Dara Dietz Blog

Article 5: Learning to Live in a Body That Fits

I stopped losing weight at 235 pounds.

Not because the program stopped working. Not because I got tired or gave up. I stopped because I needed to let the emotional side of me catch up with what my body had done.

Nobody talks about this part.

The Aisle at Olive Garden

My husband and I went out to eat. The hostess was showing us to our table and the aisle was narrow, crowded on both sides with server trays.

I froze. I was certain I could not fit through. The embarrassment came over me so fast and so completely that I was ready to turn around, walk out, and wait in the car while my husband ate alone.

Michael noticed my confusion. He leaned over and whispered in my ear.

“You’ll fit.”

I did. With room to spare.

I had already released well over two hundred pounds. My body had changed beyond recognition. But something inside me had not been informed. She was still 475 pounds and she was still bracing for humiliation, and she had no idea that the world had gotten wider around her.

The Man in the Mall

The first time a man took a second look at me as he passed by in the mall, I wanted to run home and hide under my bed.

I need you to understand what that reaction was.

As a child, I could not make them leave me alone. Being noticed by a man was never once a compliment. It was the beginning of something being done to me. My body had learned, before I had language for it, that attention was danger.

So when the weight came off and men began to look, my nervous system did not read it as beauty. It read it as threat. Decades of protection dissolved in twenty-one months and left me standing exposed in a shopping mall with a seven year old’s terror in my chest.

But I am not a child any longer.

I had to become okay with the fact that God made me a beautiful woman, and that I need to stand up and be who I am. That was a time of growing — to look in the mirror and actually see this woman. Not the one I was used to seeing. The one who is truly there.

The Anger

I will be honest with you, because I said at the start of this series that I would be.

There is some anger.

Not at God. At the waste. All those years. The decades spent hiding inside a body I built for protection, the things I did not do, the places I did not go, the life I could have been living all along. Those men took more than a little child’s trust. They stole her life.

I do not carry that anger around with me. But I would be lying if I told you it never visits. Forgiveness does not mean the loss stops being a loss.

And still — the Lord has turned it all into a huge gift. One for me, and one for me to share with others. Both of those are true at the same time. I have stopped requiring my story to be simpler than it is.

What Food Is to Me Now

My relationship with food is completely different, and I do not think people would believe me if I told them how different.

I have no desire to eat bad food. None. Michael and I have been together over forty years and he still enjoys his sweets — not a lot, but he has his treats. They never speak to me. There is no wanting there to resist. That is not willpower. Willpower is what you need when part of you still wants the thing. This is something else. The wanting itself is simply gone.

I have not regained any of the weight.

I would still like to shed another forty pounds, and that will come in time. I am no longer in a hurry. Forty pounds is not the thing standing between me and my life anymore.

What I Want You to Take From This

If you are carrying weight you cannot shed, please hear this from someone who carried it for most of her life.

Ask what the weight is protecting you from. For me it was a child who had no other way to say no. Until she was heard, my body was never going to let it go — and no diet on earth was going to change that.

Treat the injury, not just the soul. The abuse damaged my brain, not only my heart. Feeding that tissue with real nutrients was the piece I had been missing for twenty years.

Understand the mechanism. Weight is hormonal. It is about insulin. Calorie counting kept me on the merry-go-round for decades.

Expect the feelings. They will come up as the fat comes off. That is not the program failing. That is the program reaching something deeper than fat.

Let your emotions catch up. When I stopped at 235 to let my inner self grow into my outer self, that was not quitting. That was wisdom. The body can move faster than the soul, and the soul is the one that has to live there.

Do not do it alone. Michael whispered four words in a restaurant aisle and gave me back an entire evening of my life. Find your person.

The Window

I want to leave you with the thing I say most often to the people who call me at H.E.A.L., frightened and stuck and certain there is no way forward.

When you find the door locked and barred, turn around and look for the window. You will find you now have wings to fly.

You may not be able to see them yet. I could not see mine at 475 pounds, sitting in an office in Hendersonville, helping other people heal while quietly believing I was a fraud. The wings were already there. They had been growing the whole time I thought I was only surviving.

Whatever you are in the middle of right now — say it with me, even if you cannot yet feel it.

For whatever good may come.

