I gained fifteen pounds this year, and I spent months with a very good explanation for it.
Perimenopause. I’m forty-four. The internet is full of women my age describing weight that arrives regardless of what you do, and I read all of it, and something in me settled every time I did.
Then I started wondering whether I even had a real problem, whether this was body dysmorphia talking, whether the thing I was seeing in the mirror was accurate at all.
Which was a fair question. My mother used to grab my love handles when I was a young woman and tell me I was flabby. Her mother audited her granddaughters for weight gain, every visit, out loud. So I have never once had a neutral relationship with my own middle, and neither did the women who taught me how to look at it.
I thought about the medications. The peptides too. And I’m a little embarrassed to tell you that, because I have spent my whole career in this world and there was a version of me that thought I was above wanting a shortcut out of my own body. I sat with it, and ultimately decided it wasn’t right for me, and that still stands.
Perimenopause is real, and it genuinely does this to plenty of women. The medications help people I respect. Neither one was what was happening to me, and I had stopped asking.
And then a while back I actually looked.
I earned my black belt, and I stopped training the way I had been training. My dog died, and I grieved the way I grieve, which involves food. Less movement, more calories, over months.
Fifteen pounds.
That’s it. That’s the whole mystery. No hormonal conspiracy, no cosmic timing, nothing my body was doing to me while I stood by helplessly.
I want to tell you what I felt when I saw it, because it surprised me.
Relief. Enormous, embarrassing relief. Because perimenopause was an explanation I could do nothing about, and “you stopped training and ate through your grief” is an explanation with a door in it.
We think the gentle story is the kind one. Very often the gentle story is the one that leaves you exactly where you are with a beautiful reason for being there. There was something else keeping me in that fog, and it wasn’t the hormones, and it wasn’t my mother. It was illusion masquerading as some divine mystery.
I’ve been in the world of spirituality a long time, and somewhere along the way radical acceptance got quietly converted into something it was never meant to be.
Acceptance is ground. It’s the floor you stand on so you can see what’s actually in the room with you. It’s what makes change possible, because you cannot move from a position you refuse to admit you’re standing in.
What it turned into is a rule that you’re not allowed to want anything different. That wanting a stronger body or more money or a fuller calendar is evidence you’ve failed at gratitude. That the discomfort you feel about your own life is the actual problem, and the thing causing it is not up for discussion.
You’ve heard this. You’re perfect exactly as you are. Peace is right where you’re standing. Wanting things to be different is the root of suffering.
And some of that is true, and all of it is useful, and it has also become the most sophisticated way we have of never changing anything while feeling spiritually advanced about it.
Junior loves this. Junior, if you’re new here, is what I call the ego. Not an enemy, more like a nervous teenager with strong opinions about your safety.
Junior would rather you be validated than grown, every single time, because growth involves a stretch of time where you’re bad at something and visible while you’re bad at it. Validation has none of that. Validation is warm and immediate, and it asks nothing of you. It’s also sedation, and you can tell it’s sedation by what happens afterward, which is nothing.
I call this form of spiritual bypassing the Illusion of Satisfaction.
We’ve come a long way. We’ve survived things. The life is genuinely good and the status quo is comfortable enough. So when a part of us raises a hand and says I want this to change, we get handed a spiritual reason to put the hand down. Be grateful. Be present. Accept what is.
And it works, because it arrives dressed as kindness, and it’s almost impossible to argue with. Who wants to be the person who isn’t grateful or at peace with how things are?
So the hand goes down. And we stay.
I’m not interested in staying.
Self-validation is something else entirely. That’s you telling yourself the truth about where you are and staying on your own side while you do it. Both halves matter. The truth without the loyalty is just your mother’s voice with better vocabulary, and the loyalty without the truth is a very comfortable room with no door.
So here’s where I am.
I hired a personal trainer. I lift now. I overhauled how I eat, and I track my protein and hit my macros as a vegan, which is the least mystical sentence I have ever written in this newsletter, and I don’t care.
I weigh more than I ever have. At my first weigh in, I gained almost a pound and a half of muscle while losing visceral fat, which is muscle and water doing their job, and I know that because I measured it instead of guessing.
I am not ashamed of any of it. Not the fifteen pounds, not the months I spent with the softer explanation, not the fact that I wanted my body to change and said so out loud.
Wanting to be different than you are is not a spiritual failure. Sometimes it’s the most honest thing happening in the room.
Now, the useful part.
It took me months to see this because I was inside it. Your own patterns are the hardest ones to see, since you’re looking out through them, and the story you’ve built around yours will always feel like insight.
So let me ask you directly: What’s the thing in your life you keep explaining beautifully that still isn’t moving? The money, the body, the marriage, the career you love that won’t grow.
