Practicing Progress, Not Perfection

As an early adolescent, I spent a lot of time looking at Vogue magazine. I was especially taken by Brooke Shields and her high-fashion spreads.

She and I were the same age, yet she had pencil-thin legs and a mostly flat chest. By age 13, my body was already quite developed. I looked years older than my peers. I started dieting then, and the merry-go-round has, sadly, not stopped turning since.

I can’t count how many diets I’ve been on. At 15, I dropped nearly 50 pounds and was bordering on anorexia. At 16, I was bulimic for about three months until I threw up blood one evening, which terrified me enough that I never did it again.

From age 16 until I met my ex-husband at age 24, I lost the same 10 to 15 pounds every year. I’d diligently restrict my calories for a number of months and burn additional calories through exercise. The weight would eventually come off and I’d feel fabulous. But then the most difficult part of dieting would begin.

As most dieters know, it’s nearly impossible to maintain intense fitness regimes and rigorous food restriction. Over time, I’d slowly resort to my old ways—eating more and moving less—and the weight would eventually return, much to my shame and discouragement.

When I met my ex-husband, I mostly stopped dieting. I’d found someone who accepted me as I was, and I began to let go of the need to be perfect. Mind you, I’ve never looked particularly overweight (though some height/weight charts suggest I’m right on the border). I’m tall enough and well-proportioned enough that I carry weight well—I just don’t feel comfortable in my skin. That remained true for the duration of my 18-year relationship with my ex-husband. I still felt 10 to 15 pounds overweight and wouldn’t have been caught dead in a bikini or skinny jeans, but I just lived with it.

When we split up six years ago, I gained seven pounds almost immediately—for protection, I guess. I then felt 20 pounds overweight, and wanted to jump out of my skin. I enrolled in a fitness boot camp. It was excruciating, but working out six days a week and eating no more than 1,300 calories a day (comprised of vegetables, fruit, nuts, eggs, fish, and brown rice) enabled me to lose 21 and a half pounds in three months. I ate out with friends only twice that summer. It was too difficult to monitor my portions, ingredients, and calories at restaurants, so I just stayed home and measured my meals to perfection. It was a highly disciplined way of living, but I looked and felt fabulous. For a while.

Two years have passed since that major weight loss, and I’m right back to where I’ve been most of my life, carrying the additional 10 to 15 pounds that have me feeling uncomfortable in clothes and out of them.

I’ve had it. Diets don’t work.

Kripalu life coach and faculty member Aruni Nan Futuronsky agrees.

In The Kripalu Approach to Healthy Weight, a Kripalu Signature program, she and nutritionist Annie B. Kay help people like me find our healthy, natural weight—something I’ve never tried in all these years.

“Natural weight management means attending to the four pillars of self-care (nutrition, movement/exercise, stress reduction, and sleep) and bringing them back into balance,” says Aruni, who notes that weight management must involve more than behavior modification.

“That’s just not sustainable,” she says. “You really need to dive down to the internal imbalances.”

Aruni says the journey is one of “rebalancing and recommitting to what we’re really hungry for.” That might be more quiet time, creative endeavors, pleasurable movement, even love.