I mentioned in the previous post that part of what I've been doing concurrent with my weight loss is expanding my boundaries - getting out more, working more, getting more things done, etc. I've been attempting to do this relatively gradually, and I have the luxury of doing so because my husband bears the burden of making enough money for us to live while my income for the last six years has been largely supplemental. Note that this is not as inequitable as it seems. For about 10 years, my income was the main one and his was supplemental. There was a time when he was a part-time worker and part-time "househusband" and I was the breadwinner, until I broke under the weight of my body and depression.
When I quit my full-time job in a state of what I'm sure would have been diagnosed as clinical depression, my husband has been supporting me in multiple ways. He not only economically supports me, but he mentally and physically did so. When I was at my heaviest and in great back pain, he'd not only make the money, but he also would go grocery shopping to spare me and spend his limited free time emotionally supporting me. I was, in many ways, an invalid he looked after emotionally. He patiently dealt with me as I ate myself deeper into disability, knowing that I couldn't change until I was "ready" and knowing that I might never be "ready", but loving me all the same and therefore doing what he needed to do.
In the last two years, as I've experienced improved health, mobility, and emotional states, there has been a slow change in the dynamic between my husband and I. We're both happy that we can go out and do things together again (as we once did very long ago), and I'm relieved that he no longer needs to do things like grocery shopping for me on top of his large workload. I'm also pleased to be contributing more to our household income, which will eventually result in his reduced working hours and more freedom for him (he chooses for the time being to work longer hours to improve our nest egg).
However, as I mentioned in my previous post, I'm not emotionally whole by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I'm often on the edge of depression, despair, and simply feeling overwhelmed by the array of changes and shift in my identity. The steady push forward is at a pace I can just barely manage, but I think it's important to keep pushing ahead in order to be the person I want to be. However, this is a lot like running a marathon at just the edge of my endurance. Occasionally, I find that I've pushed myself too hard, and I have to stop and catch my breath.
The main problem is that emotionally this is harder to detect than it is physically. You don't know you've exceeded your capacity until you're depressed or have some sort of breakdown. This means I'm often in a state where I'm on the edge, and I need his support more than ever. Unfortunately, my husband sees someone who is getting much, much better and who requires less support than before, and reacts by giving me less unconsciously. Also, it is possible that (equally unconsciously), he's weary of looking after me and ready to move on to pursuing his own interests more now that the burden seems to be lifting.
The problem has been for us that I need less physical support and as much or more emotional support as my "success" continues. I've said before that I believe that people who have destructive relationships with food (relationships which result in reduced health or quality of life and are powerless to change them) have a mental health problem, or, at the very least, their eating issues are part of a manifestation of underlying issues. No one simply "likes food" to the extent of gaining up to nearly 400 lbs. without something deeper behind it. That's like "liking sex" to the point of never getting up off your back. There's something deeper there.
Getting back to the point though, as I've "gotten better" superficially, I've struggled as much (or more) psychologically, but I've gotten less support from my husband. This isn't because he doesn't want to be there for me, but because he has other interests he wants to pursue and cannot see any impediment to doing so. I also initially saw no reason for him not to do such things, but as time has gone on, we've had arguments and I've suffered because of the extent to which he wants to do them. It's taken awhile to figure out that my body changing hasn't changed my mind's need.
I'm not the woman he had to listen to crying because people were cruel to her every time she left the house and every little errand brought a world of horrible back pain. Now, I'm the woman who doesn't know who the hell she is, what she is capable of, and who becomes sad at the drop of a hat for reasons she is sometimes not sure of. I'm the woman who finds that the old compass she used to navigate life doesn't work anymore and is constantly having to create a make-shift one as she is a work in progress and doesn't know how far she can go or what direction she should head in. I'm psychologically lost, and am figuring out where I'm going and where I can manage. Unfortunately, I'm often going further than I should or into places which are not good for me.
So, I find that I need more support, but I'm getting less and my poor husband is in the middle of it. The truth is that he is my only constant. He's the only point in life for me which hasn't changed at all and I rely on him not only to give me strength, but to be a tether in what is a constant emotional storm. I don't know who I am in relationship to pretty much everything else in life, but I know who I am when I'm with him. When he's not there for me, especially in times of difficulty, I feel like a pile of broken pieces.
Given the reasonable need for my husband to have autonomy and do the things he wants to do in the face of my no longer disabled life, but my need to have more support, we've had many fights about when and how he needs to attend to my needs. I feel bad about being needy, and he feels frustrated by the inconsistency of the situation. For him, the guideposts keep moving and he's not sure what he can do without causing me to suffer and what he can't. This has made a difficult situation even worse, and it has been playing out for over a year now and stretching both of us emotionally to the limit.
