Health Became Different When It Stopped Being About My Weight

For years, I thought health was mostly about weight.

The scale went up. The scale went down. Clothes fit or they didn't. Numbers improved or they didn't. And whether I realized it or not, I was using those measurements to tell myself a story about how I was doing.

But recently, after looking back on one of the hardest and most transformative years of my life, I realized something important:

The scale was measuring something real.

It just wasn't measuring everything.

In this episode, we're exploring how health, healing, grief, faith, stewardship, and personal growth intersect—and why learning to see the whole story may change the way you measure your life.

Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode

What happens when one measurement becomes the judge of your entire life?

After reflecting on a year that included emergency surgery, the loss of her father, frozen shoulder, cataract surgeries, the launch of Healer & Hope Giver, and significant personal growth, Kim realized she had been overlooking many of the places where healing and strength were already developing.

In this conversation, she explores:

• Why health eventually became about more than weight 
• The difference between information and identity 
• How grief changed her perspective on stewardship 
• What her father's health journey taught her about presence 
• Why one metric can never tell the whole story 
• The relationship between health, calling, faith, and purpose 
• How God often grows things we aren't measuring 

Scripture

📖 1 Samuel 16:7

"The LORD does not see what a man sees. For man sees what is visible, but the LORD sees the heart."

Continue the Journey

If this episode resonated with you, you may also enjoy:

• Episode 24: How Childhood Shapes the Way You See Yourself 
• Episode 25: Some of What You Call Personality Began as Survival 
• Episode 26: The Sponge Principle: What Comes Out Under Pressure 

Together, these conversations explore how our experiences shape us, how healing changes us, and how God continues forming us long after survival ends.

Resources

📘 Reflective Workbook: The Whole Story (Episode 27)

🌿 Companion Guides, Workbooks & Resources:
 HealerHopeGiver.com

Monday / Thursday Rhythm

New long-form conversations every Monday.