And mean it. Then watch what He does with it.

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Dara D. Dietz is co-founder, with her husband, of H.E.A.L. Marketplace, a private natural healing association serving an international membership since 1998. She is the author of Whatever Good May Come (2009) and resides in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. She released 240 pounds between August 2017 and May 2019 and has maintained the loss.

Article 3: The Brain Comes First

By late 2016 I had done decades of spiritual and emotional work. I had forgiven the men who abused me. I had forgiven my parents. I had gathered up the discarded child in the castle and taken her hand. I had written a book about all of it.

But I was also carrying well over 400 pounds.

If healing were purely a matter of the soul, the weight should have come off years earlier. It did not. Something was still holding on, and I could not reach it with prayer or journaling or counseling. What I did not yet understand was that the damage done to me as a child was not only emotional. It was biological. And biology requires a biological answer.

What Trauma Does to a Brain

Several weeks before my life changed, I stumbled across a seminar by Dr. Tim Jennings I had never viewed. His talk, the Modern Medicine Seminar, was given to a group of medical students and includes long discussions of drug therapy — not really my kind of material. But his earlier seminars on the brain had given me so many light bulb moments that I decided to wade through this one too.

What a gold mine.

Dr. Jennings explains how early abuse, neglect and emotional trauma physically reshape the brain. Not metaphorically but physically. Early trauma alters brain chemistry, damages neural pathways, and affects the way our genes express themselves. The child who learns to disconnect and hide inside herself is not making a choice. Her brain is rewiring itself to survive, and that wiring does not simply dissolve when the danger passes. It stays. It runs quietly underneath everything for the rest of her life unless something intervenes.

This explained something that had confused and shamed me for decades. Knowing what is right and doing what is right do not necessarily go hand in hand in a life that has experienced abuse or neglect during the formative years of childhood. I had lived that gap. I had stood in my kitchen at night knowing exactly what my body needed and eating something else anyway. I had called myself weak for it. I had called myself a fraud.

I was not weak. My brain had been injured, and I had never treated the injury.

The Nutritional Protocol

Toward the end of his talks Dr. Jennings offered several nutritional supports for brain health. He did not suggest dosages, so I played around a bit and came up with something that worked for me.

• Pomegranate juice concentrate — 1 oz a day, added to superfood or water
• Folate as l-methylfolate, 1000 mcg — one capsule three times a day
• N-Acetyl Cysteine, 600 mg — two capsules three times a day
• Vitamin C, 3,000 mg — three times a day
• Vitamin B-12 — 1 capsule two times a day
• Turmeric — two capsules three times a day

A word of caution from an herbalist. The best source for any vitamin or mineral is a live food source. Life has taught me that there are times when natural juices and food sources need to be carefully supplemented for the additional support necessary to heal a specific issue. But massive use of vitamin and mineral supplements adds a heavy load to the kidneys and liver. Find the best food source for the needed nutrients whenever possible, and do not stay on a heavy supplement protocol longer than the healing requires.

Because so much housecleaning happens on a regimen like this, do not neglect the foundational programs. Boosting with Echinacea. Bowel cleansing. Massive nutrition through superfood and juicing. And plan on liver flushing every few weeks. After my first two weeks on this protocol it was clearly time to flush my liver.

Joy Came Back First

Here is what I did not expect.

The regimen I began that autumn turned out to be one of the best choices I have made in a long time. Life started becoming fun again. Interest in my own life returned.

I have always loved my work and count it a privilege to know the members of H.E.A.L. But in the years leading up to this, I had quietly stopped enjoying the extra things that had always been a huge part of who I am. Photography. Cooking. Sewing. Writing. The creative side of my life had simply shut down, and I had not noticed it going. You do not notice the light dimming when it happens one degree at a time.

Within weeks of starting the protocol I was looking forward to those things again.

To understand what that means: before a single pound came off, before I had ever heard of Dr. Fung or read a word about insulin, the woman who had done all that healing work began to actually inhabit her own life again. The brain healed first. Joy came back first. The weight came later, and it came almost as a consequence.

Why This Matters for Anyone Trying to Lose Weight

If you have done the emotional work and the spiritual work and your body still will not cooperate, I want to offer you a possibility that no diet book will mention.