Recently, I told him that if he regarded my situation as a physical illness rather than a mental one, we wouldn't be struggling so hard. Since my problems are psychological, he unconsciously believes it's okay to walk away from my neediness. If I had a herniated disc and couldn't get out of bed, he'd come home and cook meals for me without question or protest. He'd understand the need and make the sacrifice. With my broken psyche, it's easier just to "let me go hungry" while he goes out and fulfills his own psychological needs.
My husband has said that "empathy goes out the window when ones own interests are at stake", and he is right about that. It's been very hard for him to realize that his empathy for me may have been less than 100% because of this very thing. Don't get me wrong about my husband because he has sacrificed a great deal in my interests during much of our lives together. He's unconditionally loving, kind, generous, supportive, and I worship him because he is so psychologically whole and incredible, but he's dealing with a wife with psychological problems and even he, with his near saint-like capacity to be patient and caring, can't work it all out immediately (hard as he has tried).
I've tried and tried to suppress my needs, to deny my issues, and to be "better" faster for him, but the bottom line is that this isn't a road with short-cuts. No matter how desperately I don't want to be so needy, I can't change it. I've tried. I haven't beaten myself up when I've eaten more, but I've mentally thrashed myself over this. I want more than anything to give my husband the autonomy he might want to just live without having to attend to my psychological problems. There are times when I'd rather go back to weighing nearly 400 lbs. than continue to impose this burden on him. My guilt and anguish over how much changing me has placed a burden on him is so overwhelming at times that I'd rather I went back to my other kind of suffering than to inflict this difficulty on him.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), there is no going back now. It isn't the thing I'm meant to do and I know there is a better place that I'll be at psychologically in the future, but I'm not there yet and I need him to hold my hand tightly for awhile longer.
Showing posts with label husband. Show all posts
Showing posts with label husband. Show all posts
Monday, May 30, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Equivalencies (and Lisa)
Sometimes I wonder if one of the reasons the thriving diet world is so dysfunctional is that failure, struggle, and all of the drama that come along with such things are infinitely more compelling than a life of quiet success. People read romance novels not for the happy ending, but for everything that leads up to that point. Once that end has been achieved, they move on to the next drama- and romantic-tension filled book.
This "drama" adds a largeness and dimension to ones own struggles and removes some of the mundane aspects from what is often a mechanistic process. There is little that is more boring than counting calories, tallying up minutes on the treadmill, and eating steamed, roasted and boiled lean protein and vegetables. Listening to someone paint this focus in life as a picture other than what it is helps one frame ones own struggles as having significant value, rather than being a grind. This drama is largely what makes it so hard for me to read such blogs in the long run.
Through one of my link chains, I discovered a blog after my own heart, though not necessarily one that follows the same path as mine. This woman, Lisa Sargese, has been struggling with her weight all of her life, has suffered many of the same psychological traumas as me, and is approximately the same age. When I read her blog, even when she talks about adding in some type of food or exercise, I don't feel the sense of "sickness" that I get with other blogs written by people who are working on weight control. I get the sense of someone who is trying to grow in whatever way she can given the damage to her life from physical and mental aspects. Regardless of the outcome of her efforts, I can see the growth and relate to her struggles. I can also see someone who is trying to become functional rather than replace one dysfunction with another more socially admirable and acceptable one.
One of the things Lisa wrote about which has rarely occurred to me, and provided me with food for thought was the way in which people look at couples and decide whether or not one can "do better" than the specimen one is with. Because I've been married for a very long time to a husband who is unconditionally loving, I haven't entertained such thoughts since early in my marriage. At that point, I was convinced that his family disapproved of me in part because they thought he could "do better" than me, though not physically. When I gained weight back (and more), I occasionally thought about how people must look at him and think about what he was doing with his enormous wife.
Though when we first got married, I thought our attractiveness levels were roughly equivalent (neither of us models of great beauty nor horror, though I think my husband is uniquely gorgeous and insanely appealing physically... to me if to no one else), gaining weight made me feel that I moved from his rough equal to being a monstrosity that was unworthy of him. Eventually, I stopped thinking concretely about this, but I did often remark that he "deserved" a better wife than me. Those comments weren't motivated so much by my appearance as by the limits on our lives because of my weight. I thought he deserved a wife who could walk around the city with him for more than 5 minutes without pain and who did not attract unwanted and unpleasant attention with her size.
Because of my weight, we couldn't go to restaurants because of my chair fear, couldn't go to movies for the same reason, and he had to go out and shop alone. There were hits to his quality of life because of me, and I felt he "deserved" better than me. Being the wonderful and loving person he is, he never once criticized me or complained. Even now in retrospect, he never says or does anything to make me regret the limits of our lives for so many years.
