By Dina Aldabbagh

Five years ago, I wasn’t a very healthy person. Quite the opposite actually. Mentally, physically, spiritually, I was living a very unhealthy lifestyle and was on a concerning path. Luckily, by the grace of God really, I was shaken in my boots and I realized that if I didn’t change something immediately, I would soon be an entirely different person — someone I didn’t want to be. I was reflecting recently on how different my life, my mind, and my body looks to how it once did and my weight loss journey made me realize how much I love the unfolding — it’s like flirting with the future. 

Five years — that’s a long time. At that time, if you’d have told me that it’d take me as long as it has to lose weight, I’d be pissed. I would’ve said, “Absolutely not, I’m going to go so hard and change my body as quickly as possible.” Ha, that’s not what happened. Instead, I lost weight in bits and had very long periods of maintenance in between, thus why it’s taken me so long. I wasn’t actually mad about this though…surprisingly enough, I enjoyed all the stages. After every good chunk I lost, I was filled with new joy and excitement about who I now was. I reveled in every stage. I came into every new identity I embodied along the way. Eventually, I would adjust my eyeline once again and be prompted to keep pushing onward to my ultimate goal. 

However, it was in those maintenance stages that wrote in stone who I now am. In the slow changing of my identity and my habits, I was able to secure that I would never go back to being the girl I was once. Her habits are not my habits. Her thoughts are not my thoughts. I love her and I’m proud of her for having the strength to get me started, but I don’t want to be more like her, and in many ways, I couldn’t be more different. She would look at my lifestyle today and marvel, but still say, “that’s unrealistic.” But when you maintain a certain lifestyle for years at a time, you understand that actually, it’s not just realistic and very possible, but fun. You slowly fall in love with your new lifestyle, new habits, new identity, and you get used to it. When we’re in the slumps, we want to get out as fast as possible, of course. And I’m not even here to advise anyone to not try to sprint out of that place. Go, run, as fast you can from that unhealthy version of yourself. However, what I am telling you is that in reality, it’s going to take longer than you think. Ugh, hate to hear that, right. But it will. And what I’m telling you today is that is actually what we want. We don’t realize it until later, but it is. 

The easier path will often make your life a lot harder than just doing the hard work in the slow, monotonous way that it calls to be done. The long way is actually the shortcut. In reality, there are no shortcuts in life — not really — because you ultimately spend more time undoing the harmful things picked up in the “shortcut.” Maybe you want to lose 50 lbs in 3 months, so then you starve yourself. The consequence of that may just be that you pick up an extremely unhealthy and unbeneficial mindset around food that puts you into extremes — either eating too much or too little. 

And let me say, I’m not a doctor and I’m not telling anyone how much they are allowed to lose in a given time. If you can find a way to lose all the weight you want in the time you want that works for you, do it. You know yourself better than anyone else. What works for David Goggins won’t for many people, but it does work for him — based on the psyche he has from all his life experiences — so who am I to say he can’t do that? You get to choose what the best method for you is. I just know that oftentimes, an extreme ask calls for an extreme measure, and extremes ultimately harm us more than they help us. 

So, while you initially wanted to just lose weight quickly, you may have in turn picked up a really unproductive mindset that keeps you in a loop of gaining/losing and never being satisfied with your body or comfortable around food for years. It happens to people all the time. Whereas instead you could slowly lose the weight and enjoy the little increases in confidence as they come, and get used to all the habits you have to implement in order to be who you want to be with it not feeling like a chore. It can gradually become your lifestyle. You can enjoy the process. Let me emphasize that, you can enjoy the process. It’s actually quite fun.

