Archive for the The Journey Category

The sun mustered an appearance this morning with a hint of lavender on the horizon. There was no dramatic splash of color or display of azure blue with fluffy white clouds to entrance me. There was only the blackness growing grayish until finally fading into a murky gray blandness atypical of November, not March. I found myself searching the horizon for a glimmer of hope because the wind was particularly harsh and I was pedaling my bicycle uphill against it. Did I also mention it was cold and my toes were numb? Now this might seem brave in the reading of this, but it certainly didn’t feel brave in the moment. In fact, I rather wished someone would pull up next to me and offer me a ride. I gladly would have taken it.

Sometimes discipline feels akin to insanity, a detail not frequently unnoticed by friends and acquaintances. If I measured the number of times people have said to me, “Margaret, you’re too hard on yourself!” I might be able to retire early (or at least pay for an extravagant vacation in some remote tropical locale). Such is the condition of modern American culture that we disdain the monotonous hard work necessary to achieve a desired result. Efficacy in the area of personal discipline frequently looks like a sprint uphill that ends in a nosedive into the dirt as we tumble back down. The unenviable backslide is not so much discussed as the kick-off or the finale. The slow and steady slog in between is boring and—if I might be so bold as to say it—hard.

I’ve been fighting the shameful backslide mentality for what feels like ever. I coast along with discipline for a while and then inevitably stumble across a batch of cookies or ice cream and even up with a nose full of dirt. Eventually I end the binge. I gather my wits and pride and try for the hundredth time because freedom is on the other side of my slavery to food. Such is my cycle of never-ending hypocrisy. What I am learning on this particularly mundane stretch of road is that I don’t have to cave in to my fleshly cravings. This realization has empowered me to resist the idea that I have no control over my thoughts or desires in regards to food, exercise, or basically, anything harmful to myself and others. Does it require intense mental focus? Yes. Does it require preparation and planning? Yes. Do I always feel like it? Heck no! Am I doing it anyway? Yes.

The three letters of the last word in the previous paragraph encompass a mentality many people are unfamiliar with. We have become entirely too comfortable with dismissing shameful behavior. We shrug it off as uncontrollable(which is a lie). Lest I state these things too bluntly, let me remind the reader that I am foremost guilty of committing abominable atrocities for the sole purpose of self-gratification. It takes a great deal of preparation and planning to commit shameful acts. They did not stumble upon me! I got into to the car and drove to Pantera’s Pizza and consumed all I could eat from the buffet and guzzled a liter of Pepsi. I then drove back to work stuffed and nearly sick but still consumed an entire bag of Nestle Caramel Treasures. And that is only a 2 hour window into the average day-in-the-life of Margaret Wolfinbarger via just a few years (and pounds) ago. The shameful mentality required to maintain the attitude that I was powerless over my food addiction was exhausting because I was constantly perpetuating a lie. I lied to myself and others and could not understand why I did not achieve different results. Think of it this way, if I planted a kernel of corn, why would I expect an apple tree to pop up?

Now I must disclaim that not every obese person eats the way I did. Some people really do have hormone imbalances and cellular diseases that prevent them from possessing slender-ish bodies. This is not meant as an indictment on heavy people. I am, however, indicting the shameful selfish and self-centered mentality that produces many forms of obesity. To worship at the altar of food to the detriment of one’s body is nothing if not shameful. One might argue that harming oneself doesn’t hurt anyone but oneself but that is a lie too. We all live in community together and our decisions always have consequences. I have friends whose children have committed suicide. Other friends have children who are addicted to drugs. People in my own family are alcoholics(albeit currently sober). And more recently, I lost a cousin to a drug overdose. Human beings do not live in silos. Our choices DO affect those around us whether we want to acknowledge it or not. And yes, this applies to even our food choices.

Think about this conversely. People commend me on my discipline and ask me to share my story with hopes that my success might inspire the same in them. People also pay good money to hear a motivational speaker. They are often so inspired by the speech that they go out and buy the book. If we can be “motivated” to live a healthy lifestyle by way of someone who has succeeded, we can also be “motivated” to live an unhealthy lifestyle by those who choose indiscipline.

I am ashamed of the ways I have harmed my family and friends via my foolish choices over the years. I have learned that acknowledging shame provokes a change in me. Because I am constantly striving to reverse the damage done by shame, I find myself almost perpetually “sober-minded”. This sober-minded mentality rubs people the wrong way. It may be that they don’t understand it. It may even be that they feel convicted by it. But I am convinced that without it I will not advance on this journey to learn discipline. Course corrections come about because of shame-filled pits. If I want to avoid them, I must go a different way.

