The ❤ of my journey
I want to take some time to share a little bit of my heart, and why I’m doing what I’m doing. My hope is that in reading this, you may see yourself and others with more grace and understanding. Everyone is on a journey. Everyone is learning. And everyone has a story.
I am a person with a past full of hurts, joys, mistakes, tears, struggles, hopes, and triumphs… All of my moments in life have lead me to where I am right now. I am more than what I weigh. I am a young woman in the process of healing my past wounds and getting down to the heart of who I am and my worth and identity in Christ. I am redefining my life.
A lot happened to me in my childhood and adolescent years. And for about 16 years, through everything I experienced, food was my place of comfort. Around the age of 7, I began sneaking food and binge eating. Food started to feel like a “safe” place in a life that felt very chaotic. And with the binge eating came a lot of weight gain. Between ages 13 and 22, I gained 175 pounds.
Over a year ago, I began counseling. And it has been AWESOME. I have spent many months working through things, reliving things and coming to terms with things that I NEVER thought I would face. I have grown tremendously. I have healed. And I am continuing to heal. Counseling has been an awesome experience, and has given me the opportunity to be in a “safe” environment to process things and grow as a woman and child of God.
For the first 7 months or so in counseling, I ignored my eating habits & weight issues. I had to. My TRUE problem wasn’t that I was morbidly obese; it was that I was deeply hurt and in pain on the inside, and needed time to just sit with things and heal from them. Before I could start on a weight loss journey and a journey of rediscovering food, I had to face a lot of the pain which had led me to food in the first place. Before I could ever get my eating habits and health under control, I had to know WHY I was doing what I was doing, and I had to begin to work through the layers and layers of hurt that were outwardly symbolized by layers and layers of fat. And honestly, I needed to learn to have compassion towards myself. Bitterness doesn’t bear good fruit.
My counselor has said to me often, “Taylore, I keep forgetting that you have a food problem. There’s so much more to you, and yet, it seems to be all you see. It’s only a small part of your puzzle.”
I have really taken this to heart. I have had to start to see myself as more than someone who has a weight problem and needs to fix it. When people look at me, they may think: “She needs to lose weight. Obesity is her problem.” But honestly? It’s not my biggest problem. Emotionally, I was underdeveloped, and all I really knew to do in upsetting, saddening, exciting, or stressful situations was to eat. As a young girl, I did what I could to take care of my problems, and food seemed to be the best solution. It may be hard for people to understand, but that coping tool is HARD-WIRED in me. So I have to deal with the pain and the struggles and the hurts and the past. Just going on a diet won’t make my problems go away. Losing the weight won’t magically make me an emotionally healthy person. It requires so much more than that.
God has brought such a tremendous amount of healing in my life. Slowly, but surely, he has begun to repair what has been broken. He has stretched me, comforted me, taught me, & healed me in ways that I never thought I’d experience.
And now, as I continue to heal, I am on this journey. It’s about so much more than counting calories and exercising. It’s about slowly learning how to cope with life in a healthy way and how to take care of my body and my health. I know all the ins and outs of health and exercise, but it really comes down to experiencing daily life, and what God has in store for me for that day.
I will make mistakes. There will be moments that I will be tempted to revert back to my old habits and ways of coping. There may even be a day, or two days, where I binge. And I will be upset and disappointed. But it’s ALL okay. I am on an imperfect journey, but I know that it is one God has laid out for me. I will struggle and fight and continue to heal and experience new things.
As I have said before, I believe this journey will be symbolic of the healing happening on the inside.
And I am excited for you to join me.
