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.

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.