Exploring the Benefits and Challenges of Mindful Eating: A Personal Journey

I am Shawn. A Hispanic-Irish American who has struggled with my weight my whole life. I was that girl who always chased after solutions to be free from the burden of being overweight. I want to share my journey with through this blog to inspire, and help you overcome the struggle I endured my whole young adult life.

My goal is to help you see you are not alone and to show you that there is a hope and freedom through mindful eating.

Food, a familiar guest

My story starts in early childhood and it starts with food. As the daughter of a Hispanic mother, every memory of my childhood is surrounded by food. I remember large buffets at family gatherings with Cuban black beans, amazing pork, rice, and croquetas, and tasty pastelitos.

After dinner, we enjoyed espresso and endless conversations around the table with my siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Everything in my life revolved around food and I had a very good appetite.

mindful eating is done with community

Fear of being skinny

I also remember my grandmother always making sure I ate because she was afraid I was too skinny. Later in life, I learned from my mother that my grandmother thought that chubby children was a sign of healthy children, but this is a common belief in the Latino community.

Like many, as I grew older, I constantly battled being on the overweight. Thus began my journey to defeat the battle of being overweight.

Met with Consistent Failure

By my teenage years, I became obsessed with dieting. I tried everything imaginable, from weekly check-ins at Weight Watchers, to eating microwaveable food from Jenny Craig in college. I also experimented with various diets such as keto, paleo, intermittent fasting, to veganism, to plant-based, gluten-free. You name it, I tried it and I never found the freedom my soul craved. 

In addition to dieting, by my mid twenties, I then became a gym rat and was training daily for Olympic-length triathlons. All in an effort to lose weight. You would think I got thin… I didn’t. To be honest, I wasn't healthy either.

I tried crazy hacks of bulletproof coffee, high-fat diets, low-fat diets, high-protein diets, carb cycling, juice cleanses and detoxes and I never broke 160 pounds. When my body began to breakdown and give up on the countless lifestyles I tried, I would instantly see my weight climb back up, always ending heavier than when I started. 242 pounds was the heaviest I had ever been. I remember the failure I felt for years. It was a deep ache, like my heart sank below my stomach.

How did I not have control over this one thing?

I had more than insecurity. I believed I would never, could never accomplish my biggest dreams. I believed that I would never have the discipline, integrity, or character to be the best version of myself because I couldn't control this one thing. Mentally, I felt this scripture Paul stated in the Bible,

  “Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.  Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” 1 Corinthians 12:7-9. 

My thoughts since weight loss

I felt the burden of my weight so deeply, and it truly kept me humble. I had to overcome my insecurities of feeling good enough, of believing I was beautiful before I saw the weight loss.

And so in a way, I am grateful because the struggle really made me humble about physical beauty. Now that this struggle has been lifted, I see the bigger picture of what God was doing.

He helped me seek Him through the deepest desires of my heart. This was a deep desire, and it felt like it was meant to happen for me. Looking back, I see that it was God's plan, but it wasn't just about the scale. It was about the woman as a whole.

And here we are now 

What is this freedom that I have found that I feel called to share?I learned to stop obsessing over my weight and watch God bless me with the weight loss I had sought my whole teenage and young adult life by learning my body's cues. I am blessed to have broken up with the world’s ideas of weight loss and found permanent weight loss.

The freedom I found allows me to eat what I love. This freedom allows me to understand what works and what doesn't work for me. My purpose is to help others discover this freedom without carb counting, restricting, or being afraid to eat that scoop of ice cream, piece of chocolate or slice of pizza.

It allows me to focus on what really matters in my life: my faith, my husband and kids, and figuring out how to run an online business.

My prayer is that you find the freedom I found. I pray that you find the success I found and take it to your dreams. My blog posts are meant to inspire you, and set you on a path away from where the noise of the diet industry leads and takes you to true freedom. 

I hope you found your vision for yourself. I will see you next week. God Bless.