I know that I haven’t been talking about weight loss much, lately. Those of you that know how many times I’ve failed, in the past, might think I’ve strayed a bit.

Who could blame me, really? I’ve been dealing with a lot over recent months. Emotions need ice cream, after all, am I right?

But if you thought this… you would be wrong. As I write this, I’m 1 pound above my low weight, and quite honestly, I’ve been feeling in the groove, despite everything that would have normally dislodged me from my goals in the past. I’ve been there, after all. I know that road, well; the one where I lose my way, turn around, and go right back where I came from. The one where I lose control and gain all my weight back, plus some.

My mistake back then was that I saw the different aspects of my life as different roads. It allowed me to separate what I put in my mouth from the rest of me. I saw that “diet” road as temporary, leading to a specific point, and then I’d magically be able to do all the things I’ve wanted to do. Including, in that diet fantasy, the ability to eat without penalty. It’s no surprise, with that kind of thinking, that my “diet” roads have always been cul de sacs.

I said when I started this little project of mine that I’d explore the mental aspects of what I go through when losing weight, because I knew there was a lot I needed to work on in order to figure all this out. But the me from seven years ago might also sheepishly admit that she knew she was doomed to fail and taking out each tangle and untangling it was a lot of head work. In a way, I created my own excuse for failure; I could tidily discard it as too much of a challenge to face.

I soon realized that I didn’t have to do all of the head work at once, and that I had things in the wrong order, anyway. I thought that if I could buckle down and lose the weight, my brain would untangle itself.

It’s the exact opposite: the weight loss has been the after effect of working on my head.

Not to mention, thinking of each aspect of my life as somehow separated from the rest, as if they are multiple roads to travel — and different challenges to face — was wrong, too. Allowing all parts of me to coalesce into one road has given me the ability to meet my own challenges and realize how they intersect. The part of me that chooses how to nourish myself isn’t separate at all from the part of me that needs the occasional moral support or another part of me that is focused on a work-related project.

Seeing those aspects as independent of each other has always allowed me to toss away what I fail at or want to ignore. It’s why I’ve been able to push away failed weight loss efforts as “diets” and therefore not really part of me. Not to mention, a failure to understand that how we nourish ourselves is permanent, not some temporary choice with no consequences.

While there will always be a small part of me that fears failure, the process of untangling my challenges has allowed me to take each of those independent paths and interweave them into something whole, something stronger, and someone who understands that the whole is much stronger as one road instead of many. In my mind, weight loss has become just a side effect of my effort to strengthen myself in all ways. Doing so has made it far easier to understand when I occasionally end up in the wrong lane; I can adjust and get back on the right road.