My Weight Wasn’t The Problem: My Disconnection Was

For years, I believed my worth was tied to my body. I thought if I could just lose the weight, everything else would fall into place – my mood, my emotins, my thought patters, my sense of being enough. Like many women, I labeled nearly every uncomfortable emotion in my life as a problem with my body. If I felt rejected, lonely, unheard, or not good enough, the explanation felt obvious: it was my weight.

After losing more than 100 pounds, I discovered something that changed the trajectory of my life – and ultimately my work as a therapist.

My weight was not the problem.

My disconnection was.

Living on Autopilot

At my heaviest weight, I was pursuing my master’s degree in social work, immersed in learning about human behavior, trauma, and mental health. I was developing language to understand healing while remaining largely detached from my own emotional and physical experience. 

I was conceptualizing, but I was not yet embodying it in my own life.

Looking back, I can see that much of my life had been lived on autopilot, moving through life responding to the world through a detached version of myself. Disconnected from my body and emotions, my mind in overdrive, my nervous system regulating itself with food, distractions, and busyness.

Busyness became one of the most socially acceptable forms of disconnection. Stay productive and avoid slowing down long enough to notice what you are feeling – reinforcing the belief that your needs don’t deserve space. Our minds are incredibly powerful, but they can also become very effective places to hide.

Food had become my most reliable regulator. It temporarily soothed discomfort, quieted the negative thoughts, and filled the spaces where difficult emotions lived, but had never been fully named.

What was a lack of control on the outside was my nervous system coping with feelings I did not yet know how to navigate.

That cycle did not end with comfort – it turned into shame. I would criticize myself, feel frustrated, and reinforce the very narrative that kept me stuck and the pattern repeated.

For a long time, I thought I needed a harsher voice in my head – more discipline, more willpower, more control, more pressure.

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