For the first time, I didn’t see my body as an enemy or a shell, but as me.
And then, I lost weight.
A year of slow, sustainable change. Suddenly, I was at the place I had imagined my whole life.
I shopped for fun. I shared clothes with friends. I stopped crying in dressing rooms. I no longer needed a boatload of self-talk just to get dressed.
But something unexpected happened.
I thought losing weight would be the key—that it would unlock all the stuck and stalled parts of my life. That seeing that magic number on the scale would make me fearless, shameless.
But I found out something shocking: that number changes nothing.
If you’re not chasing this fantasy, you’re chasing another.
If it’s not your body, it’s your bank account.
If it’s not your bank account, it’s your résumé.
Or your nose. Or your car. Or the perfect marriage. Or the perfect child.
For years, I believed that if I could just control this one thing, my life would bloom like a perfect flower.
But when I arrived at my “goal,” I realized: my life was still my life.
And I was still me.
Certainly, I felt joy. But I also learned there’s no such thing as “skinny enough.”
There’s no magic number that makes you safe. That makes you worthy.
That, I found, was something else entirely.
I became confident at first in a cheap way—by shrinking into smaller pants.
But soon, I needed the real thing: peace.
Peace with how I was made. Peace with my body. Peace with life itself.
And that took a whole new language.
Yoga helped. It connected my body and spirit—helped me be in my body rather than fight it.
I had to relearn food, silence, judgment, walking.
I had to “starve the emptiness and feed the hunger.”
But the biggest change wasn’t in my body.
It was in my eyes.
For the first time, I stopped looking at myself with cruel, critical eyes.
I will always carry the shame of being too big at 10, at 15, at 25.
But I also carry something else:
A deep understanding that the number on the scale never tells the full story.
**This excerpt originally appeared in Shauna Niequist’s best-selling book, Cold Tangerines.
***You can purchase her newest book, Present Over Perfect, on Amazon.
