If I Could Just Fix My Weight

Then everything else will fall into place 👀

In 2009, as my first marriage was falling apart, I believed, on some deep, unshakable level, that it was because I was unlovable.

Not because the relationship had run its course. Not because I was hurting or lost or grieving.

But because I didn’t have my shit together.
Because I didn’t look the way I thought I should.
Because I was consumed, daily, hourly, by thoughts about my weight.

It felt like a moral failing. Like if I could just fix that, then maybe everything else would fall into place.

Back then, I didn’t know I was in distress. I thought I was just failing.

Eventually, I found my way to a therapist who was also an eating distress practitioner, affiliated with the Marino Therapy Centre, Dublin.

I was hoping for a plan, a fix, a way out of myself.

Instead, she offered something radical: an invitation for me to just be a human.

Not a project. Not a problem. Just present with my pain.

And a question:

Who is Amanda, apart from all that; the weight, the eating, the dieting, the trying to fix it all?

I didn’t know. I literally had no idea. None.

She gave me a copy of Marie Campion’s book, Hope, and I devoured it. For the first time, someone was naming the thing I had never been able to articulate:

Not low self-esteem, but the total absence of it.

What I’d always known was more than insecurity, but had no language for; I now know to be self-erasure. An unconscious belief that I didn’t deserve to take up even an ounce of space more in this world, than was prescribed.

That my only hope of acceptance was to shrink, to disappear my unruly self, to become more palatable; physically and emotionally.

This is what Jacqueline Campion and I spoke about on this week’s episode of The Road Back Home.

She and her family have been carrying the work of the Marino Therapy Centre for over 30 years and their message is as clear as it is radical:

Eating distress isn’t a food problem. It’s a human conditioning.

Not a disorder to be pathologised, but a cry from a person who has lost touch with their own worth, their own inner life, their own right to exist as they are.

That framing changed everything for me.

From my art journal: Lyrics to my song ‘loveable’ & me on guitar

It planted the seed of my life-long learning how to stop performing ‘thinness’ and start pursuing healing. To stop chasing control and start cultivating compassion.

It was the earliest whisper of my greatest reckoning and a beckoning back to my worthy self.

That’s what I hope this episode does for you too.

Not just if you’ve ever struggled with food, but if you’ve ever struggled with feeling like you matter.

If you’ve ever tried to earn your worth through thinness, through perfection, through performance.

If you’ve ever wondered why it feels so hard just to be in your own skin.

I don’t have all the answers. But I know this:

You are not a problem to be fixed.
You are a person to be held.

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Jacqueline Campion here 👇🏼

You can also watch it on YouTube

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📩 DO THE WORK

If this particular topic stirs something in you & you’d like to do some reflective journaling afterwards, I recommend trying the exercise offered in the ‘Do The Work’ section in post below

[you will need to be a paid subscriber to access it] 👇🏼