As cheesy as it sounds, life is the journey, not the end result. Trust me, you do not want a quick story. I’m not talking about weight loss, I mean in everything. You think you want to be married, but what you really want is a love story. As much as you may be sitting there and yelling, “No, I want to be married now! It’s already taken way too long and I’m on a time crunch — too much time has been wasted,” you don’t actually want to just “be married.” You don’t want to go from utter singleness to now having to have all the responsibilities of a husband or wife. What you want is to experience seeing what people are like, to experience being sought after, to experience having friends, to experience innocence, playfulness, to experience excitement. Excitement comes from all the little moments that lead up. I think of ‘the moment before eating the honey,’ from Winnie the Pooh. Winnie says, “What I like best,’ and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.” Life is in those small moments before the thing. The thing itself is just the thing. But those moments before, where you get to feel things, think about things, discover your inner workings, self-reflect, and change, develop — that’s what we really want out of life. We want the experience. 

If you were to skip right to the end result of your desire, it would just feel like you were roughly tossed your meal at lunchtime and told to eat. “Here, now’s the time.” You want to be able to peruse the bakery windows, then look at the menus, to smell a few things, and then ultimately listen to your body to choose what the best, most beneficial meal is for that time. Partnership with the creator is what you want, not to be tossed around like, “Alright this is your story. This thing. Now this thing. Now this. Okay now here’s the climax. And this is the resolution. The end. Happy?” We don’t want bullet points, we want the emotion of every scene. We want to feel like active participants in our story. Life would be such a let down if you were given the end result without ever getting to experience the beauty of the unfolding. Rapunzul was locked up in a tower, with every need met except the freedom to discover. She wanted to see the world, to experience it, not just be kept in her lonesome tower and look at the wilderness from afar. 

Love at first sight is a fun idea, but the slow falling in love, the bit by bit, the one emotion, one experience at a time — that’s what we live for. That’s what makes life feel like it’s worth living. The slow becoming of who you want to be, that’s the fun part. It’s like flirting with the future. A little bit of excitement here, a little there, until the commitment comes and that’s the reality of who you are. The commitment is fun, but isn’t the buildup fun too? A new story will unravel when you get the “thing,” but the journey to the “thing” is a story in and of itself. When you’re working to be a certain person, those days where you experience a feeling or situation you’ve never experienced, they move you forward. You start to get motivated by your own story. Your own life inspires you to keep going. You fall in love with your new life slowly, and so you get longevity, you get stability. Development is more fulfilling than just having.

I’ll tell you where the pain comes in — it’s when you feel like you’re making no progress that you feel pressured to rush and make something happen. However, when you’re working towards something, there’s actually no rush. If you believe you are on the right path and this thing you’re working towards will in fact one day manifest, you don’t rush to the end; you enjoy the moment you have. You enjoy the stage you’re in. When you’re in college, you know you’re going to graduate. You let freshman year be freshman year, and enjoy sophomore year when it comes. You don’t rush to graduation because you know the fun is in your time at school. It’s in meeting people, going to club meetings, doing homework at the nearby cafes, falling in love with a specific place on campus. You’re not in a rush out because you know, “One day, I’ll graduate. I want to enjoy college.” Well, one day you’ll be married, so enjoy the dating. One day, your body will look exactly how you want, so enjoy the little wins. One day, your business will make $100,000, so enjoy the $30 sale.

You can enjoy the process as long as you feel like you’re progressing. If you believe that, life is just fun. There’s no rush. But when you feel like you’re getting a lot of false starts to life, in feeling that lack of a story, you feel so compelled to grab tightly onto any thread that seems to lead to an interesting future. I don’t have quick medication for this ailment, but I can tell you that if you start to pull on one thread at a time that seems to have a promising future, without putting too much pressure on it, you’ll feel the progress you need to feel in life. You’ll be able to enjoy the unfolding. 

People talk about romanticizing life all the time, that’s basically just the process of enjoying the little things in life to their fullest — i.e. the unfolding. Love the little wins. Love the little changes, the little developments. Be present in your story. What are you rushing off to? Death? Responsibility? Slow growth is fun growth, and the gentle changing of your identity and your life is what will give you the fulfillment you seek out of life.