Weight Loss Equals Happiness? Not Always

Posted by Nadine Bells

I recently read a rather fascinating and honest article about weight loss. More specifically, it addresses out illusions that losing weight will somehow make us happier. And should we be successful in our efforts to shed a few pounds, it's not unlikely that we'll be hit with the realization that skinny is not a cure-all.

“It was great to be thin,” she said. “It was definitely easier to move around and my joints didn’t hurt so much. But I hadn’t realized that being thin wouldn’t fill all the empty holes in my life. I thought that somehow when I lost weight everything that was wrong would be right. It wasn’t. I still didn’t have a relationship, my mother was still sick with lung cancer, and I was still broke.”
....

All of us want to believe that someday we will have worked hard enough and be thin enough to reach the land of no problems, the universe of no pain. If emotional eating is a challenge for us, if we suffer because of the size of our bodies and our relationship to food, then somehow we end up believing that getting rid of the fat will take away the suffering. When it doesn’t, we feel so betrayed that we eat to comfort ourselves.

Read the article here.

Self-acceptance is easier to talk about than to actually practice. But I think it's worth fighting for. Because, as the author writes, "When I gave up wanting to have a life that wasn’t my own, I was able to grow into the life that was already mine, waiting for me to see, inhabit, and live it."

Here's to embracing the lives we have, superwomen.

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Weight Loss Equals Happiness? Not Always

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