August 2, 2006 11:59 PM
Why I know this will be my last diet
I told you all earlier I'm working on a book on dieting - not a specific diet plan, but my thoughts on how to make any diet your last. It will take a long time to go through the process - get a contract, finish and see it in print - so I thought I'd share little bits and pieces with you now. I started writing when I'd lost about 30 pounds of the 100 I have to lose. I've lost 63 now (and you all need to let me know how much you've lost so I can add it over on the right). I feel downright svelte - though I know I'm not really at all. But isn't it weird how messed up our body images are? Here's a little of what I wrote about my experience:
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I didn’t look much in mirrors when I was fat. Mirrors reminded me of a reality I did not want to be reminded of. Oddly enough, when I was at my thinnest – 118 pounds – I obsessed more about my weight than when I weighed twice that. At my top weight one bout with the mirror in the morning while brushing my hair and teeth was about all I wanted, thank you very much. Because no matter what the mirror said, in between those bouts I carried an image of myself that was completely different than reality.
Still, the world outside my bathroom was full of jarring reminders and humiliations. Walking down the street, I might look over and catch a glance of my reflection in a store’s plate glass window. It would startle me: Hey who is that fat woman? Then I’d realize it was me and quickly turn to other thoughts: What about Maddy’s grades? Jesse’s dentist appointment? Next week’s back-to-school night?
Oh, yeah, back-to-school night – with the annual humiliation of trying to squeeze into student desks. You know the ones I mean? The kind where the desk is attached to the seat? While there’s plenty of room there for a normal person, there’s not room for two normal people. And if you weigh as much as two normal people – well, let’s just say it’s bound to be humiliating.
Same thing with sliding into and out of booths in restaurants. Or trying to fasten your seat belt on a plane. In fact, the last time I flew before my Last Diet, I knew that if I weighed even a couple more pounds next time, I’d have to face the humiliation of asking the flight attendant how to buckle myself in. Did they have extensions for people like me? And even though I did manage to buckle myself in – though it took too long and I felt too awkward – there was always the feeling of taking up too much space and having to try hard not to spill over and touch the stranger next to me.
Ugh.
There was the loathing of bathing suits or having my picture taken. While clothes cover up the grim reality, even a bathing suit with a skirt leaves too little to the imagination. And while passing a stray mirror or unexpected reflection in a window is fleeting and easily banished, a picture just sticks there forever, a grim reminder of everything I didn’t want to be reminded of. Consequently, I stopped swimming and I became the family photographer. Pictures of me by myself are rare – except the headshot I use for my writing. And that was carefully staged to minimize my double chin and chosen from at least 50 shots to come up with the one closest to my self-image (and maybe farthest from reality?).
And I wish I could forget the time I was sitting in the optometrist office and Jesse came over to sit in my lap and when I placed him there, the chair broke. Okay, so that’s just plain weird. After all, there are plenty of people a lot fatter than I was. But it happened to me and it was embarrassing!
The amazing thing is that in spite of the reminders, reality checks and pangs of humiliation I felt because of my weight, I allowed it to continue. While I made sporadic attempts to “deal with†the problem, they always failed.
No, I mean I always failed.
Keeping my weight under control was a war I couldn’t seem to win. Instead, there were surrenders – white flags hoisted here and there as I continued to lose my battle with the bulge. Surrender meant taking my wedding ring to the jeweler’s to get it resized – not once, but several times. Other rings stayed in my jewelry box or became pinkie rings.
Surrender meant moving up from regular size clothes and progressing my way through Plus Woman sizes – 1x, then 2x, and even ultimately 3x. It meant occasionally finding a clump of size 5’s or 7’s tucked in between the gigantic garments with which I tried to minimize the reality of my body – a hiding place favored by thin women set on retrieving their treasure later. You might have thought the startling juxtaposition of my former and current sizes would have been a wake-up call. But, no. Those were the days of surrender.
For a fat woman who’s always loved clothes, that meant selling my smaller sizes on Ebay as I traveled up the scale. I couldn’t afford to keep multiple wardrobes and needed to finance my new larger sizes. What a surrender that was.
So let me repeat: The amazing thing is that in spite of the reminders, reality checks and pangs of humiliation I felt because of my weight, I allowed it to continue.
And I guess that’s how this time – not just letting go of old ideas about food, but finally recognizing other old ideas I needed to examine and then let go of – I finally understood that my Last Diet had to be about more than shedding pounds and inches.
Shedding the pounds and inches was necessary, of course. That was the only way for me to finally discover what I needed to see about me and my relationship to the world and my Creator. There were some painful realizations, to be sure, but believe me, but each one led me into exciting new territory – a territory I looked forward to knowing more of each day.
Ultimately, it was the joy of self-discovery that kept me motivated to see this diet through. Who would trade truly understanding herself for a few handfuls of chips or a bowl of ice cream? Once I understood how much food was bogging down my life, I was better equipped to resist it.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
More later. For all I've written on my dieting journey, click on Categories above, then click on Diet. Or type the word diet into my personal Google in the right sidebar.
Love,
