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Initial Weight: 240.6
Current Weight: 227.2
Current BMI: 32.6
Weight Lost: 13.4 pounds

I like to feel.

My favorite feeling is yearning. Yearning is so often vilified. We call it anxiety. We try to medicate it away, talk it away, or deny it altogether. So rarely do we allow ourselves to tangle in its silken barbs.

Yearning is associated with loneliness. Yet loneliness is anguished, desolate. Yearning aspires to unite with its object, to be drawn more deeply into communion. We may see a snowfall, a windswept hill, the curve of a shoulder and instantly pulse with awareness that what we are witnessing is beautiful. We tremble, yet the trembling is pleasurable. We feel both buoyed and bereft.

Yearning, the metaphysical, is closely aligned with another feeling: physical hunger. In order to diet successfully, you have to make your peace with hunger. When we first begin to restrict calories, the body screams. The mind, shocked by the body’s outrage, scrambles to satisfy its demands. Before we know it, we have “cheated.” Dejected and ashamed, we abandon our aspirations to health and retreat down the heavily trodden path of indulging the body at the body’s expense.

I am hungry, yet I feel peaceful. Like a spectator I feel myself immersed in hunger without being compelled to eat. A fragile thing, this truce between flesh and spirit. At any moment the body may rear and reclaim its captaincy; the mind’s resolve may wither. But in this moment, I have chosen to feast on yearning, and as I peel back its outer skin, feel its grainy nourishment on my tongue, I revel in the droplets of desire that gather on my lips.