its limits. Why? Because, time and again, it shows me I have no limits. And it doesn’t end with the gym. I enjoy unwinding after a long day at work with a stroll through the neighborhood or a meandering bike ride – no longer settling into my divot on the couch. I do yoga, run in charity races and dance in Mardi Gras parades. I am planning some hiking in the autumn. I see people in the park playing softball and badminton and think to myself, “I want to do that!” None of this would have been possible had I not reevaluated my feelings about physical activity and turned them on their head.

The biggest change of all, and perhaps the one responsible for my ability to look at food and exercise in a new light, is the change I have made in how I feel about myself. Just as it may be difficult to do something nice for someone you don’t care for, it is difficult to make any serious endeavors to improve your health if you don’t love yourself. Most of my life, I have pursued people, relationships, habits and scenarios which could reinforce, in my mind, my feelings of worthlessness. As much as I protested, declaring my desire to lose weight, I felt unlovable and undeserving and would, ultimately, sabotage my efforts. A number of factors helped me to turn this around including therapy, an amazing support system of encouraging and loving people, and my own success. Now, I can see my body is not my enemy – it is not my jailer, not my penance – it is the greatest gift I have and will ever receive in this life. Despite my treatment of it, my body has forgiven my every abuse and responded brilliantly and gratefully to the changes I have made. My spirit, once dour, stifled by my self-loathing, has been restored to the childlike, independent, mischievous and life-embracing one of my youth. My eagerness to try new things, my utter lack of concern regarding what others may think of me has returned as if it never left. This is the body, this is the essence of myself I love freely and care for above all else.

As my body carries me through life, I want more and more each day for that life to be long and unmarred by chronic disease or disability. When I place that kind of value on my physical and emotional well-being, changing my attitude and incorporating consistently healthy changes to my lifestyle, is the easiest thing I do in a day. Yet, I am still fallible. I will still enjoy cake on my birthday, I may still have days I don’t want to workout, and I will always have days when the old self-doubts creep back in. I’m human. It isn’t perfection I seek in making lifestyle changes, either to my routine or to my attitude, but progress. Every day I make decisions about what I value most, what I will strive to achieve or maintain. I feel that is, truly, the best any of us can do.

I love fresh flowers – the scent, the beauty, the happiness I feel when I walk into a room and see them. They have always seemed reserved for women in relationships, flowers appearing at the office on holidays, birthdays and anniversaries. As a perpetually single gal, the only time I had received flowers was when my mom sent them. One day, while pushing my cart through Whole Foods, I was passing the floral department and stopped, literally, to smell the flowers. Then it occurred to me… why not? I’d had a great week the week before – lost a few pounds, eaten healthy and hit the gym right on schedule – why shouldn’t I get some flowers? Thus began a new tradition.

I certainly didn’t come up with the concept of rewarding myself for my success; however, I am a big supporter of the idea. Some would argue that weight loss, increased fitness, improved health are all their own rewards and those people would be right. Personally, I feel adding more tangible “lagniappe” takes nothing away from one’s achievements. If your child studies all week and aces a difficult algebra test, you could argue that excelling in mathematics is its own reward when it serves them later in life. Or, you could reward your child with additional praise and perhaps a treat. Which is more likely to encourage your child when it comes time for the next test? We are all just big children at heart and the actual still feels more real than the abstract notion of future wellbeing. I work very hard to keep on track, avoid temptation and put myself first – I certainly deserve to treat myself with love and encouragement, to celebrate my victories. And so, I buy myself flowers.

The specific milestones and efforts you choose to reward are totally up to you. I reward myself for two types of accomplishments. First is simply small, inexpensive somethin’-somethin’ that brings me joy at the end of a good week of hard work and dedication. This is when I would buy affordable grocery store flowers or, another favorite of mine, Lush brand bubble bars to add to my weekly recovery Epsom soak. Manicures, pedicures and spa days are great little indulgences to make you feel special after doing so many great things for your body. Maybe downloading new music to power your workouts is the best treat for you. Perhaps taking yourself out to the movies (but skip the snack bar!) is just what you need to honor your achievement. The one thing I never recommend is rewarding yourself with food. Cupcakes are delicious but most likely counter-productive to achieving goals. Furthermore, a huge part of having success in a healthy lifestyle change is divorcing oneself from food motivation thought patterns.