Does this mean I never have fun? No. Does this mean I am always successful? No. Does it mean I’m going to give up any time soon? With the Lord Jesus’ help, I hope not!

Without shame I would not strive to do what is right. The wound must be diagnosed before a cure can be pronounced. But the beautiful news of the gospel is that for all of my failed striving I am loved enough to be redeemed anyway, and daily given extraordinary grace to keep walking the gray and slogging path. This means I can rejoice when I am saying no to cookies I very much want to eat and yes to a cold and windy bike ride because it forces me to draw nearer to my Savior for help. Yes, shame is powerful and important, but especially in regards to the knowledge that it can be overcome and even erased. To remain in that place of shame is folly, but the knowledge that I am not a slave to it is even more wonderful.

Sometimes the cold and windy days hit like a sledge hammer. They pound and flatten everything happy in my heart. But even then I am reminded of the promises of my King. He has never failed me. He has been by my side every step of this journey and with his help I have accomplished much more than I ever would have dreamed. When I was overweight, I honestly never believed I could live a healthy lifestyle for the rest of my life. Now I know differently. Yes, I had to experience the shame of choices that led to obesity, but then because of His extraordinary grace I was privileged to experience the joy of overcoming it.

I would like to share the story of my good friend, Janice Skaggs. She is a co-worker and someone who inspires me daily with her positive attitude and sheer grit. By grit I mean that she is fighting the good fight to keep off the weight that she lost in spite of our corporate culture of all-you-can-eat sweets. When I am really struggling, Janice is my go to gal. She listens when I need to complain, and brings me cherry tomatoes when she knows I need a little pick-me-up. I love Janice, and not just because she lost the weight and is keeping it off, but because her heart is even more beautiful than her face. In short, I adore her! After you read her story, I bet you will too.

I understand you first began your journey to improve your health in 2012. What was your initial motivation to do so?

In the summer of July 2011, I was diagnosed with endometrial cancer and the cure was to have a hysterectomy. After 12 years of on and off fertility treatments, my husband and I made the decision to go ahead with the hysterectomy in August 2011. My husband said, “What good would a baby do for us, if you are not here to be our babies mom?” In order to live my life cancer free that is what I had to do. So from August 2011 to February 21, 2012, I ate my sadness, and my life was a mess. I was tired of how I looked and how I felt. I decided that I was lucky to survive cancer, and even though there is no guarantee that I will never have cancer again, I have promised myself that I will never have cancer because of my obesity.

What was your starting weight?

384. REALLY 384!

What did you find most challenging both mentally and physically at the beginning of your journey?

Getting my mindset straight that I am worth the time it takes to food prep, exercise, and generally take care of myself. Physically the exercise was VERY hard. I weighed 384 pounds and so when I first started walking it was only 10-20 minutes a day. Then I started water walking, aqua Zumba, and Zumba. But I will admit I was so self-conscious of how I looked. I still am! When you lose almost 200 pounds, you do not automatically look like the models on magazines or like movie stars. There is extra skin and flab. My brain still sees a 384 pound person in the mirror at times. That is something I am constantly working on for myself to OWN my weight loss, and be proud of myself!

I know you’ve had periods of re-gain(as we all have). Why do you keep trying?

I keep trying because I realize I am worth it. I love being healthy, having more energy, and feeling good about myself. Exercise is time consuming and, just like everyone, I get busy. It is challenging to squeeze in the time to take care of myself but I make the time because I want to be healthy.

What do you struggle with most food-wise/exercise-wise?

Food can be challenging. When you lose weight and realize you can eat a few things that are treats and get by without gaining weight, then you want to eat a bit more. Then I will see it on the scale and realize that’s not working for me. I say, “OH NO…stop it Janice!!!” I LOVE food, and I can get creative with cutting calories and cooking lighter and healthier, but it does take time!

The statistics are not good for people who lose vast quantities of weight. They usually gain it back plus some. Why do you feel you have not fallen into this category/statistic?

I was miserable when I was heavy. I did NOT like myself, I didn’t like my laziness or my giving up attitude. I promised myself as I was losing the weight that I would NOT ever do that to myself again because I never want to self-cause cancer in my body again! I have to put myself first; before my husband, my family, even my friends. If I don’t put myself first, I get lazy. I LOVE to take care of people, but if I don’t take care of myself I can’t do anything for anyone else.

How do you handle temptation to eat foods you know will trigger overeating episodes? What do you do after you’ve “failed” in this regard?

