The Easiest 50 Pounds I Ever Lost

Two years ago, I had this picture in my head.
Me, turning 50.
Fifty pounds lighter. Stronger. Clearer. Definitely more confident.

My life was sliding off the rails, and I had almost no control over any of it. So I set a challenge: lose 50 pounds by 50.

No shots, no diet food, starvation, or bullshit.

But to do it right this time, I had to rebuild the foundation. Because the truth is, I never really had a fair shot at seeing myself clearly.

When I was a little girl, my father called me "Jelly Belly". He was the kind of broken and sick who got off on being cruel.

I wasn’t even close to fat.

I’d just won our state beauty pageant, had nationals on the horizon, and spent my days bouncing between music and dance lessons.

By every outside measure, I was killing it.

But his voice was louder than my accomplishments, and I spent years chasing the moment I might finally be enough. That nickname burrowed into my subconscious and became the voice in my head.

The worst part was that I believed him.

The actual truth was that I was surviving things that no child should have to. I didn’t gain weight until after he was gone. Unconsciously, I was creating a shield between me and everything that had hurt me.

Lord knows the culture didn’t help. I came of age in the 90s, when ribs and hip bones were accessories.

I already hated my reflection, and here was the world telling me starvation was something to aspire to.

By age 25, I had hit 200+ pounds during pregnancy.

It wasn’t until my daughter was a toddler that I finally came to my senses. I didn’t want her to grow up thinking the way I looked and felt was normal.

So I joined the diet program everyone swore by. I counted every point, took up running, and the weight dropped.

But little by little, I began losing myself as well.

I wasn’t eating real food - I was living on low-point frozen meals and sugar-free, fat-free everything. I always turned down my grandmother’s homemade meals for artificial crap.

I'm still heartsick over that.

The thinner I got, the more compliments I received. People noticed me.

After years of feeling invisible, my God, it was intoxicating.

It felt like power. Like safety.

It wasn’t.

Everything fell apart, all at once: three immediate family deaths (two of them just ten days apart), followed by a close friend's, then an assault.

It was all too much to process, and all the years I'd spent ignoring my hunger cues came back to bite me in the ass - I went full unhinged.

I'd go from not eating at all to devouring bowls of peanut butter until I was crying and couldn't stop, terrified of myself. Then I tried purging to undo it.

But I knew I couldn't live like that, so I found a good counselor and found my way out of that hell.

Eventually, things finally began to look up. I met my now-husband, The Balkan Storm.

He's a former D.C. chef who cooks ridiculously good food (I'm not blaming him, bless him), but going from point-counting to eight-course tasting menus was a bigger adjustment than I expected.

Then came surgeries and early menopause. I quit running. I gained weight and told myself I was just getting older.

Then we became emergency guardians to two wildly athletic kids, and I realized fast: I'm going to have to keep up.

So I started walking our winding country roads every morning. Just me, the trees, and the thoughts in my head.

That's where the 50 by 50 idea came from. In what felt like the wildest experiment of my life, I committed to one radical idea: trusting myself.

It was literally the one thing I hadn't tried.

I needed to trust that I could eat real food and my ass wouldn't cartoonishly expand the second I ingested it. (And yes, I absolutely thought that.)

But first, I had to deal with my biggest problem: my lying little bitch of a brain.

"You have no self-control anymore.”
“You’re too old for this now.”
“Your genetics screwed you. Just accept it."

I decided to try to prove myself wrong this time.

I didn’t do a massive overhaul of all my habits - that never worked before. Instead, I started with one decision at a time.

First, I got off diet soda by approaching it as, "see how long you can go without before you cave".

I still haven't broken that streak.

Then whole foods: I ate them when I was hungry, stopped when I wasn’t. I cut out the processed stuff.

Groundbreaking, right? But if you know, you know.

I moved more. A short walk counted. Fifteen minutes on the treadmill counted. All of it counted.

If I ate more than usual or had something more indulgent, I didn’t write off the day and eat all the things like I used to.

I just started again at the very next meal.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t punishing my body - I was partnering with it. And before my 50th birthday, I surpassed that goal without dieting.

I'm proud of the numbers, but I’m more proud of how I got there.

The other day, I pulled my wedding dress out for the first time in a decade.
It’s too big now, and I love that, because I got to that point safely.

My relationship with food is healthy, and my head is clear.

But I’d be lying if I said it was perfect, 'cause frankly, I’m also kinda pissed.

First, thanks to spectacular genetics, my cholesterol is still high. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, eat clean most days, and yet, here we are.

(Yes, I'm dealing with it. No, I don't need your cousin's red yeast rice recipes, thanks.)

Second, major weight loss permanently changes your body, and I’m left with the physical traces of someone who no longer exists.

That's my poetic way of saying I have a little loose skin. Which is a mindfuck when you also have a thigh gap and definition for the first time. Make it make sense.

But what pisses me off most is knowing this life could've been mine all along.

If I had trusted myself sooner.
If I'd spent less time hating my reflection and more time listening to my body.
If I hadn’t stayed so long in cycles that someone else profited from.

It took me long enough to figure it out. You don't have to take nearly as long.

Heather Papovich is the voice behind Unfinished Business. She's seen some things. She'll tell you about them.