“If you don’t deal with your demons, they will deal with you, and it’s gonna hurt.” -Nikki Sixx
Truth time, my ToTS lovelies:
It still hurts, and confronting your demons might hurt worse in the short term than ignoring them.
You have to dance with your demons in order to wrest control back, and unfortunately it’s not a one-time thing.
Every day is a dance. Will you lead? Or will your darker impulses, your demons, your dark passenger? Dealing with my demons was an integral part of my weight loss journey, but it became even more imperative over the course of the last year as I tried to maintain a healthy life.
I have always been open about what I deal with: Food addiction, secret eating, and binge eating gave way to orthorexia and over training; I developed body dysmorphic disorder and struggled with periods of severe restriction and binging. I refused to eat at restaurants if they didn’t post nutritional information online. Over the years, I even had isolated incidences of bulimic behavior. I lost weight. I kept the dance going, and every day was a struggle.
At my lowest I wish I could say I was physically healthy – the fact is, my extremely low fat diet resulted in a drop in estrogen levels so low it is seen in menopause and anorexia. As a woman in my 20’s looking to start a family, this wasn’t really … ideal. It was not maintainable, and I was miserable. The logical solution was, of course, to add more fat to my diet and gain some of the weight back, but that was a whole new dance. It came with new demons, telling me I’d be worthless if I got over a certain weight, a certain size.
Each day, if you can maintain balance, if you can make educated decisions for your health, that day is a success. We all have our different demons, but every time one pops up, if you choose balance, you win that battle. You have the capacity to win each and every battle – you just have to choose to fight. The demons, the dark passenger, they are all a part of you; they come from inside, not out. You created them. You own their ass. Once you realize that, the demons lose a little of their power. You can look at it objectively, and say “Do I want to eat this entire pint of ice cream because I’m hungry, or because I’m stressed/tired/addicted?” Balance means, to me, admitting I am hungry, portioning out a serving, putting the rest back, and enjoying my ice cream.
My demons – my food addiction and my orthorexia – might be urging me to eat the whole thing or nothing at all, but I wrest control back. I commit to the battle. We make hundreds, thousands of choices a day, and the kind of cool thing is, each choice is an opportunity to win. And when I let the dark passenger take control in moments of weakness, I forgive myself. Because nothing is more important to the journey to a healthy body and mind than self love, care, and forgiveness.
My name is Maggie Jasmin, and starting in January 2013, I dedicated myself to a new fitness journey, and have since lost 115 pounds. I move more, pick up heavy things, think intelligently about my food, and try to be the healthiest I can every day. This doesn't mean I gave up the foods I love – I just make them healthy! I blog and post recipes about my comfort food turned health food at 
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