There were times when weight arrived without warning — not gradually, but suddenly, as if overnight. Jeans that fit last month wouldn’t close. The mirror reflected someone I didn’t recognize.
It always arrived the same way — during the disconnected chapters. Life on autopilot. Numbing with food, wine, noise, distraction. Moving through days without really inhabiting them.
Weight felt like a flaw to fix needing another diet or plan. Another attempt to control the outside while the inside went unexamined.
Weight isn’t the enemy. It’s a messenger — reflecting unprocessed emotion: grief, burnout, heartbreak, the ongoing strain of holding everything together. The body holds what the mind hasn’t yet faced.
When Life Changed, So Did My Connection to My Body
Looking back, it wasn’t the high-stress seasons that undid me. Some of the most demanding periods of my life — full schedules, impossible deadlines, endless logistics — I showed up. I cooked. I moved. Strength training became an anchor. I wasn’t always at peace, but I was present.
The harder times came in the spaces between — the transitions, the moves, relationships heading toward endings, mornings that felt unanchored, nights that stretched too long. The grief.
That’s when it would creep in. A little more wine while cooking. A little less movement. A little more eating — not from hunger, but from habit. Another late-night scroll. Another online order. Comforting for a moment. Never quite filling the void.
It wasn’t overindulgence. It was disconnection.
This turning away is subtle. It doesn’t announce itself. Emotional weight rarely arrives all at once — it builds through choices made from feeling unmoored. From yourself. From your needs. From what you’re actually feeling.
No wonder there are so many diet books. Controlling food feels safer than feeling. Following rules gives the illusion of order when everything underneath is messy. Restriction is easier than asking what you’re actually trying to fill.
Culturally, the message is consistent: feeling better requires more control, a stricter plan, more discipline. But control isn’t regulation. Rigid rules don’t create safety in the body — they intensify the stress underneath. When the nervous system is overwhelmed, restriction becomes another form of self-abandonment. Not healing.
What Brought Me Back
What brought me back wasn’t another diet, a stricter routine, or a sudden burst of motivation. It was something quieter. Something older. It was an internal voice I’d carried with me my entire life. My mother’s voice.
She didn’t always have words for emotions. But she had rhythm. She had standards. It was somatic regulation – her way of grounding herself when life tried to pull her under. My mother practiced instinctive nervous system regulation long before I had language for it. She didn’t call it healing. She called it living.
And I inherited that kinetic forward motion— the quiet momentum that says: Get Up. Get Dressed. Get Out.
In the moments when I drifted — when I stopped caring for myself, when I started to disappear — I’d hear her voice. Not words exactly. It was more a physical force insisting on movement.
Not new rules. Standards — simple, non-negotiable acts of care to return to when everything else felt uncertain. An anchor — the kind that holds when everything else is shifting.
- Moving my body to shake off the fog
- Cooking simple, nourishing meals
- Walking, even just to the corner
- Sitting quietly long enough to ask: how am I, really?
These rituals gave me a way back. Simple structure that shifted me out of numbing and back into feeling. Enough shape to get curious again about what I was actually carrying.
I had lived in performance mode — chasing progress, achievement, approval. My mother lived differently. She found peace in soft structure — the quiet rituals that kept her grounded. What I saw as routine, I now understand as regulation: her body’s way of creating safety through familiar repetition.
What We Carry Until We Feel It
We carry what we don’t release. It can show up as tension, fatigue, pain, anxiety, and often as weight changes. Our biology records everything we haven’t yet felt.
Underneath addictive behaviors — the wine, the workaholism, the constant motion, and sometimes the full retreat into isolation — were emotions waiting to be felt. There had been many times I’d tuned them out. Sometimes knowingly. Often not.
Emotions are the carriers of personal truth. But we live in a culture that medicates discomfort rather than understanding it. Pharmaceutical companies profit when we manage symptoms — not when we process what’s underneath. Healing asks us to feel, not bandage.
When relief comes without reconnection, the body keeps carrying what hasn’t been felt.
Gabor Maté puts it precisely: addiction isn’t weakness or lack of willpower — it’s about pain. About trying to soothe what hurts. Whether it’s food, alcohol, overworking, or people-pleasing — we’re not trying to harm ourselves. We’re trying to escape ourselves. The work of healing isn’t behavior change. It’s returning to the root.
“The question is not why the addiction. But why the pain?” — Gabor Maté
If you find yourself reaching — for food, wine, distraction, busyness — it might be pain, loneliness, fear. Emotions you haven’t had space or safety to fully feel. Instead of judging the behavior, get curious about the need beneath it.
When we address only the behavior — quitting drinking, cutting sweets — without addressing the emotion underneath, the feeling finds a new outlet: Control. Workaholism. Scrolling. Shopping. Over-exercising. Fixing everyone else. Busyness to avoid stillness.
The addiction may shift. The emotional need remains. Recognizing this is the first step.
Healing begins when you stop managing the symptom and start listening to the signal beneath it.
You don’t need another diet or harsher discipline. You need awareness, compassion, and space to feel what you’ve been carrying.
When you begin to process what’s underneath, the weight often shifts — not because you forced it, but because the body no longer needs to protect you from what it senses you’re ready to feel.
Return to your standards as presence. The simple, grounding acts that bring you back into your body and your life.
Your body isn’t betraying you. It never was. It’s been carrying what you couldn’t yet feel — and waiting for you.
“The body holds what the mind cannot yet face. Healing begins not with force, but with the willingness to feel.”
Further Reading:
→ Feel to Heal
→ The Science of the Healing State
→ Hacking the Wired Brain: GABA, Glutamate, and the Chemistry of Calm
