Weight Loss and Worthiness, Part I

[This post was originally published on Chelsey's personal blog.]

I have tried to write about this topic at least a half a dozen times in the last three years, but every time I do something inside of me freezes up. I don’t like to talk about weight loss. Not over coffee, not in a blog post, not even inside the safety of my counselor’s office. I have talked about it in all those settings before, but every time I do I feel like I’m getting repeatedly punched in the gut afterward. I feel exposed and vulnerable in a way that is unique to discussing physical appearance. I always fear coming across as superficial and insensitive if I am completely candid.

Three years ago I was more than sixty pounds heavier than I am now. Every once in a while this information will get leaked to a friend who didn’t know me before I lost weight. I will bring it up to tell a story or say it to feel a sense of pride, but each time I do I immediately regret it. It feels like pulling back the curtains of my life and inviting them to sit front row to view the worst of my weaknesses. I feel shame about letting myself be known and I feel guilt as I am confronted by the truth of the situation: I am not proud of losing weight; I am ashamed I had weight to lose in the first place.

I spent a lot of counseling sessions this past year addressing how post-weight-loss Chelsey is such a bully to pre-weight-loss Chelsey. It first came up because my counselor asked a question related to what I remember about starting the healing process. She used gentle words to describe the 22-year-old girl who sought help and sat in her office in a tangled ball of hurt and grief three years ago. My immediate gut reaction was to say coldly, void of empathy, “That girl was fat.” Not “that girl was brave” or “that girl was hurting” or “I am proud of the choices that girl made to get healthy” but “that girl was fat.” I would actually drop kick someone in the jaw if I ever heard one of my friends get talked to this way, but it was so easy to disregard the value of who I was before I lost the weight. It was so easy to treat myself like I didn’t start to matter until my jean size ventured below the double digits.

This conversation began to unearth another truth in my heart: I have never been able to separate my sense of worth from my physical appearance. I have spent the last three years trying to hide the fact that I was once overweight because I thought that would somehow make me less than. I have wished I could just erase the girl who struggled with eating disorders and food addiction; the girl who didn’t know how to take care of herself; the girl who was carrying around years of unresolved trauma and numbing it with cartons of chocolate peanut butter ice cream. I can’t remember a time in my life when hearing the words, “you are pretty” or “you are skinny” didn’t immediately translate in my mind to “you are loved” and “you are enough”, and I truly hated myself for not being enough; for not making sure I was worthy of affection.

The crazy thing about losing weight is it really doesn’t change much. Sure, your physical health improves and you get a little more attention and you feel a little less self-conscious in a bathing suit, but internally, being able to run three miles and fit into a size small top alone changes nothing. If you have issues seeing your worth at 200 pounds you will have issues seeing your worth at 135—you are still the same human believing the same lies. Deeply held heart beliefs are not swayed by external circumstances. We see examples of this in relationship status, job situation, family health—external circumstance changes can bring joy and a sense of accomplishment, but they cannot satisfy us and they cannot alleviate the tension of being internally displeased. Things that are feeble and easily changed become dangerous when we try to make them our source of safety and security. Our idols cannot fulfill our deep desire to be loved.

The other day I was reading something I wrote a couple months ago about body shame. It started with me talking about walking in the bathroom and bursting into tears when I saw my body in the mirror. I don’t remember this exact moment, and I don’t usually have such an emotional reaction to body shame, but as I read it I was struck by how I never anticipated this part of weight loss. Right now I weigh less than I did as a freshman in high school. I don’t say this out of shallowness or conceit, I say this to say that, for over ten years I thought that being the weight I am now would grant me some sort of access to love and acceptance that I had previously been denied. I’ve done a lot of things over the last ten years to try and obtain the body I thought I should have to find the belonging I so deeply craved, only come to find out that it's not the answer. The deeply rooted shame doesn’t disintegrate along with the fat cells.

I have a million more things to say about this, which is why this is only part 1, but I will end by saying that this can feel really sticky to talk about because we all like to stumble around pretending like we’re not susceptible to idolizing beauty and numbers on the scale. But our culture’s obsession with beauty (and my obsession and your obsession) ultimately points to a deeper need to be loved and known, and if we don’t confront our idols we can’t find the place where our need is ultimately met. As my beloved counselor would say, “it’s about your body and it’s not about your body. It’s about weight loss and it’s not about weight loss.” Meaning, when we get caught up in seemingly silly things, there is usually a whole bunch of background story and deep scars associated with that thing, and it is essential to bring it to light. Your body cannot hold the weight of your worth.

>> Read Weight Loss and Worthiness, Part II.

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Why did you move?

A cardstock print sits propped against the lamp on my desk: a taupe watercolor swipe outlining a peakside Saguaro, the sun a tiny ring above. Beneath this minimalist illustration are these words in typeface: “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

I happened upon this notecard-sized print on the way out of a shop last weekend, after already having completed another purchase. It was the last print of its kind in the pile. I had to have it. I returned to the cashier: “This one, too.”

You see, this verse has been a thread weaving through my story, simple words spoken by a prophet long dead, a passage of comfort I’ve returned to again and again since my pilgrimage to the desert four years ago, when I inked a cactus on my wrist.

The Good Old Days

Last week was National Margarita Day.