Your brain may still be injured.

Not broken. Not beyond repair. Injured — and injuries can be fed and supported and healed. The forgiveness was necessary. The counseling was necessary. The prayer was necessary. But learning to disconnect at seven years old left physical marks on the brain — the very organ that governs your appetite, your impulse control, your mood, and your motivation. That organ needs actual nutrients to rebuild.

I spent decades treating the soul and ignoring the tissue. When I finally treated both, everything moved.

Nine months later, in the last week of August 2017, I was ready to begin.

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Dara D. Dietz is co-founder, with her husband, of H.E.A.L. Marketplace, a private natural healing association serving an international membership since 1998. She is the author of Whatever Good May Come (2009) and resides in Rutherfordton, North Carolina.

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Article 2: Whatever Good May Come

“We can’t change the past, but we can gather up its lessons and move on, stronger and wiser. We can’t control the future, but we can send our dreams ahead of us to help prepare the way.”

People ask me how I lost 240 pounds. They want the practical answer — the fasting protocol, the food plan, and the herbal supports. Those answers are coming. But before we get there I need to tell you about the work that made all of it possible. Because the body does not release what the soul has not yet processed.

This is the story of how I found my freedom.

The Question I Could Not Answer

For years I wrestled with a question I could not resolve. Why does a God of love allow innocent children to be abused and hurt? Why doesn’t a Father who claims to love us step in and stop it?

I had lived that question from the inside. I was not asking it theoretically.

For a long time, I accepted what Paul the Apostle wrote — “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” I filed the question under things I would understand later and kept walking.

But I kept walking and kept asking until one day, somewhere in the long middle of my healing journey, the answer began to take shape.

The Gift I Did Not Ask For

I believe the Father has given each of us free will. We can choose to be evil if we like. We can choose to hurt others. By allowing free choice He has permitted that evil, pain and suffering will exist in this world. But knowing this would have to be, our Father of love also designed that our trials would be our teachers. Our biggest hurts our biggest gifts.

That is not a comfortable theology. It did not come easily to me. It was not handed to me in a moment of inspiration. It was forged over decades of confusion and pain, years of being misunderstood by everyone including myself.

The men who came so selfishly into my young life, stealing my childhood while they ripped my young soul to shreds, will one day stand before the Judgment Bar of the Almighty and face what they have done. That is not my burden to carry. What I carry instead is this — their acts, when filtered through the love of my Father, have become a wonderful gift.

It has taken years to grow into and open this gift. The Father alone understood the path I was walking. He continued to enable me to go the way I had to go. Throughout the years of confusion and pain He was filling me with something I could not yet see or name. It was being delivered to my soul piece by piece, set up and waiting for the time I would be able to open it and become the woman God intended me to be.

Learning to Forgive

The altar of forgiveness is not a comfortable place to kneel. The stones are hard. The question unavoidable — Can I forgive?

Forgiveness must be a gift, freely given. It cannot be earned and is seldom deserved. It must come from a place of understanding and love. The one being forgiven need not ask for this gift. Forgiveness is first and foremost a gift to myself.

In my life I have needed to forgive myself the most.

I have learned to forgive the men who stole my innocence, to feel no anger or bitterness toward those who robbed a lifetime of possibilities from me. Not because they deserved it. Because I deserve it. I can allow them to be human beings with their own stories. I am not their judge or jury; I am simply the survivor of their choices.

I have forgiven my parents — a mother who valued her friendships with depraved souls more than her children’s safety, a father who should have flown to the stars but was held down by a past he could not rise above. They gave me all that they had to give. It left me broken, but I decided to heal.

Holding onto old injuries hurts no one but me. I could not forgive myself until I began to understand and love myself. Love is not based on an ideal of what a person should be, but on the truth of who they are right now.

The Castle on the Hill

During a weekend intensive on personal empowerment I participated in a guided meditation that has stayed with me ever since.

I watched myself walk up a grassy knoll toward a castle. Passing through a massive door standing ajar I entered a large dimly lit room. As my eyes adjusted I began to make my way toward what appeared to be piles of discarded things. A favorite childhood sweater. A small pink music box with a ballerina with a broken arm that still played its tune when I opened the lid. Memories stored safely in stone walls strong enough to hold them.

