What Gaining (and Losing) 80 lbs Taught Me About Nourishment, Power, and Coming Home to My Body

Between 2021-2022, I gained 80 lbs.

If you have been following me since then… you remember how public I was about my journey.

If you haven’t been following me since then, it’s important to know that this weight gain did not just happen “randomly”. It happened on the heels of me realizing that I had been unconsciously under-eating for a lot of my life, and it happened as a result of me actually beginning to feed myself properly for the first time.

Since then… I have learned SO MUCH through direct experience about food, my body, my health, and how to relate to weight… and I want to share some of those learnings with you! Because there are DEFINITELY some things I would have done differently.

This entire journey began for me after I had done some routine clairvoyant energy work on my physical birth.

It’s a topic I have worked the energy of many times… and could keep working the energy of it because it is so rich with transformation and healing.

Using my clairvoyance I reset the energy between my mother’s umbilical cord and my baby body from one of malnourishment to nourishment, and shortly after that, I had the realization that I had been treating my body in the exact same energy signature I had observed in that umbilical cord!

My body had been begging for nourishment: calories, nutrient dense foods (cue the nut butter binging)… and I had unconsciously been ignoring her. I couldn’t hear her. Even though I was all about embodiment at the time and had been doing all the psychic work and therapy.

I had been unconsciously under-feeding myself, in terms of quantity of food/calories and in terms of quality of food (protein, nutrient dense food, adequate amount of carbs).

This all started to change in the physical world after this energy work (as above, so below), and it was a HUGE ancestral healing moment for me.

I remember how many family member spirits started coming to me at that time… ones who had been stuck in famine, poverty, and patriarchal oppression… and ones who were far, far back and carried goddess wisdom. Those ones in particular wanted to remind me to come home to my female body, to treat her with kindness, to remember that she was worthy of nourishment.

I began a deep shedding and release of heavy patriarchal programming, and as I gained weight, for the first time in my life… I dropped out of the male gaze. I was no longer attractive to most men. It was surprisingly, insanely freeing.

I also began a quite haphazard journey of eating more food and eating a variety of different foods that I hadn’t eaten in a long time. Looking back… this is where I see I could have done something differently if I was to do it again!

First off, I did all of this way too fast. In reflecting I can see how I started my re-feeding journey from a place similar to a trauma response.

I was honestly shocked that I had had all of this food stuff hiding in my subconscious, and so I started to eat again from a place of shock. Not a slow, steady rhythm but more of a frantic, oh my god— I am seriously underweight, how did this happen— kind of vibe.

It was excruciating to come out of starvation. I remember how the first two months I was hungry every other hour.

My hunger signals started coming online again, and my body was very, very hungry. I could barely keep up with the food intake.

This is actually a natural part of coming out of starvation. But it was unnerving, and I didn’t have much if any support. I did not have someone guiding me who had been through this journey. I was really doing it all on my own in a lot of ways. I knew of some other women who were on similar journeys… but if I could do it all over again, I would definitely find someone who could help me slowly and intentionally walk this path.

I also stumbled into a lot of diet culture stuff.

In an attempt to let go of food fear, because I had previously been operating from a lot of “purity” programming with regards to food… meaning I was severely dysregulated whenever there was not an organic option available, and I would choose to not eat if there wasn’t “healthy” enough food available… I began eating non-organic food and foods that scared me. I ate Fruit Loops again (my favorite childhood cereal). I ate Wendy’s.

There is something to be said about how this helped me face my fears and neutralize those foods… and it was simply not the kind of nourishment my body needed at the time. I didn’t fully realize this at the time, but my metabolism was struggling quite a bit, and the extra additives and all those kinds of things in that kind of food was further taxing my body overall, not helping her.

I did start to eat quite a bit of nutrient dense foods, and for the most part, those things did help. Eating more protein has deeply supported my blood sugar regulation and so many other processes in my body. Eating a balanced meal (which, I am not sure how I was never taught how to properly combine protein, carbs, and fat and why this is not just necessary information everyone knows) also really helped. Simply eating more and eating balanced meals have helped my body feel so much better and way safer. Food is simply put: fuel!

Aaaand, something that I didn’t know then that I know now is that my body’s histamine bucket started to overflow when I started to include more high histamine foods into my diet (a lot of these like bone broth and sauerkraut are seen as popular nutrient dense, healthy foods).

These foods are great, but my body needed way slower intake of them because I had likely already been dealing with histamine issues because of other imbalances going on like adrenal fatigue and estrogen dominance.

I remember when I started to lose weight. It was July 2023, and my weight had plateaued for about 6-8 months.

At my heaviest I was 194 lbs.

I had genuinely come to a place of peace and acceptance with my body at this size, and I trusted that my body was going to rebalance.

I had known from researching about this process that my body would gain weight until she felt safe and like food was no longer a scarce resource, and then she would start gradually losing weight until arriving at my set weight, which is the weight that is perfect for my genetics and bodily design.

All I needed to do was keep eating, keep walking and just carry on, essentially. Which is what I did.

I changed nothing about my diet or exercise (which at the time included daily walks and the occasional very light strength training), and my body started to drop 3-4 pounds every month. For awhile. Until I arrived at around 140-135 lbs, which she stayed at for awhile.

