Letters to my Body

Simple conversations—with my inner thighs and other body parts.

In my twenties, I started a new kind of orgy: the self-help kind. I obsessively read books, attended courses, seminars, retreats, and all sorts of therapies. People around me thought it was too much; I didn’t care. No one was coming to save me; I had to do that myself.

To weigh 350 pounds is no small thing. Losing 200 of them isn’t either. There’s no telling who I’d be without that chunk of my story. Pound by pound, I peeled away the layers and revealed what was trapped in my fat; good and bad.

On my journey, I encountered many plateaus; I didn’t like them. I feared they meant my weight would not continue to go down, or worse would go back up. They happened often enough that I had to accept them as the necessary evils for my results to be long-term and for my nervous system to adjust to its new normal.

At minus eighty pounds, with 100 or more to go, I continued doing what I’d done before: ate less, moved more, and felt my feelings; yet my weight wasn’t budging. I hit one of those plateaus and shared my frustration with my friend Paul, who offered up, “Your body created your fat in the first place, it knows how to let it go.”

A new thought entirely. 

Paul often altered my whole inner worldview in one single conversation. He proceeded to describe this exercise:

“Communicate with each of your body parts for two weeks at a time, writing out questions with your dominant hand, and answering with the other.”

I could see how that might yield some wisdom.

This ten-minute journal process was to be self-administered and self-monitored; no weekly sessions, no one checking in, no group to report to.

 14 days x (x body-parts) (with x being ≥ 71) = 994 days (±3 years)

It took me longer to accumulate the current body fat mass, so I guess I should be willing to commit 10 minutes a day for the next three years.

±3 years × 10= ± 9,940 mins.

Paul, if I do my self-help work and no one is there to witness 9,940 minutes of it, does it still make me better? I said, not out loud.

I had started a company called Made in Paper, designing greeting cards for large companies. The business was very lucrative. I could do it from home, while my daughter was in school, and my consultant-husband was away, traveling several weeks out of every month. I had the time and money to focus on self-discovery. 

As soon as Paul gave me my assignment, knowing that being happy was an active verb, not a passive state, I drove to the art store. Proper gear is everything. I scored the perfect journal with the anatomy of a body on the cover, and the perfect red and blue pen.

When I got home, I grabbed my equipment, lit a candle, took a few breaths, and sat there waiting for something to happen. I felt stupid; not convinced we would have anything to say to each other. My body was a foreign entity: my head at the top to host my thinking and my feet at the bottom to take me places. What happened in between was a combination of annoying needs and crazy out-of-control behaviors, predominantly involving sex and food — both complicated and often disappointing activities — so focusing on what was between my head and feet was no picnic.

But I trusted Paul, so I gave it a minute.

Turns out my body had a plan, even if I didn’t: it wanted to begin with the flabbiest part of my arms, between elbows and pits; all women in my family have and hate that chunk. I’d made a vow never to show mine in public. So that was the perfect place to begin. My body and I actually agreed on something. That was a good start.

“Why are you so chubby?” I asked in blue with my right hand. To my surprise, my left took the pen, switched to red, and answered clumsily, “I am the exact result of how you do life.” Switched back to right and blue, I said, “How can I get rid of you?” and again, left and red took over, “Love us more, treat us better.” And that went on for ten minutes a day for two weeks.

I would select my next body part — or it would select me — and we would check it off from the anatomy cover when done.

My weight was going down. I was feeling less of a pull towards junk food. I was eating more consciously. It seemed like giving my body a chance to speak made it less capricious. Maybe the overeating really had been a cry for help. When I started listening, my body didn’t need to employ such drastic measures to get attention. I was determined to keep journaling.

One of the most potent conversations occurred four body parts and eight weeks into the process.

 “Fat-From-the-Inside-of-My-Right-Thigh, what purpose do you serve?” I wrote in blue and switched hands.

 “I am like a concentration camp tattoo,” my thigh replied in red, “the memory of where you came from. I am here to make sure you don’t forget.”

From walking on coals, I knew that this part of history was embedded in my cells; journaling with my thigh uncovered more. I sat there, tears rolling down my face, as I recalled my grandparents’ friends debating whether or not to have their camp tattoos removed. Those who did wanted to forget; those who didn’t wanted to remember. I definitively meant to honor that history but not carry its agony.

Right hand and blue pen took back the page.

“I hear you, Right-Thigh, can we do the remembering without the fat?” Back to left, and red, “We could do a weekly meeting to remind you,” it said.

I was mesmerized, wondering where this wisdom came from; but I was getting valuable intel — also there was a good chance I wasn’t going to solve right then and there the most unanswered question in the history of mankind: where does wisdom come from?

One time, my left shoulder suggested I stop eating eggs — my main source of protein. I disagreed. It insisted. I pushed back. It kept at it: I’d been administered a childhood vaccine on that shoulder, cultured in egg white, and I’d developed antibodies both to the vaccine, and the white, apparently. I took an allergy test and it checked out; now I only eat yolks.

I lost 20 pounds from this journal-writing practice but more importantly, my body and I became friends. I realized my corpus was an actual entity, with real needs, and I was in charge of it. The era in which my body would only be a means to carry my head around, had come to an end.

From journaling, I learned all sorts of hacking tricks: avoid liquids with food — as they dilute digestive enzymes; stay away from processed sugar —as they mess with my insulin; reduce stress — as that increases my cortisol; sleep more — as that gives my hormones a chance to rest; focus on gratitude — as that changes the alchemy of my brain; approach eating as a mindful act — as it’s not some irrelevant task to be done while watching TV.

This exercise taught me to feel gratitude for my body­ — this sacred vehicle that stuck by me, even when I kept slashing its tires and keying its doors. It’s easier to read cues from my actual vehicle — the car has lights that blink when it needs gas, wiper fluid, or a break change. It tells me exactly what to do and I do it: yellow if it’s important, red if it’s urgent — no blinking whatsoever when all systems are go.

My body doesn’t have a system of blinking lights; nothing goes red when I’m overtired, nothing flashes when I overeat, and unfortunately, nothing blinks when I’m in a toxic relationship. However, when it comes to my systems being go, regrettably, my car and I have something in common — no positive reinforcement whatsoever.

I’ve added cues to remind me to take care of myself — they don’t blink— but they catch my attention. I have a tattoo that says [matter] on my wrist, right where a concentration camp number would have been. Matter is what I’m made of; matter is what I find relevant. The word itself reminds me to drink water, take a nap, or call a friend.

I still journal with red and blue pens. I interviewed my stomach recently, no longer fitting into my favorite jeans. My left hand grabbed the pen and wrote, “Sweet Soph, you were just in Paris, where bread and cheese taste so much better,” and it added, “you just slept for a month in the very bed under which you used to stash your jars, in the house where trespasses were perpetuated.”

I smiled, thanked my stomach, and applied some love, knowing that would get me back in my jeans.