Healthy Voice: Life Beyond the Weight

Healthy Voice: Life Beyond the Weight is a journey of transformation that goes beyond before and after pictures to a life reborn from the inside out. Despite the title of the book that may make the reader think it’s about how the author lost the weight and then found a life, the content is the exact opposite. The author could never find a life when she was obsessively focused on the weight. She only found it when she put down her obsession with the weight and got help for what was going on inside.
Meredith experienced something in her childhood that many children experience. Her parents got a divorce. As an only child, she lived in between two worlds in cities three hours apart. There was only one thing that would help her navigate this life. That was the food. So at age eight, she began a love affair with food that would last twenty-three years and a love affair with diets to cope with it. But her insecurities never went away. Even though she grew up in a Catholic household, she never felt close to God. In fact, she felt God had to be mad at her if he’d allow her parents to divorce and her to be overweight. When the time came for her to go away to college, Meredith found herself adding drinking to the list. Despite her habits behind the scenes, Meredith was able to achieve a degree from the University of Notre Dame and land a job on a Presidential campaign which would eventually help her start a successful career at the White House. As a White House employee in her twenties, Meredith balanced a high stress job with eating, dieting, running marathons, drinking and everything else she could do to escape the stress. Except, it caught up with her. She began having panic attacks every day at the White House and eventually chose to leave to work at a federal agency. The pain inside still wasn’t going away. So she did what she had left to do - she chose to escape and found a geographical cure. She left Washington D.C. To pursue a graduate degree at her alma mater, the University of Notre Dame.
What she wouldn’t find out until halfway through, was that God had a different plan. At thirty-one, she would have a quarter-life crisis that would have her come to the end of herself where she would cry out to God for help and begin an entirely new journey of life. It was through returning to God that she would finally receive the love He’d always wanted to give her and find the grace to begin a new life where God would guide her down a road of recovery from her addictions and new life in Christ.
In the first part of the book, Meredith shares intimately with the reader how it all unfolded to show the reader that whatever they’ve gone through, they are not alone and they can overcome. But she takes the second part of the book to actually guide the reader on the journey to finding their own personal Healthy Voice by providing twelve steps and ten tools for walking the journey.