Writing my way to losing 100 lbs

When the going gets tough the tough get writing

Happiness on my balcony. All photos by Kerstin Martin.

Dear friends,

I am writing to you from my new Substack page! I imported all my blog posts and your email addresses and you don’t have to do anything if you want to keep receiving my blog posts. If you’d rather unsubscribe you can do so easily via the footer of my emails.

What I love about Substack is that it puts the focus firmly on writing. Which, after all, is what this journey is all about! I love the ease with which I can compose and publish a blog post that is then automatically sent to my subscribers as a newsletter. I also enjoy the community aspect that makes it easy to subscribe to other people’s content, making my inbox feel like a happy, more connected place. Finally, I love the simplicity of the platform’s interface and how clean and uncluttered it is. It’s a bit like the good old blogging days but with more advanced technology. I hope you like it, too!

As I was setting up my Substack account it asked me for a one-line description and that made me pause. I’ve never found it easy to come up with the notorious elevator speech, let alone one sentence to describe what I do, or what something is about. My tagline on my old blog was “weight loss from the inside out” but that did not feel right anymore for this space. It’s funny how we can obsess over something as simple as a tagline! I played around with it for a couple of days when it finally hit me: between my journaling and blogging I am writing my way to losing 100 lbs! And what that really means is I need and want to write more.

In some ways this discovery of Substack feels quite serendipitous. Anyone who’s followed me for a long time knows how much I’ve struggled with this journey, it’s been very up and down. Right now I am in the down spiral of resistance and last suppering, but I can feel myself getting close to the familiar point of “Enough, I need to get back on track!” And I am going to write myself out of this.

Blogging on my balcony 🌻

Love my herbs!

Yesterday I listened to an interesting podcast interview between Amy Porterfield and Ed Mylett. Ed is a self-made millionaire who’s a bit too ‘bro’ for me, but he’s actually a very smart and humble guy who shared some great insights about how our identity is at the core of any changes we want to make.

I’ve talked about the concept of identity before and he basically confirmed what others have been saying for a long time: no matter what we do, if we don’t change our identity so that it’s in alignment with our goals, we will never get there. He gave a good analogy:

“Your identity is the thoughts, concepts, and beliefs you hold to be most true about you. It is like a thermostat sitting on the wall of your life. It sets the temperature. So let's just take success, financial success. You're a seventy-five degree-er in your own worth. And now you've got all the tools and the skills you've been learning and you're learning how to make this stuff happen. But then you’re like, “Oh, it's overwhelming.” It's you trying to turn the air conditioner on for your life and cooling it back down to what you believe you deserve. You're not overwhelmed. You're creating that emotion because you're starting to exceed your identity. And so there's two parts of success. You've got to learn the tools and tactics of success, and you've got to learn to increase your identity simultaneously because you will never long term exceed your internal identity. You will eventually turn the air conditioner on and cool it right back down […] It's the air conditioner of your unconscious mind cooling your life back down.”

Darn.

Spot of journaling by the sea.

My resistance is basically the air conditioner that’s cooling me right back down to my internal identity level. Every time, without fail, for decades.

So what do I do? How do I evolve my identity so that the changes I want to make are supported by what I believe about myself?

Ed suggests that “the trilogy of identity is faith, intention, and association. If you have faith, carry it with you, focus on your intention, and associate yourself with people who are achieving at a higher level.”

As someone who identifies as agnostic the faith part is tricky for me. Association is also something I struggle with as I just don’t know any people in my ‘real life’ who have evolved their identity like this in their late 50s and 60s. That leaves intention and that’s probably where I am closest, my intention is definitely there. I don’t believe that Ed’s trilogy is neccessarily the be-all and end-all of identity evolution but he has nonetheless given my some valuable reframing and lots of food for thought to write about, both here and in my journal.

Writing my way to losing 100 lbs - well, 75 to be correct, I have kept off a 25 lbs loss for the last two years - feels good in my bones. In some strange way, given the regression we are currently experiencing in the US with regards to women’s rights, writing and sharing about this journey almost feels like an act of defiance, too. Diet culture is yet another patriarchal construct to control us and our bodies, and boy, have we gotten ourselves tangled up in that net! Just imagine if we all ditched diet culture for good and not only loved and accepted ourselves and our bodies as we are, but also healed our emotional wounds and took extraordinary care of our precious bodies because this world needs us to feel strong, confident and relevant?

More food for thought for sure.

Have a lovely weekend!

Kerstin xo