The Healing of Weight Gain

One morning, while writing What’s in the Way IS the Way, a wonderful series of words showed up: Life is set up, to bring up, what has been bound up, so it can open up, to be freed up, so we can show up for life. This points to the truth that all of us had experiences, when we were growing up, where we weren’t shown how to be with feelings like loneliness, shame, anxiousness, anger and vulnerability to name a few.

So we learned to stuff these feelings deep inside of ourselves, hoping this would make them go away but they just ended up influencing our lives from underneath our everyday awareness. Because life wants us to be free, it will put us in situations to bring these resisted and rejected parts of ourselves close to the surface so they can be healed with the light of our accepting attention. To clarify what this looks like, I would like to share a story from my life.

When I was growing up, I lived most the time in the same bedroom with an older sister who was and still is tall and willowy. I was shorter and rounder and the contrast was repeatedly pointed out. I started overeating when I was 10 and bingeing and dieting when I was 12. I desperately tried to control my food intake, hoping to make myself acceptable by being slender. Emblazoned on my memory is a moment when I was 16 trying to get into a pair of jeans by jumping up and down and then laying on the bed to try to get the zipper done. Such pain!

Of course, whatever you try to control controls you and I kept on gaining and losing huge amounts of weight until, between age 22 and 23, I gained 97 pounds in a year. During this whole journey of rejecting my body, by far the most difficult part of it was the extreme self-revulsion, so intense that at times it would feel like liquid fire all over my body, right underneath my skin.

In my 30s, rather than always trying to always make myself be better or different than what I was, I began to become curious about what I was experiencing, especially my relationship with food, and my body naturally began to let go of weight.  It has stayed the same basic weight for decades even though I don’t control my eating. I shared this deeply healing process in my book The Gift of Our Compulsions and the essence of it is that my overeating turned from an enemy needing to be controlled to an ally to be listened to.

But still, buried deep inside, was this fear of gaining weight again. My greatest fear used to be just life itself and I spent a lot of time hiding in dark rooms. Then when I had children, my greatest fear was something happening to them and it took a while, but I was able to come to the place of understanding that they are on their own journey and life will bring them exactly what they need. Meeting those fears eventually uncovered this ancient fear of gaining weight, which is really the deep fear of the agonizing pain of self-rejection.

I have healed a lot of this fear but the core of it didn’t come out of hiding until I had hip replacement surgery in August. I rarely weigh myself and never allow a doctor to weigh me because the scale for me has been a terrorist, but I knew they needed to know my weight for the surgery. So a week before, I weighed myself and of course, was up a few pounds because I haven’t been able to exercise for almost a year. No big deal.

Much to my dismay, when I weighed myself two weeks after the surgery, I had gained 9 pounds. I hadn’t been that weight since my 30s! So, I got off the scale and got back on again and there were those 9 pounds! The shock was so great that all I could do was crawl into bed and hold myself. As I brought my attention into what I was experiencing, there was the liquid self-revulsion and in a flash, I was that young teenager again, experiencing the agony of weight gain.

The draw to fall into all the raw feelings, that were now as present as they were when I was young, was very strong. But having discovered how to not leave myself when I am really hurting, I quickly remembered the agony of either falling into or trying to get away from uncomfortable feelings. I also remembered that life is set up to bring up these feelings up so they can be seen and healed with the light of my heart.

As I brought my attention fully into the liquid self-hate, in a flash my heart opened and I was fully present for these painful feelings, which in the past had caused me to feel so totally wrong and completely alone and the only way I could survive them was by stuffing them deep inside. But now, under the gaze of my compassionate heart, the self-revulsion began to open up and move through me rather than being trapped inside.

Does that mean the feelings completely went away? No. I’m still living in a lot of pain and have limited ability to move so my body is not the safe sanctuary it is been over the years. But when the old urge to reject my body arises, it almost immediately takes me to my heart.

A few days after my shocking experience on the scale, I was told that most of the weight gain was from water retention due to the surgery.  When I heard that, it totally made sense but then I wondered why I couldn’t figure that out for myself right after I stepped on the scale. But almost immediately, I understood that when I saw a dramatic weight gain, after decades of staying basically the same weight, all sense flew out of me as reaction took over.

But life is set up to bring up what is been bound and I am very grateful for this experience because the less we have hidden inside, the more we can be fully alive. As long as we have parts of ourselves that we need to hide, not only from the world but from ourselves, we won’t be free.

As painful as this experience was, I now have complete access to a part of me that I had to freeze all those years ago because the pain was so unbearable. And every time I meet this pain with compassion and understanding it dissolves into the truth that I am okay no matter what my weight is! Such joy!