If you get on the wrong train, get off at the nearest station; the longer it takes you to get off, the more expensive the return trip will be.
Japanese proverb
How do you know you are on the wrong train?
You feel it at the end of the day. That quiet dissatisfaction you can’t quite name. You don’t feel satisfied with your life. You don’t see the meaning of it. Decisions you made today were not really decisions at all, they were accommodations. Every time you agreed when you wanted to scream instead. You said yes out of fear. Fear that something bad would happen. That people won’t like you anymore. That you will disturb someone. That your opinion is inconvenient.
Deep inside, you know you are not doing what you should do. You know you are not where you would like to be.
And every evening, you compensate. With food. With sugar. With the one thing that never asks anything of you in return.
The longer this goes unsolved, the more damage it does. The more you suppress your inner voice, the more you will overeat. That is not a character flaw. That is cause and effect.
Let’s go deep into what you are actually avoiding, and how to finally get out of here. Wherever better that is.
What Your Weight Is Actually Screaming
“I’m not worth it.”
“I’m small.”
“I don’t matter enough to be respected.” “
Treat me however you want, I won’t object.”
And here is the uncomfortable truth: people actually do.
Not consciously, not cruelly, but instinctively, people treat you the way you treat yourself.
When you consistently shrink, agree, disappear, and accommodate, the world takes that as information. It adjusts accordingly.
In a strange way, your weight has been protecting you. Keeping you invisible. Keeping you safe from the very thing you quietly, desperately want, to be seen.
We’re not through yet.
Because here is the question nobody asks: What if you lose the weight and people actually like you? Yes, you read that right. What if the thing you are most afraid of is not rejection, but connection? What if somewhere, underneath the layers, there is a woman who doesn’t know how to receive love without bracing for it to leave?
As someone who perhaps didn’t learn how to interact with people in a fully safe way, you might be tempted to stop reading here. It gets personal. It gets close. Please stay.
This is not about tearing anything open, it is about gentle, deliberate, compassionate movement toward yourself. There is no judgment in this space. Only recognition.
Julie Was Not Special. Neither Are You. And That Will Set You Free.
Julie was 7 years old the first time she learned that love was something that left.
Her father walked out on a Tuesday. No dramatic goodbye, no explanation she could hold onto. Just a door that closed, and then a silence that filled every room in the house like smoke. Her mother, broken in her own way, retreated somewhere unreachable, physically present, emotionally gone. And Julie, aged seven, did what very small people do when the adults around them stop being safe.
She went quiet. And she went inward.
Not in a broken way. In a survival way.
Because here is what nobody tells you about children who grow up in emotional isolation: they don’t fall apart. They build. They construct an entire inner world so rich, so textured, so privately magnificent, that the noisy, shallow world outside becomes almost unbearable by comparison.
Julie became the kind of person who could sit alone for hours and not feel alone. Who noticed everything, the shift in someone’s tone, the meaning behind a silence, the emotional weather of a room the moment she walked into it. Who found small talk physically exhausting and deep conversation genuinely nourishing, but rare. Who had almost no friends at certain points in her life, and a handful of soul-level connections that most people never experience even once.
She was, in the truest sense, extraordinarily interior. Profoundly self-sufficient emotionally. Acutely sensitive to relational noise, the kind of person who can feel the difference between someone performing warmth and someone actually offering it.
Someone who restored herself in solitude, not in crowds. Who didn’t attach easily, but when she did, she attached completely, with a depth that most people only read about in novels.
And she filled the gaps, the loneliness, the father-shaped hole, the mother who was present but absent, with sugar. Sweet, reliable, non-judgmental sugar. It never left. It never disappointed. It was always there on the Tuesday evenings when everything felt too quiet and too much at the same time.
But here is where Julie’s story takes a turn that most people don’t see coming.
Because Julie, this sensitive, perceptive, quietly brilliant child, grew up and drew one of two conclusions about herself, depending on the day, the season, the wound that happened to be open.
On most days, she arrived at the first conclusion.
I am the problem. Everyone else has something I don’t. They find connection easy, life manageable, people enjoyable. Something is fundamentally wrong with me, and I am less. And that is why people leave.