New devotional reflections every Thursday.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey friends! About four weeks ago, I found myself looking at a picture I didn't like. Clothes that no longer fit, and a number on the scale that wasn't moving in the direction I wanted. And if I'm honest, part of me started telling a familiar old story. The story that says progress can be measured by a single number. The story that says if the scale isn't cooperating, maybe everything else is failing too. Maybe you've told yourself some versions of that story before. Maybe it wasn't a scale, maybe it was a bank account, a relationship, a diagnosis, a job, a prayer that still feels unanswered. We have a tendency to find one measurement and let it become the judge of the entire story. And that's exactly what I was doing. Because the truth is, I wasn't looking at that picture in isolation. I was looking at it through the lens of disappointment. The clothes that didn't fit, the scale that wasn't where I wanted it to be, my A1C wasn't where I wanted it to be either, and for a few moments, all I could see was what hadn't happened. But later that same day, I found myself walking through the timeline of the last year. August that brought the emergency surgery, October that brought the loss of my dad, November brought a frozen shoulder diagnosis, December brought cataract surgeries, and the launch of a podcast that had been living in my heart for a long time. And suddenly I realized something. If I judged the last year of my life by only one measurement, I would completely miss what God had actually been doing. Because while I was just staring at one number, God had been growing things all over the place. Not perfectly, not quickly, but undeniably. And that realization made me start asking a different question. What if the scale was measuring something real, but not the whole story? I think part of the reason that question hit me so hard is because weight has never been just a number for me. For many of us, it isn't. It's attached to memories, experiences, comments people made years ago that somehow still echo decades later. It's attached to every before and after picture we've ever seen, every diet we've tried, every promise we've made ourselves, every disappointment that we've carried. I can still remember being told that I would be pretty if I lost weight. It's amazing how a single sentence can live inside of you for years. Not because someone intended to shape your identity with it, but because when you're young, you're still deciding what the world believes about you. And somewhere along the way, many of us absorb the idea that smaller means better, more acceptable, more lovable, more successful, and more worthy. The problem is that those messages rarely stay contained to appearance. Eventually they begin shaping how we see ourselves. And once that happens, weight stops being about health. It becomes about value, it becomes about whether you're enough, it becomes about whether you've succeeded or failed. And that's a heavy burden for any number to carry. Because no number was ever designed to tell you your worth, not a weight, not a clothing size, not a bank balance, not a follower count, not even a diagnosis. Numbers can provide information, but they cannot define value. And I think that's something I've spent much of my life learning, not once, but repeatedly, every season teaching the lesson a little bit differently. The older I get, the more I realize that very few people are actually fighting with a number. We think that we are. We think that we're fighting with the scale or our blood sugar or cholesterol or our clothing size. But underneath those things, there's a much deeper story usually. For me, part of that story started when I was 18 years old. That's when I was first diagnosed with PCOS. At the time, I didn't fully understand what that diagnosis would mean for my life. I didn't know it would affect my hormones, my weight, my fertility, my metabolism, and so many of the health challenges that would follow. I just knew something wasn't working the way it was supposed to. Over the years, more diagnoses followed. Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, a growing list of medications, doctor appointments, lab work, questions, frustrations, attempts to fix things. And if you've ever walked through a long health journey, you know how easy it is to start measuring your life through the lens of what isn't working. Because every appointment seems to come with a number. Every test seems to come with a number. Every conversation seems to come with a number. And after a while, it becomes very easy to believe that the numbers are telling you everything you need to know about yourself. But they're not, friends. They're telling you a data point, just something, not everything. For a long time though, I don't think I understood the difference. Because somewhere along the way, health stopped being about only health and became tangled up with responsibility, discipline, with success, failure, and even with shame. And sometimes I'd even venture to say with more morality, if you've spent much time around diet culture, you've probably seen this happen too. Certain foods become good and other ones become bad. High carbs. Certain choices become evidence that you're doing well, and other choices become evidence that you're failing. And before long, you're no longer evaluating behavior. You're evaluating we are evaluating ourselves. The language changes. We stop saying, I made a choice that I wish I hadn't made, and start saying, I'm the kind of person who always fails. We stop saying my health is struggling right now, and start saying, I am a problem that needs to be fixed. Looking back, I think that is one of the most damaging things that can happen. Not because health doesn't matter, it does. And not because weight doesn't matter, because it does. Not because blood sugar doesn't matter, because it absolutely does, but because numbers were never designed to carry the weight of our identity. They can inform us, they can guide decisions, they can help recognize