I try to stay away from foods that send me over the top. Like ice cream, cookies, chocolate, and breads. But every now and then I will allow myself to eat something like that but within reason so I don’t get carried away. It’s happened. I’ve caved in and went through the drive-thru at McDonald’s or Chick-Fil-A and then went on to eat ice cream, or cookies and candy. But when I fail and start to gain some weight, I remind myself how much I enjoy being able to walk into Kohls or Macy’s and find clothing in my size, or how I feel when I exercise. For example, when I was heavy just walking from the parking lot into work hurt my feet, knees, and ankles. Now I can walk up the steps or walk many miles without hurting. I have to remind myself often and stay accountable to myself by weighing daily. I know some folks say that is not wise because and our weight fluctuates but I need to see the numbers on the scale to help me stay in line!

What activities do you enjoy that contribute to the motivation to stay healthy as opposed to falling back into binging/couch-potato-ing?

I love to walk outside, hike, swim, and shop. I do not allow myself to sit and couch-potato until after I have prepped my food for the following day, gotten my clothes together for the gym the next morning, and work for the following day. I typically only allow myself to sit on the couch and do NOTHING for 60 minutes per day!

How do you feel about yourself in correlation to the perception the media and society in general project via the image of the “ideal woman”?

It has taken me some time to realize I will NEVER be a size 2 and I am okay with that! I feel great, have lots of energy, and LOVE motivating other people. That is truly what I live for. It is annoying to me that the media and society in general expect women to have PERFECT bodies! Really, what is a perfect body? I feel like I am average some days, and then others I feel like Wonder Woman because losing almost 200 pounds and keeping it off is something to be truly proud of. I AM really proud of myself.

Tell me about how you deal with the mental part of maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is tough. It can be annoying to others that I need to constantly prepare for upcoming events. On Sunday evenings I get my husband’s and my breakfast, lunches, and some dinners prepped the best I can. Unfortunately, fresh food doesn’t last as long as processed food. I portion out our foods and get them ready for the week. This way we can easily grab what we need instead of being tired after a long day at work and make a hasty decision to run through a fast food restaurant. This lifestyle is NOT easy and I would NEVER tell anyone it is. It takes determination, but the way I feel when I have our meals organized and know what I will be eating throughout the day, is the only way I can make this healthy lifestyle work for me. I force myself to input what I eat into my log, no matter if I go over my allotted calories for the day or not. This is what keeps me motivated. I also use the log to learn about myself. It enables me to see why I get off course because of what was going on with me at the time.

So there you have it. Now you understand a little bit why Janice is my hero! Be encouraged and inspired. If Janice can do it, you can too!

I find beauty in a great many things. The ever-changing canvas of the sky, for example, mystifies me. One moment, a deep and abiding blue, the next, a tidal wave of clouds on the horizon, and the next moment the blue is gone—eclipsed by billowing shades of gray. One would think the sun had been swallowed up. But no, it peers out through crevices and creates shafts of light, as if to say, “the blue was not enough and so I called in the clouds in order to paint a prettier portrait.” And all of this experienced on a drive home from some errand I was not fond of.

The tasks involved in living a healthy lifestyle can feel like those errands. Salad for lunch. Again. Elliptical machine of Doom. Again. Walking around the block. Again. Celery instead of donuts. Again. It’s enough to make one chuck in the towel and land in the White Castle drive-thru. Because the sweet reward one grasps between greasy fingers satisfies an itch. The chocolate shake meets a need. The fries and perfectly-dolloped-ketchup bring to fruition a ritual that elicits a certain sense of soul-satisfying comfort. What you crave, indeed!

But I would propose that such rituals are hollow. The food-addicted person experiences the temporary pleasure in the immediacy of that moment, but each indulgence becomes a weight that brings the body low. And not only the body…. For each stomach-expanding experience pierces the soul. The food-addicted person lives to eat but often dies with each bite.

And so we hold fast with one fist to the foods that are killing us while grasping for an inoculation to the waist-expanding epidemic for which we feel there is no cure. We drown and we die. And hope is extinguished with each savory bite. Unless…

…we let go of what is killing us and cling fast to what is good.

I had been “good” for many months when I encountered the cake at work. Beautifully frosted and mostly uneaten, it felt wasteful to leave it there. Alone. Dejected. Forlorn. At least that is how I perceived it. My thoughts had turned traitorous.

“You can eat just one piece. You have worked so hard. Indulge. Go ahead. You deserve it.”