This version of Julie shrank. She over-explained herself. She apologized for taking up space. She ate in secret and felt shame about that too. She people-pleased and smiled and accommodated, and then came home and stood in the kitchen at 9pm, eating something sweet and fast because it was the only moment in the day that had been entirely hers.
And on the other days, not most days, but enough days, she swung to the other extreme.
I am too much for most people. I feel more deeply. I think more carefully. I see what others miss. My loneliness isn’t ordinary loneliness, it’s the loneliness of someone who operates on a different frequency. And because I have suffered more, lost more, survived more, I deserve more. I deserve special treatment. My pain is different.
This version of Julie held herself slightly apart. She looked at people’s easy laughter and surface-level friendships and felt privately superior to it, while simultaneously aching to belong to it. She kept score of her suffering. She wore her difficult childhood as both a wound and a credential.
Both versions of Julie, the “I suck and everyone else is fine” version, and the “I am too deep for this world” version, were two faces of the same coin. And that coin had a name.
It was called: believing her story was exceptional.
And that is precisely the trap.
Because the self-help world spent decades telling people exactly what Julie wanted to hear, that they were extraordinary, that they were meant for great things, that their sensitivity was a superpower and their suffering was a mark of depth.
It was well-intentioned. And it left an entire generation of quietly wounded women more stuck than before, because it handed them a story that felt true and kept them completely frozen.
The uncomfortable truth, the one that actually moves people forward, is something else entirely.
Your suffering is real. Your sensitivity is real. And your difficult childhood is real. Your loneliness is real. None of that is being dismissed.
But it is not exceptional. Not in the way you’ve been using it.
Yes, you read that right. Not exceptional.
The girl who lost her father young, she is not rare. Millions of women carry that exact wound. The woman who finds small talk unbearable and deep connection elusive, she is not a misunderstood genius in a world of shallow people.
She is, beautifully and ordinarily, an introvert in a culture built for extroverts. The person who swings between “I am nothing” and “I feel everything more deeply than you”, she is not uniquely broken. She is doing what humans do when they don’t have a stable internal anchor: she is outsourcing her sense of worth to the story of her pain.
And as long as Julie believed her pain made her special, either specially damaged or specially evolved, she could not solve it.
Because you cannot fix a problem you are secretly using as an identity.
It gets better.
Because this is not the end of Julie’s story. It is the beginning of the only version of it that actually leads somewhere.
The moment Julie stopped auditing her suffering for its severity, stopped checking whether her loneliness was special enough to explain her choices, stopped swinging between unworthiness and superiority, something unexpected happened.
She became available to reality
And reality, it turns out, is far more interesting than the story she had been telling.
The reality was that her capacity for depth was genuine, but it wasn’t superiority. It was simply who she was. Something to work with, not a throne to sit on or a wound to nurse. The reality was that her childhood had shaped her, genuinely and significantly, but it was not a life sentence, and it was not a currency to spend on exemption from doing the hard work.
The reality was that other people, ordinary, average, unremarkable other people, were also carrying father-shaped holes and mother-absences and years of sugar eaten in the dark. They were also oscillating between “I am too much” and “I am not enough.” They were also, quietly, just trying to find something that felt like home in a body and a life that hadn’t always felt safe.
As if that’s not enough, the reality was also this: Julie was not alone in her aloneness. Which is, of course, the great paradox. The very thing that made her feel most separate from other people, her sensitivity, her depth, her difficult history, was precisely the thing that could connect her to them. Not as proof of her exceptionalism. But as proof of her humanity.
That is the insight that changes everything.
Not the comfortable version where you are told you are extraordinary and should believe in yourself. The real version: you are not specially broken. You are not specially evolved. You are human, which is simultaneously the most ordinary and the most extraordinary thing in existence. And those two facts do not cancel each other out.
Julie’s sugar didn’t come from weakness. It came from a seven-year-old girl who needed comfort and found it in the most available form. That makes complete sense.
But Julie is not seven anymore.
And the most powerful thing she can do now is not to honour her wound by keeping it exceptional. It is to look at it clearly, without inflation or performance, and say:
This happened. It shaped me. It is not all of me. And it does not excuse me from choosing differently.