problems, but they cannot tell us our worth. And yet for years, I think I unknowingly handed them that authority. Part of what eventually changed for me was realizing that many people who struggle with weight aren't simply struggling with food. They're carrying stories, they're carrying grief, trauma, fear, loneliness, shame, stress. Patterns they learned long before they ever understood what those patterns were doing. And to that, add to that a food environment designed to keep us coming back for more. And it becomes much easier to understand why so many people feel trapped. The older I get, the less interested I am in simplistic answers. Because human beings are more complicated than that. Health is more complicated than that. Healing is definitely more complicated than that. Most people don't need more shame. Most people need more understanding, more curiosity, more compassion, more willingness to stop and ask what is really happening beneath the surface. That is a question we've been asking throughout this entire season. What shaped me? What formed me? What am I carrying? What am I reacting to? And what story am I living from? And eventually those questions started changing the way I view my own health. Because for years I thought the goal was to become smaller, to weigh less, to take up less space, to finally arrive at some imaginary finish line where everything would feel settled. But the older I get, the more I realize that health was never supposed to become my identity. It was supposed to support my life. And those two are very different things. Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking, how do I become acceptable? and started asking, how do I become available? Available for the people I love, available for the work that God has placed in front of me, available for the moments I don't want to miss. And a shift changed more than I realized. Because once that question changed, the scorecard changed too. A few weeks ago, after that conversation about the scale and the picture and the clothes that no longer fit, I found myself doing something I hadn't intended to do. I started reviewing my last year. Not as a health journey and not as a weight loss journey, just as a year of my life. And as I walked through it, something became impossible to ignore. The story I was telling myself and the story that had actually unfolded were not the same story. The story I was telling myself was simple. The scale is higher than you want it to be. The A1C is higher than you want to be, want it to be. Some clothes no longer fit, therefore you're moving backwards. Plain and simple, clean, easy to understand, and completely incomplete. Because when I started looking at the actual year, it looked very different. Last August, I had emergency surgery, abdominal surgery. And there are moments in life when your priorities become crystal clear. And emergency surgery tends to be one of them. Suddenly, you're not thinking about clothing sizes, you're not thinking about numbers, you're thinking about healing, recovery, getting through the next day, getting back to your family, and getting back to your life. Then October arrived. And with that came one of the hardest losses of my entire life. My dad passed away. Even now, there's part of me that struggles putting that reality into words. That past tense is a really hard one to swallow. Some losses are so significant that they permanently change the landscape of your life. You learn how to carry them, you learn how to live around them, but they never become small. Grief takes energy, healing takes energy. Showing up for your family takes energy. Continuing to function while your heart is broken takes energy, friends. There are things happening inside us that never appear on a scale. And then November brought a frozen shoulder diagnosis, and December brought two cataract surgeries. And in the middle of all of that, something else was happening. This podcast launched. A dream that had been living quietly for a long time finally entered the world. And if you've been here for any length of time, you know this podcast has become far more than a hobby. It's become part of my calling, part of my ministry, and part of how I live out this idea of being the healer and hope giver. When I look at the resources that we've created, episodes we've written, the companion guides, the guided healing workbooks, the reflective workbooks, the website, the conversations, the emails, the notes from listeners, I don't see something I forced myself to do. I see something that God has continually invited me into. And I realized something else while reflecting on this year. A year ago, I don't know that I would have shown up this way. Not because I didn't care, but because I was still learning to trust my own voice. Still learning that I didn't have to shrink, still learning that I didn't need to make myself smaller in order to make other people comfortable. That growth doesn't show up on a scale either. Neither do boundaries, and neither does leadership. Neither does learning to ask for help. One of the biggest lessons I've learned through church leadership this year is that most problems aren't solved through accusation. They're solved through partnership. They're solved when people are willing to say, here's what I need, here's what I'm seeing, and how do we solve this together? That may sound incredibly simple, but for someone who spent years trying to keep the peace by carrying everything herself, that is significant growth. And again, none of it shows up in a clothing size. My faith has grown immensely too. Not because suddenly I became a believer, because I've believed for a long time. But I think I've become a more active participant within my faith. I've become more intentional about spending time with God, more intentional about bringing my fears, frustrations, decisions, and hopes before Him, more willing to filter life through faith instead of simply adding faith into life. That growth doesn't show up in lab work, but it's real. And the more I reflect on all of this, the more obvious it becomes. The scale wasn't lying, it was simply