I did not, however, celebrate the holiday. Truthfully, I’ve yet to find THE Mexican place here in Phoenix. You know the one: gaudy decorations, cheap food, even cheaper margaritas.

But there’s a Mexican restaurant at the corner of Charlotte and Whitebridge in Nashville, TN.

You may have heard of it.

10 Life Lessons This Cross-Country Move is Attempting to Teach Me

There are a few lessons life has attempted to teach me since my move — all things that I haven’t yet spiced up into a full essay, but deserve to be memorialized by my metaphorical pen nonetheless.

So I present a collection of lessons I’ve learned — and am still learning — in the last 3 months.

When The Hardest Thing & The Right Thing Are the Same

“Nuh uh!” I had protested.

The best thing about being 15 years old is that you know absolutely everything there is to know about life.

I certainly did.

I was arguing with my friends over the line in a song from The Fray (#tbt to moody middle school days): “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.”

Doing the right thing should never be hard, I confidently claimed. Anytime you have the choice to do the right thing, the healthy thing, the thing that builds up rather than tears down, it should never, ever be difficult to choose that.

Like I said, I knew everything.

Of course, 13 years later, I know that I don’t actually know much at all. And I also know that the hardest thing and the right thing are just about ALWAYS the same. It’s madness, really.

A Holy Yes to the Real Things: On Setting Social Media Boundaries

Two and a half hours.

That’s how long I had spent on my phone that day. Reading emails, sure. Responding to texts, some. Catching up on news, a bit. But mostly: scrolling through Instagram.

I had spent an hour of my day clicking through clips of someone else’s life. The sad truth? Some days, I’ve spent way more than just one hour lost to Instagram.

This is where the High School Musical cast flash mobs my brain with “we’re all in this together”—because my educated guess is that you can relate to this daily scroll-fest, too.

Who You Are Now: On Outgrowing Earlier Versions of Yourself

In the last few months, I’ve realized, much to my dismay, that I look older. That I am aging. This sounds dramatic coming from an able-bodied twenty-seven-year old, but it’s true. I didn’t know I found so much worth and security in the way that I looked until I started to notice a difference.

As humans, we note the passing of time in the changes around us. The tree that was once green is now orange, now yellow, now brown and bare. The crack on the stoop starts to grow weeds and crumble. The basil plant gets bigger, the dust on the shelf gets thicker, and the water stain on the ceiling expands to look like a dinosaur. We note these changes with surprise, as if they’ve happened all of a sudden instead of one day at a time.

On Navigating Grief During the Isolation of Quarantine

I read about the third suicide that had happened while we were in quarantine via email from my supervisor.

“I apologize for my absence. As some of you may have heard, my brother committed suicide over the weekend, and my family and I have been grieving this loss.”

I wrote back to the mass email individually saying how sorry I was for her loss, and that I, too, had suffered a loss at this time. Within the last month, I had lost my uncle to a surgery that left him paralyzed for weeks in the hospital. Alone. Without family. And that that had filled my heart with grief in a confusing time that didn’t allow people to gather and grieve the loss of a loved one. Let alone, let them say goodbye.

No Man Is An Island: An Ode to Our Neediness

The last few years of my life—so basically my Full Grown Adult Years—have been a reinforced lesson in this one simple yet slightly-jarring fact: we need each other. I mean, need-NEED each other.

“No man is an island,” says Thomas Merton, and my bae C.S. Lewis backs this up further by writing, “We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.”

We’re meant to be needy, but why is it so hard to acknowledge and accept this?

Say What You Need

Now maybe it wasn’t your family or your upbringing that made you neglect voicing your needs. Maybe it was a toxic relationship or a difficult work environment. Maybe it was someone who told you that your needs were selfish or that the desires of your heart didn’t matter.

Whatever it was, I urge you to identify those people or experiences or situations and start using that knowledge to change.

A Beginner's Guide to the Enneagram

Maybe you, like me, have become curious about the Enneagram because it is popping up everywhere in conversations and on your social media timeline. Maybe you know everything there is to know and have become quite fluent in Ennea-lingo (you even know that there are sub-types!).

Maybe this is the first time you’re ever hearing about this weird test and you’ve spent the last four paragraphs trying to figure out how to even pronounce the word “Enneagram” (In-ee-a-gram, for the record).

No matter where you’re at, we can all use some guidelines when it comes to personality tests, because none of us are immune to over-identifying, self-shaming, and becoming a walking personality-test-fulfilling prophesy. So, without further ado, here are my dos and don’ts of Enneagram-ing.

The Battle to Overcome Your Rejection

Rejection is an issue I’ve had to wrestle hard with over the last three years. Every time Rejection and I had to face off in the boxing arena, I would always end up slammed and pinned down. In boxing, you have ten seconds to get yourself up before the game is over. For me, it took months before I could even peel my head off the floor.

How to Respond to Someone Else's Grief

But this post isn't about my own grief. It's not about the tears I've cried, or the questions I've asked. It’s not about my own days where getting out of bed felt too hard.

It's about a different side of the fight. It's about your mom's grief when she loses her college roommate. And your best friend after she has a miscarriage. It’s about all the people you encounter, telling you about their grief.

Health, LifeChelsey SatterleeFebruary 8, 2018FeaturedComment