I had myself a bit of a scare last week when I (TMI) found blood in my….”evacuations” and had that “Oh my heck, I have cancer!!” moment. I freaked out, I broke down, I saw my own mortality flash in front of my eyes, and as I drove to my doctor, I pondered the path that had led me to where I am today.

I suppose I should mention that from around age 18 to about age 28 (I am currently 30) I struggled with anorexia and compulsive over exercise.  After years of therapy, self-help books, and more than anything, learning to let go, I had what I would consider to be a breakthrough, and I began to make a turn about.  I stopped starving myself, and I began to research the crap out of diet and what truly constitutes a healthy and Ideal and Perfect human diet. I was a girl with a mission. After so many years of depriving my body, I now wanted to give it exactly what it needed in exactly the right amounts. This quest sent me into a variable labyrinth of information, and just when I felt like I was making headway, another portal would open and I would be sucked into yet another dimension, complete with convenient links to amazon.com where I could purchase books that would give me everything I ever needed to know about what, when, and how much to eat, along with fish oils that would do everything from prevent cancer to make my hair shiny and long.  Eventually though, I began to notice trends in what I like to refer to as The Old School New Aged Dogma of Diet. This movement isn’t just a fad, it is based on tons of scientific evidence, years of case studies, and the basic biological principles of human composition…..Plus….for me….it meant getting to eat a ton of things that I use to forbade myself from having because I thought they would make me fat.

Namely Fat.

I have to admit that when I started embracing this new-aged idea of eating fat and living a more paleo lifestyle it was because I truly wanted to be healthy, but it was also because I was hoping that if I did it, every last scrap of fat would just melt off of my body and I would be a size 2 while eating copious amounts of bacon.  In my mind thin still equals “healthy”, so after I stopped starving myself and my 5′ 8” frame which I had been able to deprive into a size 4 or 6 (and sometimes 2 and 0 depending on the brand) and around 116 lbs (though at one point 109lbs), and started eating more fat and whole foods,  I instead put on weight, which truly shouldn’t have been a shock to anyone, considering I had been underweight for many many years. I didn’t know exactly how much weight I put on, I didn’t want to know, so I didn’t weigh myself. As anyone who has struggled with the scale knows, weighing yourself can be a trigger for restriction or over exercise.  Every time I went to the doctor and he weighed me, I would tell him that I didn’t need to know how much I weighed unless it was a health issue, and he never told me.

Of course, as fate would have it, the day that I went in to talk about the possibility of cancer, my doctor forgot and told me that I know sit at around 130lbs.  The moment he told me the number I felt the color drain from my face and I got that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. In the past, this revelation would have flung me into severe restriction along with bouts of intense exercise, but this time, something different happened. This time instead of totally freaking out, I had this thought…

“I might have cancer, I could be dead within a year or two….maybe less…does what I weigh REALLY matter anymore?”

When I realized that I may never have a chance to see the world or have children of my own, or fall in love and get married, because my life was going to be cut short, I realized that this obsession with my weight had already stolen what little time I had been given. I vowed in that moment that I would make a real effort to never let obsession in any form rule my life and steal whatever precious time I had remaining.

That being said, it is still hard. I still have a hard time with knowing the difference between whether I am not “allowing” myself to have something (which is an obsessive controlling behavior), and being able to say, I recognize that this isn’t good for me and it wont make me feel good so I don’t want to eat it. I don’t think I should have to eat a doughnut every time one is offered just to prove to myself that I’m cured, though there have been moments when I have thought that this is exactly what I have to do.  I can honestly say that I still don’t want to get fat, but I don’t think anyone does. I don’t think that this makes me or anyone else “obsessed” per say, but I do see how the fixation with weight can so easily make that turn from a legitimate concern about health to a life hindering obsession.

More than anything, I just want to end the obsession that stole so many years from my life and robbed me of the joy and peace that I now realize are indeed possible to achieve here and now regardless of what size jeans I wear.

I have looked into Paleo, The Specific Carbohydrate, GAPS, and what I see in all of them is this idea that my body is broken in some fashion and that the only way I am going to get well is if I cut out dairy….wait no…eat MORE dairy….but only if it is Raw….and I also need to never eat any kind of grain again….oh wait…no….just for 2 years until my gut flora has been restored and then MAYBE I will be able to eat then again….MAYBE…..and I also need to drink 3 gallons of bone broth and brew my own Kefir water…and ferment my own veggies….which I have grown myself with no pesticides….and churn my own butter….and never even speak the word night shade veggies again….which pretty much means that if I ever go to a party or to Thanksgiving dinner, I will be that person who is only eating food I brought with me because I know it is “safe”…..see what I am getting at? I know there is a difference between healthy eating and orthorexia…but for someone like me who has lived the last 12 years in restriction and total obsession, I can honestly say that I want to be done.

I am done trying to “fix” myself, and I have zero desire to adhere to any kind of strict diet EVER again. I don’t want to drink bone broth at every meal, and if I feel like eating a frickin’ sweet potato, then I wanna frickin’ eat one! I totally get that there are basic scientific and biological realities that exist when it comes to what we eat and what it does to our bodies, but I just want to be able to eat again like when I was a kid and I didn’t give a flying rats…face… what it’s glycemic impact was or whether it is going to increase my opportunistic gut flora. I use to obsess that if I ate a cookie it was going to make me fat, nowadays I find myself obsessing over whether that same cookie is going to throw my entire GI track off kilter, and heaven forbid I want to eat some refried beans because beans are an inflammatory food blah blah blah. I know there is a balance to be struck here, and I am desperately trying to find it. Some days are better than others, and some days, when my gut turns on me, those uber strict regiments start to look pretty tempting and I find myself wondering where I can purchase a whole cow so that I can boil down its bones to make broth.  But even as I thinking that thought, I am also secretly praying in my heart…..“Dear Lord…There must be another way…Please show me a way to be healthy without extremes and without restrictions, and without obsession.”

Where does it end? When does the obsession end? When do we stop trying to be perfect?? “Perfect” body, “Perfect” way of eating, “Perfect” cancer fighting diet. I simply don’t have the energy for perfection anymore, even writing you this blog post is wearing me out. I see people posting their before after photos after doing P90X…or Crossfit….or….RAGNAR….or Super Ultra Mega Giant Marathon and I beat myself up because I have let my gym pass go unused for several months now.  Maybe it is because it takes one to know one, but I’m telling you, when I look around I see obsession, we have become an extreme and extremely obsessed group of people. Members of the church are not exempt, if anything, I see us as being more vulnerable because we also have this idea of “perfection” in everything we do.  So even as I am writing this, I still feel that drive for obsession inside of me and telling me that obsession and perfection, and adherence to a strict set of rules is the only way to live. I still believe that voice at times, on days when a pair of pants that use to hang off of my slight frame now won’t even zip up all the way…..but then other days, I truly don’t give a damn. I love those Don’t give a damn days. I want more of those.

And throughout this whole process the phrase moderation in ALL things keeps coming to my mind, and I can’t help but think that if I were the devil, and my goal was to get people to waste their lives away and never know what it means to be truly happy, or truly loved, or truly at peace, or truly reach their full potential, that a pretty quick and affective way to do that would be to get people to become utterly obsessed with things that seem oh-so-important…up until the moment that you realize to your great horror that they do not…and they never did…and now you have run out of time.

I don’t want to waste any more time. I want to be free of obsession….even if that means my life becomes a little less “perfect” and a little more…..soft.

By the way, my blood work came back clean, so cancer is unlikely. I guess that means I still have some time left to try something different. Maybe there is a better way out there, my gut tells me there is.

Thank you for listening