Saturday was glorious and sunny; the whole city is buzzing with infectious olympicness. We spent the afternoon in a rowing boat on the lake, in the middle of Regent’s Park. Followed by a spontaneous ice-cream and a wander through the trees: it has become an annual date for us. And this year was epic.

I wore a sleeveless flowery summer top over jeans. Which is not particularly eventful in and of itself. But how I felt in that outfit, in my body, marks a spasmodic shift in my little cosmos. There was no clothes drama, no anticipated stress at being out in the park on a hot day. I didn’t need to adjust my top or worry about the bulking effect of a layered outfit, I was not concerned with my thighs rubbing together or the shame of eating an ice-cream in public followed by the overwhelming guilt and need to atone. I was a woman in the park on a date with her husband.

The thing is, I have ALWAYS been a woman in the park on a date with her husband. But having let go of the shame and the guilt and the fears and the endless, exhausting obsession with food and weight and the size of my thighs, I was so much more in the park. With all of that other stuff no longer taking up space in my head, I noticed the way the birds chatted to each other, how the geese flew around the lake in great swirling loops, while the gulls sat on posts and yelled ‘MINE!’. I felt the breeze on my skin that smelled of sunscreen and rose perfume. I melted with empathy for the little boy on the lakeside path watching us wide-eyed, who was super-sorry for an earlier indiscretion, the punishment of which involved no boat ride for him. And my ice-cream was full of strawberries and tasted of awesome.

The whole experience was amplified because all of me was all there.

I am in new territory. This body I am inhabiting is now officially the smallest body possessed by adult me. But also, I am now officially, the most me ever. I feel sure that these events are both utterly connected. Turning inward and being mindful, has enabled me to wake myself up.  I don’t feel frightened by anything I can feel or remember feeling, I am beyond any feeling. Bigger than. Vaster than. And so there is no reason anymore, to turn to food, shopping, drinking et al, because these experiences keep me from being present.

From being alive in my own life.

‘Wherever you are, be all there’ ~ Jim Elliot

Badger’s daily moment of zen is somewhat different

For almost thirty days in a row, my post-wee, daily weigh-in has showed the same numbers. This has been met with a whispered ‘fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou’ from moi. Because I am running 20km a week and I am having a serious love affair with vegetables (the European zucchini harvest makes me swoon) and I feel so good about my body and my head space around this and WHY WON’T THE BASTARD NUMBERS SODDING WELL MOVE?!

The last few days I have been at home nursing a temp and sore throat. Daily movement has involved less that a dozen stair climbs. So of course today shows a two pound reduction. FINALLY.

When I was eating without thinking, I hated the scales. Hated the numbers going up and up seemingly beyond my control. As they increased I felt exponentially less-than. They were measurable evidence of my shame. The numbers made me feel like a fraud: I was able to manage complex and risky change projects worth millions of pounds, and have difficult conversations with people at all levels of an organisation every day. But I could not do a thing to alter my own body. So I chucked the scales out and felt quietly smug that those bad boys would never darken my door again.

When I decided to understand why my relationship with my body was so broken, I felt I needed empirical data, free of the emotional turmoil I was walking through. But the whole purpose of this was to STOP feeling bad about myself. The scales and their Tales of Woe felt like a exercise in compulsive self-harming. And then Mr P’s undergraduate studies in the social sciences finally proved worthwhile! He found research from the University of Minnesota that found adults who weighed themselves daily while trying to lose weight, lost 12 pounds in two years, whereas people who weighed themselves weekly lost six.  The daily weighers also had less of a tendency to regain their weight.

Bolstered by The Science I committed to weigh myself once, everyday. And it has proved fascinating. I know that in the days before my ‘Lady Moontime’ I put on a couple of pounds, but first sight of a bloody gusset and they disappear (probably water retention), the numbers tend to stay the same until Friday or Saturday and then change. Eating carbs after 5pm, or less red meat, or exercising more does not impact the rate at which I lose AT ALL. I look for an overall trend rather than obsessing about individual days. And so while this month of plateauness has been frustrating, I have been able to talk myself through it.

I have become super attuned to the rhythms of my body through this daily practice; it is a reminder that  I am honouring my promise to myself to embrace kindness and curiosity in getting healthy.

What is your relationship to the scales? Do you weigh yourself?