As I turned to leave, the fading light fell on one last pile just inside the archway. My arms reached out before my mind caught up. There, lying motionless and silent, was a baby girl. She had been tossed aside, discarded. I knew this child instinctively. I had seen those eyes before — wide open and full of fear.

As I gathered her safely into my arms we melted into one.

In a second meditation that same weekend she appeared again, this time about seven years old. She sat outside the house of the old man who had raped us. In the past when she visited my dreams I had felt contempt toward her. I had not cared for her and she had not trusted me.

This time was different. As I saw her sitting there all alone with no one to share her horrible secret with, my heart filled with compassion. I finally understood why she had gone back to his house — she craved love and attention. She was just a little girl. It was not her fault.

I reached out for her hand as I had many times before. For the first time she took it and walked away with me.

The Prayer That Changed Everything

Somewhere in the long middle of my journey, I learned a prayer that became the title of my life.

When you cannot yet see the blessing in what has happened to you — when the wound is too fresh or too deep to find gratitude — simply say: “For whatever good may come of them.” And mean it.

When you believe, you release a power into your life that is able to transform the most devastating experience into your greatest blessing. You will be able to say honestly that you would not choose to return and change these things. That because of the gifts they carry you would choose this road again.

I would choose this road again.

Not because the abuse was acceptable. It was not. Not because the losses were small. They were enormous. But because of who I have become by walking through it. Because of the thousands of people I have been able to sit beside in their own pain and say — I know. I have been there. And there is a way through.

Those men took more than a little child’s trust. They stole her life. The Lord has turned it all into a huge gift — one for me and one for me to share with others.

Personal Freedom

A good portion of my life was spent in victim mode, accepting responsibility for the wrong choices of others, reacting instead of living. Personal freedom came as I developed boundaries. I now understand where my responsibility ends.

Personal freedom is the ability to choose instead of react. It is getting up in the morning free to make good choices all day long. It is going to bed at night knowing I have broken no personal vows to myself.

This is real personal freedom. This is really living.

And it was this freedom — hard won over decades — that finally prepared the ground for what came next. The body had been waiting for the soul to catch up. By late 2016 I was close enough to ready that new life could finally take root.

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Peace & Faith by Dara Dietz

We can’t change the past but we can gather up its lessons and move on, stronger and wiser.

We can’t control the future but we can send our dreams ahead of us to help prepare the way.

We can live each moment, heart and soul, and cherish this day’s greatest gift — the gift of now.

May peace with the past and faith in the future gently guide you through each precious moment of today.

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Dara D. Dietz is co-founder, with her husband, of H.E.A.L. Marketplace, a private natural healing association serving an international membership since 1998. She is the author of Whatever Good May Come (2009) and resides in Rutherfordton, North Carolina.

Article 1: The Weight Behind the Weight

“When you find the door locked and barred, turn around and look for the window. You will find you now have wings to fly.”

Between August 2017 and May 2019, I Shed 240 pounds and reclaimed my life. People want to know how I did it. The answer is not simple, because the weight itself was never simple. To understand how I lost it you first have to understand why I had it.

This is not a story about calories and exercise. This is a story about a seven-year-old girl who had no voice and no vote. Her only power was to watch, to record, and to remember. And to survive.

The Silent Watcher

She was a silent watcher. One who understood more than her years of life should ever know.

From the very beginning she sat quietly, studying the souls who pressed into her life — those who took from her things she was not yet offering. She saw through the eyes of a child men who selfishly took pleasure from one who did not respond. She learned to allow life to roll over her. She learned how to disconnect from an overwhelming situation, to go into herself and hide until it was over.

She had no voice, no vote. Her power was to watch, to record, to remember.

That little girl was me.

The men who came into my young life did more than violate a child’s body. They stole her sense of safety, her personal boundaries, her ability to trust. They planted confusion and shame so deep it would take decades to fully up-rooted. What they could not steal was the Still Small Voice she heard even then — the one that told her, quietly and persistently, that none of this was right. That she was meant for something more.

The Body Keeps the Score

For years I did not fully understand why I carried so much weight. I had done enormous amounts of emotional and spiritual work. I had journaled, counseled, prayed, and wrestled my way toward healing. I had arrived at genuine forgiveness — not as a concept but as a lived reality. I had written a book about it.