And so I settled in with a piece. But when that piece was gone, and no one was looking, I went back for another. And then another. And then my thoughts, on fire with sugar-laden euphoria, grabbed a box and began stuffing it full of left-over cake to take home. Four hours later, and sick as a sugar-overdosed human being can be, I found myself searching the aisles of Walgreen’s (in despair) for a bottle of ipecac to purge the poison from my body. (Thank God I did not find it). I just felt so helpless.

So how does one let go of that self-destructive behavior yet find a semblance of peace?

We must disseminate the lies from truth, and then forcibly live the truth.

This is not easy. The psychological issues surrounding addiction are buried deep within that squiggly gray mass that resides atop our obstinate bodies. Probing that sponge is like wading into the ocean of our issues. We stick a toe in and immediately withdraw. The water is ice cold! But I would posit that unless we persist, we perish. Unless we confront the why behind our addiction and start slicing off the heads of that beast as it rears and snaps, we will forever be under its power. We may find success for a moment—we may even reach our “goal”—but we will invariably collapse beneath the weight of the chains that bind us. And so…

If we are to rid ourselves of the addiction that is killing us, we must replace it with something else. The heart was not created to be a void. For many, this is the rub to reducing girth. I remember when vegetables and fruit were abhorrent. Lean meats provoked a gag reflex. But I knew the only way to live a healthy lifestyle was to stop consuming foods and pursuing habits that harmed my body—no matter what.

Developing healthy habits was very challenging, but I approached it with the attitude that the change would be permanent. Then I went on an adventure to re-learn how to eat. This is not unlike learning to ride a bike(I’m slow so it took me a REALLY long time to learn). Now, I don’t drink soda, and guess what? I don’t miss it. I do not consume fried foods and I do not miss them. French fries no longer have dominion over me, but there was a time not too long ago that a meal was not a meal unless it contained fries and soda. I spent decades in that dungeon. And I’ll be candid, I would rather cut off my own tongue than go back to that God-forsaken place.

Portia De Rossi describes her struggle with anorexia in the book, “Unbearable Lightness”. Her desire to fit a specific standard of beauty drove her to madness and nearly killed her. Karen Carpenter was not so lucky, and we lost a beautiful voice. Why do we fall in love with the lies? Why do we twist ourselves into pretzels to conform to the ever-shifting perceptions of beauty in our culture?

The lies have power because we are hungry for beauty, and so how we assimilate beauty into our lives is important.

Dean Koontz wrote book called, “A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie”. In it, he describes life before, during, and after his friend. Everything that Trixie was, was beautiful. Her presence forever changed the Koontz’s lives.

“In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe. If we allow ourselves to be enchanted by the beauty of the ordinary, we begin to see that all things are extraordinary.” – Dean Koontz – A Big Little Life

Trixie brought such meaning and joy to the Koontz’s that the loss of her was unbearable. You see, once one has experienced real beauty, a false substitute will not do.

Addiction is ugly. Addiction is a cycle of lies. So in order to find our way out of the ugliness we must wage war with lies by way of beautiful truth.

Truth is beautiful because it sets us free.

Ask the pardoned convict who was wrongfully incarcerated. Or the addict who comes to understand his triggers. I like the way John Owen describes it in “The Nature of Indwelling Sin”, “For a man to find his sickness, and danger thereon from its effects, is another thing than to hear a discourse about a disease from its causes.” It’s one thing to sit in a classroom and learn about cancer, it’s a completely different experience to be diagnosed with it.

Beauty is the help we all secretly long for.

If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you might notice that many of the pictures I share are of nature. I am deeply inspired by the beauty in the world around me. We use our eyes to behold and absorb beauty. The intricacies of a cocoon, woven by a caterpillar that emerges as a butterfly is enough to fill the senses with wonder. But these types of beauty are not usually found by the casual eye. We must pay attention to our surroundings. We must seek them out. ANd when we do find them, they are marvelous. We simply have to train our eyes to find them.

The lie says, “Diets are miserable. I will have to eat food I don’t love.”

The truth says, “I don’t know how to make or even purchase tasty, healthful food.”

The lie says, “Salad is boring, vegetables are gross, and lean meats disgust me.”

The truth says, “I can try new salads, vegetables and meats until I find what I like.”

The lie says, “The perfectly-shaped body will make me happy.”

The truth says, “There is no such thing as a perfect body”.

Beauty is never boring.

The truth is beautiful because it is tangible. The truth is our only hope of ever breaking free from addictive behaviors. Once we are brave enough to expose the lies we believe—the lies we tell ourselves and others—and embrace the beautiful truth, the sooner we can begin to experience lasting change.