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.

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.