measuring one thing. The problem wasn't the scale, the problem was that I had quietly allowed it to become the judge of my entire story. And that's a burden no single measurement was ever meant to carry. Because while the scale was measuring one thing, God was growing 10 other things. He was growing resilience, faith, wisdom, perspective, leadership, boundaries, calling, relationships, compassion, a deeper understanding of what actually matters. The scale wasn't wrong. It just wasn't measuring everything. And suddenly I started wondering how often we all do this. How often do we choose one measurement and let it become the judge of the entire story? A diagnosis, a bank account, a relationship, a job title, a prayer that still hasn't been answered, a dream that still hasn't happened yet, a season that was isn't unfolding the way that we hope. We take one piece of information and allow it to determine how we feel about everything else. Meanwhile, God is doing a thousand invisible things that we aren't measuring at all. And maybe part of maturity is learning how to recognize growth even when it isn't happening in the category that we are watching the most closely. Because sometimes the thing you're measuring isn't the place where the greatest transformation is occurring. Sometimes the deepest growth is happening somewhere else entirely. As I continued thinking about all this, my mind kept returning to my dad. Not because he spent his life talking about health, not because he spent his life giving lectures about taking care of yourself, but because losing someone you love has a way of clarifying what matters. There's a sentence I've thought about many times since he passed away. If I could have one more healthy day with my dad, I would take that in a heartbeat. Not one more inheritance, not one more possession, not one more conversation about paperwork or logistics, but one more healthy day, one more day where he felt good, where he could laugh, he could tell stories, one more day where he could simply be present with the people who love him. Because when someone is gone, you realize how quickly the things that you thought mattered aren't the things that you miss the most. You miss the presence, the connection, you miss the moments, you miss the ordinary days that didn't seem extraordinary while they were happening. And somewhere in the middle of grieving my dad, I started looking at health differently. For most of my life, health had been connected to improvement, to fixing, correcting, managing, reducing, changing, achieving. There was always another goal, always another number, another milestone, and another finish line. But grief has a way of stripping away all the unnecessary things. And what remained was a much simpler question. How many healthy moments can I create with the people that I love? Not because I can control everything. I can't. My dad's story taught me that. Life teaches all of us that eventually. There are illnesses that we don't choose, diagnoses that we don't expect, losses we can't prevent, bodies that age, circumstances that change. None of us are promised tomorrow. But there are some things we can influence, some things we can steward, some choices that we can make. My dad actually taught me something about that long before I ever realized it. When he was younger, he struggled with his weight too. At some point in his 30s, he made us made some significant changes and lost a considerable amount of weight. And unlike so many stories we hear, he never gained it back. Looking back now, I don't know exactly how many years that added to his life. I don't know which health challenges it may have prevented. I don't know what his future would have looked like if he had made different choices. But what I do know is this. When pulmonary fibrosis eventually came into his life, it wasn't carrying the extra burden of decades of additional weight. The disease still came and the diagnosis still came, the loss still came. Health doesn't give us control over every outcome. Life simply doesn't work that way. But I do believe those healthier years mattered. I believe they gave him more opportunities to be present, more opportunities to love his family, more opportunities to show up for birthdays, holidays, graduations, ordinary Tuesday nights, and all the moments that eventually became memories. And maybe that's part of what stewardship looks like. Not trying to guarantee every outcome, simply doing our best with what we've been given. And when I started viewing health through that lens, everything began to shift. Because suddenly health wasn't about becoming worthy, it was about becoming available, available for my precious husband, for my two wonderful sons, available for my future grandchildren that I hope to know someday, available for this ministry, for the calling that God has placed on my life, available for the people who need me, available for the people that I love. The goal wasn't perfection. The goal has always been participation. And that's a very different way to approach health because perfection is exhausting. Participation is meaningful. Perfection says, have you arrived yet? And participation says, are you showing up? Perfection says, look at everything that's still wrong. And participation says, look at a at the life that you're being invited into. Perfection is always moving the finish line. Participation values the moments that you're standing in. And honestly, that's what I want more of now. Not a perfect body, not a perfect health record, not a perfect set of numbers. I want more moments, more conversations, more family dinners, more holidays, more memories, more opportunities to serve, more opportunities to love, more opportunities to be present. Because when I think about my dad, that's what I miss the most. I don't miss his accomplishments. I don't miss the things that he owned. I miss him, his laugh, his stories, his presence. And if that's what I miss, then that's what I want to give the people that I love too. I want to give them as much of my presence as I can. As I possibly can, as many healthy years as I can steward, as many