Weight Loss and Worthiness, Part III

[Read Weight Loss and Worthiness, Part I and Weight Loss and Worthiness, Part II.]

In May 2014, at the tail end of a semester abroad, I solo backpacked across Ireland for two weeks. I became fixated on the idea of doing this trip after I read an article about the Dingle Peninsula—a stretch of land stationed on the western coast that you can hike the full length of in a little over a week. The hike involves walking from village to village, each daylong trip ranging from 10 to 20 miles. I chose three days for the parts of the hike I wanted to do and set off with my hot pink running shoes and a $5 Primark raincoat.

There were many challenges about this trip that I very naively didn’t foresee, but the hardest and most emotionally taxing was how difficult it was for my body. I was out of shape and ill-prepared and the hills of the Irish countryside were much more demanding than I anticipated. On my last hiking day I walked 18 miles on a beach. I thought I would finally find some relief on flat ground, but it was grueling and I was in tears for more than half of it. I had planned for something adventurous and worthwhile and my body was insufficient in aiding me in those things. That trip lit a fire in me, and shortly after I got home I made a list of all the hopes I had for my body. I wanted to hike Machu Picchu and outdoor rock climb and feel comfortable in a bathing suit on a beach. I didn’t want to be held back or limited because my physical health never made its way up from the back burner of my life.

When I started losing weight at the end of 2014 it was the perfect storm of healing. By the sheer grace of God, I began running and seeing a therapist at the same time, and I wholeheartedly believe both of those things by themselves would have caused me to crumble. I don’t think I could have walked through deep emotional trenches without having a way to relieve aggression readily available to me, and I don’t think I would have stopped downing cartons of ice cream at a time if I didn’t learn to quit numbing and process my feelings.

I had tried to lose weight a million times a million different ways before this, and they all involved a sort of “all or nothing” mentality. Either going to the gym 6 days a week and eating only lettuce or consuming all the sugar in my house when I screwed up and worked out for one less hour than I planned to. Not only is this mindset built entirely on the back of self-shaming, but it also causes burnout and is perhaps the best way to ensure failure. Shame is a terrible motivator.

This time though, my motivation was almost exclusively to get healthy and strong. I wanted to make good choices for myself. I made small baby steps of progress instead of subscribing to the Get Fit Fast culture that is constantly seducing us. I wasn’t spurred into striving for the perfect body by the thought that boys might find me acceptable if I just got down to 120 pounds. I felt deeply connected to God and myself when I was doing things that strengthened my body. I learned how to cook real recipes and I didn’t deny myself ice cream with friends. I cried the first time I ran for eight minutes straight because it felt like redemption and the culmination of a million hard choices. It hasn’t always been true, but it is now sweet for me to remember the first six months of getting healthy. I have never been more connected to the importance of health, and disconnected from the idea of being a certain weight, than I was when I first started running. It reminds me of the pure truth I was choosing to hold onto even as an overweight, emotionally turbulent 22 year old—my body is enough.

Lately, the idea of being enough has been at the forefront of my mind. When I start striving and becoming super anxious about a multitude of things throughout the day, it is usually an indicator that I am believing my value comes from external things instead of being something I innately possess. In all areas of my life, I have to start asking the question “am I doing this thing out of a place of already believing I am enough or am I trying to earn my enough-ness through this thing?” This is an incredibly potent question we need to ask ourselves in our relationships with our bodies.

“Am I working out because I believe my body is important and loved and deserves to be taken care of or am I working out to achieve importance and love and care that I don’t believe I already have? Am I denying myself chocolate because I am being a good steward to this vessel that has been entrusted to me or do I believe that 5 less pounds will ensure my worth?” Your body is enough right now, as is, no exceptions. Being enough is not something that you earn, it is just something that you are. It does not fluctuate with your weight. I believe it is a call on our lives to take care of our bodies, and that health is so important for reasons that don’t involve jean size, but it is absolute fact that your body’s value does not increase or decrease based on what it looks like.

And clearly (cc: my last two blog posts), I do not believe these things perfectly. It is easy for me to spiral down into the if this, then worth mentality. If my hair was blonder, if I had fewer acne scars, if my abs were more defined, if I just lost ten more pounds then I would finally feel worthy in my physical appearance. The if this, then worth mentality is a moving target and nothing will ever be good enough for it. My hair will never be blonde enough, my skin never clear enough, my abs never defined enough, my weight never low enough to convince me that I am enough—because those things were never meant to give me value.

Please hear me: being a certain weight won't fix your problems. Achieving what you think is the ultimate standard of beauty will never satisfy your longing to be known and loved. Getting the right job, marrying the right person, becoming financially stable will never fulfill your desire for importance. It is my hope, and the hope of the God who made you, that you believe that you are enough right now, as is, no exceptions.

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

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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.

You Are Worth It: A Journey to Discovering Your Voice & Worth

In November of 2019, two weeks before my wedding, I called it off.

It was the hardest conversation I have ever had, and it created a domino effect of more difficult conversations with practically everyone in my inner circle. And those conversations created a ripple effect of embarrassing moments with acquaintances and co-workers.

The most difficult part of all of it was that no one saw it coming. Not even me.

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.

How One Writer is Learning to Navigate Her New Normal

2020: a new year but NOT a normal year. The world really took a turn when it was late winter. The news and social media were giving a lot of updates on the virus that took over the world. At the time, I didn’t know if I should take a break from social media and avoid the news.

Everywhere was closing and shutting down; it felt like 2020 was canceled.

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.

HealthChelsey SatterleeMarch 1, 2018FeaturedComment

Weight Loss and Worthiness, Part III

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