My second reward comes after achieving a bigger pre-set goal. I love setting short term, challenging but achievable goals along the path to my ultimate goal – examples of my short term goals have been training for a 10k, fitting into a too-small blouse and meeting a certain weight goal by a certain event or date. For meeting these bigger goals, the rewards are a bit bigger as well, but they are also geared towards further encouraging my new lifestyle. This is when I treat myself to new workout clothes, a great new vegan cookbook or training equipment. My most recent goal and reward was fulfilling the promise I made to myself that when I reached my lowest adult weight I would treat myself to personal training sessions and reinvigorate and revive my workout routine.

For some reason, we seem to live in a world that wants our successes to go unnoticed. So afraid of appearing immodest or being accused of flaunting our triumphs, we let them pass quietly and obscurely. We treat the truly remarkable as unremarkable and pedestrian. We think we should just be happy with doing well and not seek to celebrate that. We don’t “toot our own horn.” Personally, I think that is absurd. By all means, celebrate! We are amazing people, doing amazing things – we are doing things we probably thought unimaginable at one point in our lives. Enjoy the process, by all means, but feel free to honor your progress with experiences and tokens that bring you joy and remind you of just how awesome you are and how far you have come.

An interesting aspect of my personal story is that there are two groups of people in my life: people who knew me when I was at my heaviest and people who only met me after I lost weight. The former are often impressed by the transformation, find me a bit unrecognizable and can’t believe how much weight I’ve lost. The latter tend to be a bit astounded upon seeing old photographs of me and can’t believe I was ever so heavy. However, there is a third perspective to consider: mine.

On an intellectual and purely practical level, of course I know I’ve lost weight. I have donated countless clothing items when they no longer fit my shrinking frame. I am aware of how much easier physical activities are now compared to before. While I have not yet met my weight loss goal, I absolutely can acknowledge that I have lost a significant amount of weight. But I don’t feel any different on the inside. On the inside, I am still a fat girl.

Being an overweight person and experiencing life as such went a long way in forming my identity. So intricately entwined with my personality and reality was obesity that, in many ways, being fat was my identity. Ask someone what he/she “is”, they may answer with a profession, they may answer with an ethnicity, they may answer with a gender. Ask me what I am, and the answer is “fat.” So what is the fat girl mentality? My fat girl persona is the funny, cool, laid back, the perpetually friend-zoned girl men want to hang out with until they meet the woman they want to date. In short, it is the girl whose wonderful internal qualities exceed her perceived outwardly shortcomings. I am self-deprecating, quick to deflect insults by making myself the butt of the joke. I feel lumbering, awkward and uncoordinated. I view compliments as highly suspicious and probably disingenuous. I see a department store as a potential minefield. I have no mirrors in my house apart from the one installed over the bathroom sink and, in it, I look at only parts and pieces as necessary (is my mascara all over my eyelid? Is my hair ok? My teeth clean?) and not the whole. Regardless of changes in my size and physical abilities, this remains my complicated and, at times, painful internal life. While everyone around me sees a person changed, I see myself as the same – a fat girl, albeit a fat girl in a slimmer girl costume, masquerading as something I am not.

Will this change? Will I leave the fat girl behind as I continue to progress and, eventually, meet my goals? Will I become confident in my appearance, will I feel graceful or elegant? Or is the fat girl someone I should fight to hang on to? She has an endless capacity for compassion, seeing her own struggle in those of all who are ridiculed, judged and dismissed for trivial and superficial reasons. She has zero tolerance for body shaming, fat bashing and making fun of others. She understands that people aren’t fat because they are lazy, they aren’t fat because they have no self-esteem, nor are they fat because they have an Oreo cookie dispenser in the dashboards of their cars. She is not of her physical self, but of her emotional, mental and spiritual self. Is the fat girl inside, in fact, the reward for having persisted despite truly foul treatment on the parts of others? I do, in all honesty, believe I am a better person for having lived this particular life and learned these lessons. Perhaps being forever the fat girl is, in fact, a blessing.