“How do you live a healthy lifestyle without losing too much weight?!”
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A question that resonates with me all too well.
The thing about healthy living is it’s a double-edged sword.
There’s SO much information & knowledge that is readily available & that we can apply to our life & use to our advantage but there’s also a danger in knowing too much.
The key is to not let our journey to health become so restrictive & controlling that it limits or controls other aspects of our life or that we become so obsessed that it consumes us. That’s when the sword gets dangerous & can lead to the development of unhealthy habits, even if you had good intentions initially.
I strongly believe that living our best & healthiest life is about learning what makes us happier & doing more of it & learning what makes us unhappier & doing less of it. It sounds like a simple formula, but it isn’t.
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For me, living a healthy lifestyle isn’t about calories, numbers or weight loss but rather about how I feel physically, mentally & emotionally & the amount of comfort & confidence I feel in my skin & body.
It’s about eating intuitively, feeling mentally stable + strong, working out, eating wholesome delicious food, healthy relationships, coping with stress & anxiety & having a healthy relationship with food & my body.
These are the things that make me happy & that’s why I do more of them. Counting calories, weighing myself obsessively, restricting food intake, feeling depressed & isolating myself make me unhappy & that’s why I fight my ED everyday & do less of that.
In the depths of my anorexia, I lost so much weight that I became skeletal & guess what? I was the unhappiest & most mentally unstable I’ve ever been.
I found true happiness when I learned to listen to my body & to make sure I always felt in tune with it. I won’t lie, some days, I lose my rhythm & my body & mind aren’t on the same wavelength. That’s when it becomes important to reflect on the WHY & to strengthen that relationship.
The human body has a natural state of balance that it strives to attain & I strongly believe that when we heal our relationship with food & our bodies, it naturally happens.