meaningful moments as God allows. Not because I owe them perfection, but because I love them. And love always wants more time. I think that's part of what I've been learning. Health is not a punishment. Health is not a project. Health is not an attempt to earn your worth. Health is a gift. And every healthy moment creates opportunities to share that gift with the people around us. Maybe that's why this conversation feels different to me now than it did 10 years ago. Ten years ago I was asking, how do I lose weight? And probably how do I do it the fastest? And today I'm asking, how do I remain present for the life that I've been given? And honestly, I think that's a much better question. For most of my life, I thought health was primarily about becoming smaller, a smaller number, a smaller clothing size, a smaller body. And while I still care about my health, I don't think that's the question I'm asking anymore. The question has become, how do I show up well for the life I've been given? How do I steward the opportunities in front of me? How do I create as many meaningful moments as possible with the people I love? How do I remain available for whatever God asks me to do next? Because the older I get, the more I realize that health isn't just about living longer. It's about living more fully. It's about being present while you're here. It's about participating in the life that we've been given instead of constantly postponing it until we reach some imaginary finish line. And that's what I learned from that picture. And the close and the scale. Not that those things don't matter, but that they don't get to tell the whole story. Only God sees the whole story. Only God sees every lesson, every act of faithfulness, every hard choice, every moment of growth, and every step forward. Every place where healing is quietly happening beneath the surface. And maybe part of maturity is learning to see that our lives can be viewed through a wider lens. To acknowledge what's still difficult about ignoring without ignoring what's already growing. To recognize what still needs attention without dismissing how far we've come. To hold both truths at the same time, because healing rarely happens in only one area of life. Growth rarely happens in only one area of life. And strength is often developing in the places we aren't even measuring. And honestly, I think we're only beginning to explore this idea because if this episode has taught me anything, it's that the way we measure ourselves shapes the way we experience our lives. Over the next several episodes, we're going to continue talking about health, healing, identity, stewardship, relationships, faith, and what it means to build strength that reaches beyond a single area of life. Because health is never just physical, it touches our emotions, our faith, our relationships, the stories we tell ourselves, and the way we show up for the people that we love. If today's conversation resonated with you, here are a few episodes that connect naturally to what we've explored here. Episode 24, how childhood shapes the way you see yourself. Episode 25, Some of What You Call Personality Began as Survival, and Episode 26, The Sponge Principle, What Comes Out Under Pressure. Together, these conversations explore messages, the messages we absorb, the patterns we develop, the things that shape us over time, and the ways healing slowly changes how we move through the world. And if you're someone who likes to process things on paper, I've also created a reflective workbook for this episode. And it's designed to help you explore the messages you've carried about health, worth, strength, and stewardship. Tend to gently consider whether you've been measuring yourself by a scorecard that was never meant to carry the whole story. You can find that workbook along with other companion guides, guided healing workbooks, devotionals, and the growing collection of resources inside the Healer and Hope Giver ecosystem at healerhopegiver.com. One word, healerhopgiver.com. Because healing isn't just about solving a problem, it's about becoming more fully present in the life that God has given you. Friend, thank you for spending time with me today. Whether you're listening while driving, folding laundry, walking through the neighborhood, sitting in a waiting room, or stealing a few quiet moments before the rest of your house wakes up, I'm so grateful that you're here. One of the greatest gifts of this podcast is getting to hear your stories. Every week I hear from people who are healing, grieving, rebuilding, growing, questioning, hoping, and learning how to trust God in new ways. I read every single message, every email, every comment, every review, and I want you to know how much they mean to me. So if today's episode resonated with you, I would genuinely love to hear about it. Tell me what stood out. Tell me what you've been measuring, tell me what growth you may have overlooked. Tell me what God has been showing you lately. These conversations are one of my favorite parts of this journey. And if someone came to mind while you were listening today, someone who is discouraged, frustrated, carrying shame, or feeling like one area of life is defining everything else, I hope you'll share this episode with them. Because sometimes all we need is a reminder that the thing we're measuring isn't the whole story. And if you're enjoying this podcast, I'd love for you to follow the show wherever you listen so you don't miss any future episodes or devotionals. If you're part of our YouTube community, subscribing, liking, and leaving a comment helps these conversations reach people who may need a little hope right when they needed it. You can also find the episodes, companion guides, reflective workbooks, guided healing resources, devotionals, and more at healerhopegiver.com. And until next time, keep looking for the whole story. The story that's beyond the numbers, the story beyond the disappointment, the story beyond the unfinished places, because God is often doing far more than we can see. And healing is rarely measured by only one thing. I'll see you Thursday.