Starting Where I Am Right Now

And now…  For the Magician’s Greatest Trick…  Cutting a Woman in Half.

This is a story about a woman who once carried an extra 200 pounds on her short frame.

But the story isn’t so much about losing the weight as it is about dealing with the cause of the weight.  Cutting the woman in half is more about filling the holes in her existence so that the body can reach it’s natural and best state of being.

The story is about me, Joan, the Raw Kitchen Magician.

So where is the best place to start?

Not exactly at the beginning because little in life is linear.  So we’ll start with where I am now.

221 pounds.  That’s what the scale told me the last time I stepped on it.

I couldn’t call it a liar, because the mirrors and my clothes confirmed it.  So I had to acknowledge what I’ve been putting off for more than a year.  I’ve put back on 60 pounds and I feel so far gone that I struggle to rally the energy to lose the weight again.

I went from 320 pounds to 160 pounds (all the way down, briefly, to 130 pounds with the help of the Master Cleanse for 40 days).

I’ve made it my business to be about the means to health.  I teach every week to people who are thrilled to learn the shortcuts, tips and tricks of organization and advance preparation to make the raw-food lifestyle easy.

Now every week, I tell people that I used to weigh 320 pounds and that I’ve lost more than 100 pounds and have kept it off.  I don’t tell them that I actually lost 160 pounds and put 60 of them back on.  No.  That wouldn’t be good for business.  That would mean I wasn’t a fitting messenger.

Yet, I find myself apologizing or explaining away my “still fat” existence.  People usually waive that away and tell me I’m beautiful or fine the way I am.  But I don’t feel that way.  I feel like a fraud because I’m not doing well physically.  And it’s not just the weight.  It’s the swollen ankles, it’s my skin breaking out or breaking down, it’s the huff in my breathing after a brief exertion, it’s…  The list goes on.

And so now I have to get to the core of it the real cause.  It’s not because I don’t know how.  It’s not because I don’t have enough reasons why.

It’s about me loving myself enough to forgive the weight gain.  It’s about me discovering what my soul needs so that I stop filling the void with food.

It will look like I’m cutting a woman in half.  If I go from 220 to 130, that’s almost half of me.  But it’s just the external show of my soul being reconnected to my body.