HealthEvolution

   While driving to work one morning, I looked over to the next car and in the driver’s seat was an old friend who I hadn’t seen in years - a strange coincidence, I thought, because I had just been thinking about him earlier in the day.  After arriving at work, I overheard some of my co-workers saying something about how nothing in the world is really an accident, and that there are no coincidences, we actually control our circumstances - usually completely subconsciously.  I couldn’t help but interject after my experience earlier that day, and find out what they were talking about.  They handed me a movie called The Secret and just said, if you haven’t seen this, watch it tonight.  After work, I went home and watched that movie - it changed my perspective so profoundly and so quickly that I really can’t describe it.  I was joyously overwhelmed and immediately started it over and watched it a second time.    

I can, and will, write many many more articles detailing the ways in which I connected the teachings of The Secret to weight loss, but for now, let me just say that it taught me more in 2 hours that I’d ever understood in a lifetime of struggle.  For the FIRST time in my life I was able to imagine, if only in a quick flash of happiness, what my life could be like.  I realized that something different was actually possible and that my circumstances were simply the results of past thoughts and choices.   I saw a way out - I saw that I had the power to change what was wrong, that I’d been controlling it all along.  You know, people who are overweight often embrace that as a part of who they are - in a very personal way.  I defined myself as a fat girl!  I loved food and I was always the smartest, funniest, and coolest chick amongst any crowd of skinny little bitches.  I considered that to be part of who I was (and so it was) because that’s who I’d been my entire life.  Always the chubby girl, so I just embraced it and declared that to be the core of me. 

Secretly, however, I hated it.  I longed for something different and even though I could acknowledge the good qualities of my spirit and character, I still deeply resented myself for the way I looked.  Because I had been identifying myself as that person for so long, I had actually continued to create it as my reality.  My thoughts and beliefs about who I was dictated my words and actions - and because I had the thoughts and beliefs of a fat girl, I talked and acted like one, too.  Those actions caused me to remain one.  It’s really that simple.  Immediately, I realized that I had to shed the old ideas about who I am, and change the foundation of my beliefs about the person I was because I wasn’t really that person after all.  There was a reason I hated looking in a mirror or at a photograph of myself…because that person I saw in the image wasn’t ME.  I knew that wasn’t who I was supposed to be - it wasn’t who I wanted to be.  I hated the way that person looked and it didn’t really represent who I was at all!  I think most people (especially women) feel this way when they look at a picture of themselves and say things like, “Oh, that’s a terrible angle,” or, “I look so fat in this picture, gross!” 

I realized that if I was going to change who I was, I had to stop identifying with that old image.  I was no longer going to be that big girl, I wasn’t meant to be that fat girl, that person who I’m looking at doesn’t represent the real ME.  I realized that in order to change my body, I had to first change my mind - start thinking of myself in a fundamentally different way.  Stop associating myself with those big girls who I surrounded myself with to comfort me, and declare that I actually belonged with the cute skinny girls.  I really was small inside!  I began replacing the standards inside my head with new ones - a tall, strong, lean size 2.  I started noticing all the girls who were my height and very thin, and for the first time, instead of resenting them, I respected them.  In my mind, and later out loud, I called anyone who fit a certain height and weight proportion as “Future Me”.  This kind of visualization gave me a real subject to see, made me change the characteristics that I previously identified myself with, and strengthened my beliefs about what was actually possible.