We’re not through yet, because there is one more thing.
The women who finally break free from the pattern, the people pleasing, the silent hunger, the sugar eaten in the dark, are not the ones who decided they were special enough to deserve better.
They are the ones who decided they were ordinary enough that they didn’t need to be exceptional to be worth it.
That’s it. That’s the whole revolution.
Not a throne. Not a wound. Just a woman, fully human, choosing herself, not because she has suffered more than anyone else, but because she is here, and she is enough, and Tuesday evenings belong to her now.
The sugar was not the problem. The story was. And stories, unlike fathers, can be rewritten.
Often, it’s this realization, that you and your problems are actually not privileged in their severity or pain, that is the first and most important step toward solving them.
Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
The Weight That Won’t Leave Is Holding the Story You Won’t Let Go Of
Julie lost the weight once. Maybe twice.
She followed the plan. She was disciplined for weeks, sometimes months. She ate the right things, moved her body, tracked, measured, committed. And the weight came off, and then, quietly, reliably, it came back. Not all at once. Gradually, the way water finds its level. The way things always return to where they feel safe.
And Julie blamed herself. Her metabolism. Her age. Her hormones. The fact that she just didn’t have what it takes.
But here is what nobody told her: the weight was not the problem. The weight was the answer. It was her body’s very logical, very faithful response to an internal story that had never been resolved. And until that story changed, not the food, not the exercise, not the calorie deficit, the weight had nowhere else to go.
The body keeps the score that the mind refuses to settle.
When you live in a state of chronic emotional suppression, when you silence yourself daily, accommodate constantly, and manage everyone else’s comfort before your own, your body reads that as threat. Not metaphorically. Literally.
The nervous system cannot distinguish between a lion chasing you and the chronic, low-grade stress of never feeling safe enough to be yourself. Both activate the same biological alarm system.
Cortisol floods the body. And cortisol, when it runs chronically elevated, does something very specific and very frustrating: it signals the body to store fat, particularly around the abdomen. It drives intense cravings for fast energy, sugar, refined carbohydrates, anything the brain can burn quickly in case it needs to run. It slows metabolism. It disrupts sleep, which elevates cortisol further the next day. It creates a biochemical environment in which weight loss is not just difficult, it is actively working against the body’s perceived survival strategy.
Your body is not broken. Your body is doing exactly what a body does when it believes it is under siege.
And the siege, for most of the women reading this, is not external. It is the daily, relentless act of being someone other than yourself.
How can you beat that? You can’t, not with restriction, not with another plan, not with more discipline.
Because here is what the swings between “I am nothing” and “I deserve special treatment” actually do to the body: both states are chronic stress states. Both keep cortisol elevated. Both send the body the same signal, we are not safe, store everything, release nothing.
When she is in “I suck” mode, she eats to soothe the pain of inadequacy. The sugar is comfort, numbing, a small private mercy in a day that has asked too much of her.
When she swings to “I deserve this” mode, she eats to reward herself. I have held so much. I have survived so much. This is mine. The food becomes the one space where having needs feels permitted.
Both swings lead to the same kitchen. The same Tuesday evening. The same wrapper on the counter.
And neither ever resolves the underlying story. Which means the body never receives the signal that the threat is over. Which means the cortisol never drops. Which means the weight, faithful, logical, frustrating, stays exactly where the story left it.
The weight is communication.
It is the body saying: something in here has not been resolved. Something in here still believes we are not safe. Something in here is still waiting for permission to let go.
It is not punishment. It is not failure. It is not a character flaw wrapped in biology.
It is a nervous system doing its job, protecting a woman who learned early that love leaves, that presence doesn’t mean safety, and that the only truly reliable comfort is the kind you can find in a kitchen at 9pm when everyone else has gone to bed.
The women who lose the weight and keep it off are not the ones who found a better diet.
They are the ones who made the internal environment safe enough that the body stopped needing to hold on.
They stopped performing. They stopped needing their pain to be exceptional. They became simply, groundedly human, present in their own lives, honest about their own needs, willing to be ordinary enough to have those needs without drama or justification.
And in that ordinariness, the body finally exhaled.
Copyright ©Nutrinama Ekaterina Choukel
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