Immigrating to a new country is never an easy path. There’s the paperwork, the language, the ache of missing people you love, the slow work of building a life somewhere unfamiliar. But the reality is we choose this path in the hopes that the payoff will be worth the stress, the effort, the culture shock. I am happy to report that for me, the payoff has shown up in a place I didn’t expect: my health.
Anyone who knows me knows I’ve had a lifelong struggle with my weight and with disordered eating. The stress of my life back in Missouri caught up with my body in a real way — I reached an all-time high of 320 pounds. My physical and mental health were being drained by my weight. I was struggling to move the way I used to move, and I was terrified, genuinely terrified, that I wasn’t going to be able to keep up with my daughter. That fear sat with me in a way that no number on a scale ever had before. It wasn’t about vanity. It was about wanting to be able to chase her, keep up with her, be there.
Something about leaving that stress behind — the specific stress of that specific chapter of my life — gave my body room to change. I am happy to report that as of today, I’ve lost 48 pounds. This has come slowly, over the course of about 13 months, which means I’m losing weight at a rate that’s sustainable rather than punishing. No crash, no extremes, no white-knuckling it. Just a slow, steady unwinding of a pattern I’d carried for years.
And then, almost by accident, a second thread of change joined the first. A friend of mine challenged herself to give up alcohol for six months. I decided to join her, mostly out of solidarity, not expecting it to mean much. As of today I’m 33 days without alcohol, and I honestly don’t see myself going back. I feel clearer. More present. Less foggy in ways I hadn’t even realized I was foggy. It turns out that once you start clearing space in your life, you start noticing how much you were filling it with.
I still have a long way to go with the weight loss piece. I’ve only reached about 40% of my total goal. So I’ve made the decision to add a GLP-1 medication — under my doctor’s care — to help with the next 72 pounds. So far, it’s quieted the food noise. That constant background hum of thinking about food, negotiating with food, has gone quiet enough that I can actually focus on my day instead of on my next meal. Some people might call using a medication like this “cheating.” I really don’t care. If it improves my life and helps me be a more active mother, that’s the only metric that matters to me.
Here’s the part I want to be really clear about, though, because I think it’s easy to miss in a post like this one: this journey was never about being uncomfortable in my own skin. I spent a long time in a body I was at war with, and somewhere in the last year or two, without fully realizing when it happened, I stopped fighting. I’ve learned to love myself at any size and to know that I’m worthy of love regardless of what the scale says. That belief didn’t come from losing weight — if anything, it’s the thing that made losing weight sustainable instead of another round of punishment.
So this isn’t a before-and-after story about fixing something broken. It’s a story about a woman who moved across a continent, got honest with herself about a couple of things she’d been carrying for a long time, and found that some of the weight — the literal kind and the other kind — started to lift once she did. This is about feeling well. About being able to show up for my family, fully, for years to come.
If you’re carrying something similar — whatever your version of the 320 pounds or the wine at the end of a hard day is — I hope you hear this: it’s possible to change the pattern without declaring war on yourself first. Sometimes the biggest shift isn’t willpower. It’s finally getting some distance from the stress that built the pattern in the first place.
More soon.
Leave a Reply