And still the weight remained.

What I did not yet understand was that the body and the mind are not separate systems. Early childhood trauma does not stay neatly filed away in memory. It lives in the nervous system, the hormones, the cells themselves. The weight was not a failure of willpower. It was not laziness or weakness or lack of discipline. It was my body doing exactly what a traumatized body does — building the only protection it knew how to build.

The Silent Watcher had no vote as a child. But the body found its own way to say no one will touch me again. The weight was her vote. The only one she ever had.

Understanding this changed everything.

The Long Road to Ready

Healing from childhood abuse is not a straight line and it is never finished in a single act of forgiveness or a single moment of breakthrough. It is a long, often grueling journey taken in layers. You peel back one layer and find another waiting beneath it.

My healing odyssey began in earnest in 1998. By 2009 I had traveled far enough to write about it — a memoir called Whatever Good May Come, a title drawn from a prayer I had learned to pray over the hardest experiences of my life. For whatever good may come of them. It was an act of faith that the worst things that had happened to me could somehow be transformed into gifts. Not despite the suffering but through it.

The book was published. The spiritual work continued. And the weight remained.

What I know now is that I was not yet finished becoming ready. The emotional and spiritual work had to fully complete itself before the body would agree to let go. You cannot rush that process. You can only keep showing up for it.

This was not my first attempt. When Michael and I moved from California in 1996 I already weighed 375 pounds and my health was failing — bladder and kidney infections that required constant antibiotics, kidney stones twice, acid reflux so severe I went to the emergency room certain I was having a heart attack, back spasms, hair falling out by the handfuls. I lost seventy pounds during those years and watched every one of them layer back on, scared and out of control. I ran and played in my dreams at night the way I had before the weight. I woke each morning to restricted movement and promised myself that today I would begin. By nightfall I had abandoned the promise again.

I was building a natural healing association and helping thousands of people while living inside that cycle. I felt like a fraud. I lived in fear of the phone call that would prove I was wasting everyone’s time.

I tell you that so you know the 2017 breakthrough was not a first try. It was the attempt that finally worked, and it worked because by then everything else had moved into place.

The Turning Point

In late 2016, roughly nine months before I began my weight loss journey, I stumbled across a seminar series by Dr. Tim Jennings — a psychiatrist whose work sits at the intersection of neuroscience and faith. What he shared stopped me cold.

Childhood abuse and neglect do not just leave emotional scars. They leave biological ones. Early trauma literally alters brain chemistry, damages neural pathways, and affects the very expression of our DNA. The healing work I had been doing for decades on the spiritual and emotional level was real and necessary — but there was also a physical dimension to the damage that needed to be addressed.

Dr. Jennings outlined several nutritional supports specifically for brain healing after childhood trauma. I began implementing them immediately. Within weeks something began to shift.

The creative side of my life — photography, cooking, sewing, writing — had gone quiet over the previous years. I had not noticed how much of myself had retreated until it began to return. Joy came back first, quietly, like the first warm day after a long winter. Interest in my own life returned. The woman who had done all that healing work began to actually inhabit her life again.

That was when I knew the body was finally ready.

A Note to the Reader

If you are carrying weight you cannot seem to release, I want to ask you a gentle question before you read another diet book or count another calorie.

What is the weight protecting you from?

I am not asking that to be provocative. I am asking because it is the question no one asked me for decades, and the answer — when I finally found it — unlocked everything else.

The weight loss tools I used were real and practical and effective. I will share all of them in the articles that follow. But they only worked because the ground had been prepared. Decades of spiritual work, years of emotional unearthing, and finally the biological healing that addressed the damage done to a child’s brain and body.

If you have been doing everything right and the weight will not move, consider that there may be a weight behind the weight. A story your body is still telling. A protection your nervous system is still insisting upon.

That story deserves to be heard before it can be released.

In the next article I will share the spiritual journey that made my transformation possible — including the prayer that became the title of my life.

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Dara D. Dietz is co-founder, with her husband, of H.E.A.L. Marketplace, a private natural healing association serving an international membership since 1998. She is the author of Whatever Good May Come (2009) and resides in Rutherfordton, North Carolina.

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