Recently someone commented on how much weight I’d lost. This in itself isn’t that uncommon – I’ve lost nearly 40 pounds in recent months and people notice. However, it was how they commented on it stuck with me.
“It’s impressive.” That word. Impressive. Something inside reacted.
Once upon a time I believed I weighed too much (I was about 175 lbs and fit). From this place, I literally starved myself for over 5 months – eating less than 1000 calories a day, and exercising 5 – 7 times a week (between an hour and a half and three hours a day). In that period of time, I gained weight and capped at about 196 lbs. I kid you not.
I still feel the emotion and pain from that time (2005 – 2007). I still have the number of calories present in most foods memorized (bananas 110, eggs 70 hard-boiled and 100+ fried, bagels 350, etc). And I still want to lose weight.
What gets me is the compliments. Everyone who’s been an acquaintance without really knowing me has stepped forward to tell me how much weight I’ve lost. They assume I’m now demonstrating a level of self-discipline that I lacked in the past, and it breaks my heart.
It hurts because to the part of me that’s still insecure it confirms that I was somehow right to put myself through that pain to lose weight. It says I really didn’t look as good as I could have (or should), and that people noticed. Right now I’m around 160 lbs, my goal weight has always been 140, meaning theoretically I still have 20 lbs to lose.
I’m not going to. Or, I’m not going to try. All these people coming forward, being impressed by how I lost weight, let me tell you what really happened.
I didn’t lose weight because I exercised and counted calories and kept a food diary and followed a strict Naturophathic diet. It’s because I stopped doing these things.
I stopped weighing myself in the mornings, stopped thinking about what I ate, how much I ate, if I was actually hungry when I was eating, etc. I let myself indulge, and trained myself not to feel guilty when eating food, rather to open to and really enjoy what I was eating.
I let myself binge if I wanted to binge, though I would come back to mindful eating as one who is meditating brings herself back to an inner focus.
All the comments on how much weight I’ve lost (of which I probably receive 5 – 10 a week) make me terrified of gaining weight again. I mean, it went away on its own. Nothing I did consciously made it go, and as far as I can tell it could just as easily come back regardless of my daily habits. I could go back to eating less than a thousand calories a day and my weight would still gain if my body decided that’s what it needed to do.
I have no control that I’m aware of over this. So I am taking all of these comments intended to congratulate me on my “improvement” and I am imagining them surrounded with soft golden light. I offer them to Source, and ask that they transform into the highest vibration of love and acceptance available.
Acceptance for who I am today, and for the young woman who cried all night because a restaurant once gave her white rice instead of brown. Acceptance for all body types, for all bodies, for all people. Acceptance.
This is why I started my Food Support Group. I needed it once upon a time, and it didn’t exist. Now it does.
Heya,
Thanks for sharing your story. I can relate to feeling like it’s not in my control. Like, it’s my body doing its thing people. If I had beat it into submission would you really want to congratulate me on that? Wait, I guess you would.
I want to say at the same time that it’s out of your control, you did do things–you consciously chose to reject the body-hate culture. You healed your relationship with your body–that’s not nothing. I think we can’t control our weight but we can choose to move in the direction of healing, which can lead to losing weight (but that’s not the goal). Anyway I just want to give you some credit here. =)
I went through a similar thing (post written in 2007). The things is I *did* gain it all back – or much of it, in the past 6-12 months. But I feel differently about it now. I feel this sense that I will lose it again–because weight is this way my body tells me that something is up. And I have this intuitive sense that when I understand what it is about and heal whatever is there to heal, I’ll probably lose weight again. But either way, I feel differently about my body now. It’s my body, doing its thing–not this indictment of my character.
Well, I shouldn’t make it sound like it was all easy, I wasn’t really pleased to gain weight back. But it did surprise me that I wasn’t more upset. It’s just every girl’s worse nightmare after all. It was a good opportunity to remind myself about how I want to be in relationship to my body and reclaim that again.
One weird thing, regarding comments, is that nobody at all comments when you gain weight. Everyone comments when you lose weight. It’s sort of amusing to me. Because I’m sure people notice, you would notice either way. But there is such a taboo around gaining weight that everyone pretends not to notice. So I like to walk around and pretend that it’s not that they feel embarrassed for me, it’s just that I live in a culture where it doesn’t matter and bodies can be whatever size they want to be. Heh. It’s a nice little bubble in my head. =)
Emma
Emma,
Thanks for this. I realize I have done things that resulted in weight loss, it’s just nothing I can consciously point to and say “this works”. I also realize pretty strongly that losing weight is only a “good” thing based on an imposed standard, and has nothing to do with anything except what’s right for the person in the moment.
I read over your post from a few years ago and strongly identify. Bodies, as near as I can tell, are energetic beings that don’t operate by the left brain “do this, get this result” rules. The sooner we catch on, the happier we’ll be.
Sarah
Just to share another perspective on messed-up relationships with food and weight. I was always thin as a child and young adult and it was something that people always commented on. As I grew hips as an adolescent I feared that I was losing my thin-ness. I clung desperately to it, feeling like it was the one thing that people liked about me. Out of some strange groundedness that I had, I rationalized myself out of an eating disorder. That and the fact that when you eat dinner as a family, you can’t skip it without someone noticing.
Anyway, I grew out of it, but I still think about how dangerously close any of us can come to being a slave to our image (or perceived image.)