Behind the Smile

Two refrigerators and a moment of clarity

I am the proud owner of not one, but TWO new refrigerators.

Here’s our new kitchen fridge (apparently this is how we find excitement in our 40s, folks):

We’ve got another one in our laundry room. How we got two new fridges is a long story that I will spare you from suffering through. But it started with family in town and my brother-in-law asking for some ice.

From there it turned into a full blown If You Give a Mouse a Cookie scenario… musical refrigerators, measuring mistakes, coolers everywhere, doors coming off hinges, a leaky water line, sawing off cabinetry. You get the idea.

When we finally got both fridges in place this morning, I had a moment to breathe and reflect…

How exactly did we get here?

Sometimes it takes being on the other side of the chaos, being out of the weeds, before you can really understand what happened.

That’s true with refrigerators. And it’s true with life.

A few years ago, I gained 75 pounds in a single year. That is drastic weight gain.

But while it was happening, I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t see clearly what was happening to my body or my life until it was already far along.

It took five more years before I finally hit rock bottom and got the help I needed through a GLP-1 medication.

And now that I’m on the other side of it, I can see things I couldn’t see back then.

I can see how miserable I was.

Gaining weight and living in an obese body changed who I was from the inside out. It slowly stole joy from my life. It made me feel powerless and out of control.

Now that I have that zoomed-out view and a GLP-1 working in my brain, I can see the full picture.

In so many photos from that time, I’m smiling. But behind every smile there were so many emotions. And the biggest one was shame.

One of the first moments during my year of gaining 75lbs where I realized my weight was slowing me down and holding me back.

Obesity is a disease. And over the past few years, I haven’t just shed the extra pounds I was carrying.

I’ve shed the weight of that shame too.

But something else has happened along the way. I’ve also gained the ability to be honest about what that time in my life actually felt like.

And that’s what today’s video is about.

In it, I talk about the hardest parts of being fat: the things I lived with every day but rarely admitted out loud.

We’ll get into some of the physical things, the emotional things and the things I carried silently for years.

If you’ve ever looked at a photo of yourself smiling and thought, no one knows how hard this actually feels, I think this video will resonate with you.

You can watch it here:

Wishing you the very best week ahead!

Until next time,

Meghann