Losing weight was interesting. When I was gaining weight, there was so much social stigma I had to navigate. Many people in my life, from family to longtime mentors, questioned my weight gain and told me I had “really let myself go”.

Obviously this was painful, and once I processed the pain that it brought up for me… I could also see how my weight gain was triggering so many people around me because it was triggering their own social programming.

As a woman to choose to trust my body and be okay with the weight gain, instead of seek to control it and make myself smaller… was a direct challenge to patriarchal systems of power.

It was a dismantling of my own internalized patriarchal narrative that said my body was really for men. She was to be manicured and contorted in order to attract and serve men.

What I want to know is why is society so afraid of a heavyset woman? A woman who takes up space?

My weight gain became a reclamation of my body becoming mine again. Of me taking up space in my own body and in my world.

Since losing weight, of course, I have gotten the comments from people about “how good I look”.

It was a strange and surprising journey back into the land of the male gaze. I remember hanging out at the river with a friend last summer, and I was naked, and a few men were hitting on me. I was like, oh? Men find me attractive again. Their attention no longer carried the same weight that it once had for me.

I hadn’t realized how performing for the male gaze had been running so much in the background until it no longer became available. My worth was no longer tied to whether I could attract men.

And then I went through a deeper dive into some health issues that arose last Fall. It was like my body had said: I am so happy you are finally listening… here are all these things I have been trying to tell you for your entire life.

It was rough and shook me up (as Uranus was squaring the ruler of my 6th house of health at the time, of course). I cleared out more layers of not being able to hear my body, and I started to get to the root of what my body needs to truly thrive, energetically and physically.

I also lost 15-20 lbs quite rapidly around this time because of diet changes.

For a brief moment, I wandered into the land of “low carb” because I was scared and didn’t know what was happening in my body, and this was promised as the answer. I quickly learned that this would not be the magical solution for me, and in fact, would cause further harm to my already severely depleted adrenals.

It felt devastating to return to being underweight again, and ironically or unironically, I have had to learn to love and accept the body that I started this whole journey out with 4 years ago. But now, I am armed with much more integrated wisdom to support her in coming back to her set weight and a state of deep, cellular nourishment. More slow and steady this time around :)

I have started and stopped writing this update many times this past year.

Mostly I have just not been ready because I have been living it. I wanted space for it all to settle more. And also mostly because there is just… so much here. I could write a book and maybe one day I will. This journey has been unbelievably rich, and I feel wealthy coming out of the other side of it with invaluable life experience and learning made through trial and error.

Some things I want to mention as I share the details of my journey with you.

First, I want to let you know that I am very open to questions about my process.

Something I have learned throughout all of this is that a vast majority of women are chronically under-fed. It is honestly an epidemic. It is rare in my experience to come into contact with a woman who eats the full amount that her body needs.

So many women snack and don’t eat breakfast and then maybe have one full meal throughout the day. You can be perceived as skinny or fat and still have this issue.

If this is you, please know that I am not judging you for this. I am simply writing this to raise more awareness about how the patriarchy lives in our habits and how we treat ourselves. How ancestral trauma lives in our habits and how we treat our bodies.

If all of us were modeled by our mothers how to eat and nourish and value our precious vessels, this would not be happening at the rate that it is. But we don’t live in a world where that knowledge has been passed down. I don’t blame anyone for this.

Secondly, my journey is MY journey. What has been right for my body has been right for my body. That does not mean that it will be right for your body!

I can’t tell you the amount of people who over the years have tried to convince me that their way is THE way. That what worked for their body will work for all bodies. It’s not true. We are all so incredibly unique. I don’t want to fall into that trap of assuming everyone is like me even as I share my story and hope some of you resonate with it.

It can be so easy to become dogmatic about food and health in particular… and I am just not interested in that anymore. There are many roads to the truth; there are many roads to health, wellness, and nourishment.

If you see a part of yourself in my journey, I hope that this inspires you!

If this inspires you to listen more to your own body’s hunger signals and feed her more consistently, I couldn’t feel more honored. Please learn from my mistakes!!!! As a 3/5 in Human Design, I am quite literally here to experiment like crazy in the material world and then share with you what I have learned. ;)

This entire experience has only ever been leading me closer to myself and my ability to communicate consciously and kindly with my own body.

I have learned how to let go of so much self-hatred and downright mean and invalidating social stories in order to arrive at a deeper self-love and attunement to my physical self than I have ever had or had modeled to me.

I know that this deeper attunement to my body and her hunger and fullness cues will serve me for the rest of my life.

It helps me be a better partner and friend, and it will also be the foundation for my attunement to my child if I choose to become a mother.

So much can be solved from simply eating when you are hungry and eating enough until you are full.

Sounds so simple, but easier said than done in the complex web of social programming our first chakra information usually rests within. (Your first chakra being the energy center that is responsible for your survival and things like food, rest, exercise, water, etc).

Finally, I have learned so much about power through this experience.

How we as women give our power away to patriarchal ideals at the expense of our own health and wellness. How we center men in our lives and in our relationship with our own bodies. How it’s possible to reclaim your power and center yourself and your own well-being in your life instead. How liberating and more authentic it is to lead a life like that. How food can become the site upon which all of this plays out.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for witnessing my story.

Whether you’ve been here for years or this is the first time you are reading about my wild adventures in this arena! It’s truly an honor to be witnessed in this by you.