Resolution Revolution for the New Year!

2022 marks my 55th new year, and this time, my Resolution will be radically different from any prior ones. This year, I’m going from setting goals designed to “fix” things I believed were wrong with me, to goals of a more intrinsically rewarding variety.

Historically, I chose apirations like:

“Lose X Pounds by X Date!”

“Hit the Gym x Times per Week!”

“Eat X Calories Daily!”

“Cut out Fat and Processed Foods!”

These were also goals recommended to me as “healthy” by the Diet Industry; ironically, they would also play a huge role in leading me straight into a life-consuming obsession with thinness and a severe, decades-long Eating Disorder.

Recently (and with the help of the EDRC) I obtained ED treatment, recovery, and a joyous paradigm shift: for the first time since I was 14, I began to see myself as valuable and worthy completely apart from the numbers on the scale.

Before treatment, I would wonder, “What would my life be like, if only I lost X more pounds?” In treatment, a therapist asked me to change the question to: “What would my life be like if I spent as much time doing the things I love as I spend trying to control my weight?” Pondering the answers, I began to imagine a life different from the one created by my long-held belief that I had to be thin—at all costs—to be OK.

Toward the end of ED treatment, my goals began to evolve to include learning to accept, then to love myself exactly as I am.

In a Body Image Group at the ED clinic, the facilitator asked the clients if any of us could remember a time when we did not have any body image issues, and if so, what it felt like. I began to recall.

One memory was especially catalytic: I watched myself as a pudgy 6yr old, clad in a pink plaid ruffled bikini, playing in my front yard, jumping up and down in the sunny rainbow of the sprinkler stream, running crazy zigzags into and out of the water’s path, legs dancing, arms and braids swinging, completely unashamed of—and unconcerned with—my body’s weight, shape, or size.

Quite a contrast from the current, bikini-phobic me!

I sat back in my chair, basking in the joy of this memory, longing above all else to feel this way again in my current life—and body—as an adult. Come to think of it further, I could not recall ever hearing any toddler say, “I hate my fat thighs!”

After letting us share our stories, the therapist then posited the opinion that self-acceptance is not something we have to learn, because we each came into the world loving ourselves already, (like toddler-me in the sprinkler memory). She also told us that it takes a long time and a lot of hard work to get to a place of self love from a lifetime of feeling not good enough.

She said, also, that the voices we hear inside telling us we are not thin enough, smart enough, pretty enough, or that we are fat and disgusting are not truly our voices, but are messages that were put into our minds by outside sources, further shrouding our natural state of self love.

The trick now, going forward into the new year, for myself and all fellow intrepid individuals who care to join me on the journey, will be to find our self-love already inside, exhume it from beneath the layers of societal brainwashing, and to get back to living life from our original reality. Sort of like coming out of a cult! No easy task, but for sure doable, and a worthy goal!

I am just starting to genuinely re-discover self-love, and have a loooong way to go before I can use the words “joy” and “bikini” in the same sentence, but am entirely committed to getting there, no matter what it takes.

This year, my goal will not be one of change, but of loving things the way the are! It still feels funny to even say it like this, but nonetheless, my Radical Resolution for 2022: to “Love Myself, Exactly as I Am!”