The Weight I Let Go

I. The weight I was carrying

It is possible to carry something for so long that you forget it is heavy. I stayed in a relationship for ten years — not because I was weak, but because I am the kind of person who honours commitment, who believes in working through things, who does not walk away easily from what she has built. Even when what she has built has quietly become something she carries more than inhabits.

There was no single crisis. No dramatic rupture. There was a knowing — persistent, quiet, patient — that this was no longer where I was supposed to be. And I kept not listening to it. Because listening would mean deciding, and deciding would mean disrupting everything.

By the end, I was tired in a way that sleep couldn't fix. Foggy in a way that nothing could clear. Disconnected from joy, from myself, from the version of me that used to move through the world with something that felt like lightness. What I was experiencing in my body was not a physical condition. It was the accumulated weight of ten years of choosing everything except myself.

II. The knowing

In 2022, I had my son. And something happened that I cannot fully explain with language. The moment I held him, something in me became very still and very clear at the same time. Not the clarity of a decision made — the clarity of a truth already known, finally being acknowledged. I looked at this child and understood: I cannot show him what it looks like to disappear. So I ended the relationship. Not dramatically. Not with a long negotiation. With a knowing.

And then, almost in the same breath, another knowing arrived.

Not a plan. Not a programme someone recommended. Just a clear, internal instruction: begin with the body. I didn't question it or research it first. Something within me simply knew the sequence. End what is draining you. Then cleanse. Then fast. Then eat — one meal, real food, made with intention.

I began a physical body cleanse. Then I moved into fasting. Then one meal a day — whole food, natural, simple. Not a diet. A conversation between me and my own body. A way of saying: I am listening now. What do you actually need? The fenugreek and fennel tea in the mornings. The chia seed water throughout the day. The single, nourishing plate when the sun was high. None of this came from a book. It came from somewhere inside me that had always known and had simply been waiting for me to be quiet enough to hear it.

III. The journey is the self

My mind became clearer — not the artificial clarity of caffeine or adrenaline, but a deep, settled clarity. The fog lifted. I started noticing things I had stopped noticing: colour, birdsong, my own thoughts arriving in order instead of all at once. I felt lighter. Not in a way I could measure. In a way I could feel — in my chest, in my shoulders, in the way I moved through a room. And then, without pursuing it, without making it the goal, the weight began to drop.

Size 42 → Size 36

In three months. Without starving. Without a gym programme. Without any of the things I had tried before that worked briefly and then stopped, leaving me more depleted than when I started. Because this time, it wasn't about the weight. The weight was just the evidence — evidence that something deeper had shifted, which the body, faithful and honest as it always is, simply reflected back.

The decisions I made — to end the relationship, to begin the cleanse, to eat one honest meal a day — were not calculated. They were received. Like instructions from a part of myself that had been holding everything patiently, waiting for me to come back to her. The journey of life is about the self. Not the self we perform for others. The self that was there before any of it, whole and unhurried, waiting for us to choose her.

That is what the body cleanse was. That is what the fasting was. That is what the one meal was. Not a diet. A return.