Wonder
Plus-Size Yoga Practitioner Talks About How Yoga Let Her Learn Self-Love
Her body was just an “excuse.”
Dana Falsetti is a plus-size advocate that found self-love after regularly practicing yoga. The 22-year-old woman from New Hope, Pennsylvania, shared that she once weighed 300 lbs and felt miserable about herself.
She’s tried losing weight and managed to shed 70 lbs. But it did not help with her self-esteem, and she continued binge-eating.
Dana, who was still in college, then turned to yoga to find relief. She spoke to DailyMail, “After all those pounds went away, I was still me. I was still sad, feeling unworthy, feeling even more confused, and just lost.”
“I went to yoga because it was something new to try during a time when I felt like giving up.”
She continued, “A big part of me was craving the time for silence, for meditation and reflection. I had no idea the physical practice would lead me down the path of inner strength that I always needed, and that led to the larger perspective shift that really changed my life.”
When she started yoga, she didn’t imagine she would nail challenging poses, such as headstand, because she believed her weight would make it impossible.
“That pose was a far, distant dream worthy of somebody else,” she admitted. “I was sure I was too heavy to hold myself upside down.”
“I was trapped in a really bad cycle of negative self-talk, but I kept practicing because I just couldn’t stop, and then things started to change.”
It was all thanks to her own persistency in practicing that she finally managed many of the more complex poses. Dana called them “sparks of practices” and saw the possibilities of taking it one step further at a time.
Dana proved herself wrong again and again and “realized the limit does not exist.”
Yoga allowed her to fight her tendencies for emotional eating, her source of overweight issues.
“It used to be that when I felt anything, whether it be happy, frustrated, stressed, excited, whatever, my response was to eat,” she shared. She has an “all or nothing” attitude that made it hard for her to break her eating behavior.
Yet, Dana had felt how this attitude was why she kept going at yoga despite believing that she couldn’t do the complicated poses initially. She said, “My practice was and is the self-care I always needed.”
As she eventually nailed the most challenging poses and contorted her legs in binds, she learned that she was only using her body as “excuses.”
“As I kept practicing, I thought that my belly was too big or my thighs got in the way, and then they slowly started to go away. And all these limits were ones that I was making up for myself.”
“And that’s what translated to everything else in my life. I realized that I was just making excuses; my body was an excuse that I was using to hold me back from seeking my potential and being happy and living my life. And superseding those limits on my mat is what really changed my life.”
While Dana grew her Instagram to 300k following, she has now stayed away from the platform.
She shared, “There has been a lot of trauma. Visible and not. As much as I regularly wish I could, I can’t will trauma not to have its impact.”
“I am grieving, realizing my relationship with this community and this work is the most intense one I’ve ever been in, and I tie every memory back to this account and how it all began. Through therapy, I’ve come to realize it’s been a five-year abusive relationship, even with all it’s given me.”
She now only promotes her practice videos, allowing viewers to pay how much they want on her other account.