What I realize now is that his actions have left me in a rare place mentally in regards to my weight loss. Instead of being focused upon my appearance, which I feel at my age would be a discouraging factor in continuing to work on my weight, I am honed in on quality of life gains. It's not about a taut tummy (which is out of the question for me anyway - stretched out skin does not snap back when you're in your mid 40's), but about being able to do the things other people do without a second thought. Because of him, my eye is on the achievable rather than the unachievable. I don't like my stretched out and wrinkly form, make no mistake, but I'm also not questioning the value of my efforts in light of the fact that I'll never look like anything but a disaster naked.
There are many gifts that my husband has given me, and this is just one of them. It's something that I didn't even realize was the case and a blessing that is worth noting and being incredibly grateful for. People who go into this with a significant other who has helped shape their thinking such that they value the impossible to attain ideal rather than the doable are working at a disadvantage I have not had to cope with.
I think this advantage, along with many other things such as valuing changes in action and thinking patterns rather than the end results, has made it easier for me not to fall into certain thinking traps. In particular, there is the weight loss burn-out near the end of the process in which someone says, "good enough" before they reach the goal they set and they start to slide back into old habits. Essentially, they miss enjoying food and accept the body they have, often with a load of cognitive dissonance quieting self-justifications.
Make no mistake, I have no problem with body acceptance at any size. If you're happy with who you are (whether you are healthy or not), it's nobody's business what your weight is. However, the reasons are paramount. "Good enough" thinking is spurred in part by the focus on appearance, which I generally do not have and I'm pretty sure I have my husband to thank for that in large part.
I note this here in part because I think that it's important to understand the dynamic involved with your choices and the opinions of others close to you. They can shape you in ways you can't easily detect at times. Sometimes it is highly destructive, or, as is my case, it can also be highly constructive.
This "drama" adds a largeness and dimension to ones own struggles and removes some of the mundane aspects from what is often a mechanistic process. There is little that is more boring than counting calories, tallying up minutes on the treadmill, and eating steamed, roasted and boiled lean protein and vegetables. Listening to someone paint this focus in life as a picture other than what it is helps one frame ones own struggles as having significant value, rather than being a grind. This drama is largely what makes it so hard for me to read such blogs in the long run.
Through one of my link chains, I discovered a blog after my own heart, though not necessarily one that follows the same path as mine. This woman, Lisa Sargese, has been struggling with her weight all of her life, has suffered many of the same psychological traumas as me, and is approximately the same age. When I read her blog, even when she talks about adding in some type of food or exercise, I don't feel the sense of "sickness" that I get with other blogs written by people who are working on weight control. I get the sense of someone who is trying to grow in whatever way she can given the damage to her life from physical and mental aspects. Regardless of the outcome of her efforts, I can see the growth and relate to her struggles. I can also see someone who is trying to become functional rather than replace one dysfunction with another more socially admirable and acceptable one.
One of the things Lisa wrote about which has rarely occurred to me, and provided me with food for thought was the way in which people look at couples and decide whether or not one can "do better" than the specimen one is with. Because I've been married for a very long time to a husband who is unconditionally loving, I haven't entertained such thoughts since early in my marriage. At that point, I was convinced that his family disapproved of me in part because they thought he could "do better" than me, though not physically. When I gained weight back (and more), I occasionally thought about how people must look at him and think about what he was doing with his enormous wife.
Though when we first got married, I thought our attractiveness levels were roughly equivalent (neither of us models of great beauty nor horror, though I think my husband is uniquely gorgeous and insanely appealing physically... to me if to no one else), gaining weight made me feel that I moved from his rough equal to being a monstrosity that was unworthy of him. Eventually, I stopped thinking concretely about this, but I did often remark that he "deserved" a better wife than me. Those comments weren't motivated so much by my appearance as by the limits on our lives because of my weight. I thought he deserved a wife who could walk around the city with him for more than 5 minutes without pain and who did not attract unwanted and unpleasant attention with her size.
Because of my weight, we couldn't go to restaurants because of my chair fear, couldn't go to movies for the same reason, and he had to go out and shop alone. There were hits to his quality of life because of me, and I felt he "deserved" better than me. Being the wonderful and loving person he is, he never once criticized me or complained. Even now in retrospect, he never says or does anything to make me regret the limits of our lives for so many years.
What I realize now is that his actions have left me in a rare place mentally in regards to my weight loss. Instead of being focused upon my appearance, which I feel at my age would be a discouraging factor in continuing to work on my weight, I am honed in on quality of life gains. It's not about a taut tummy (which is out of the question for me anyway - stretched out skin does not snap back when you're in your mid 40's), but about being able to do the things other people do without a second thought. Because of him, my eye is on the achievable rather than the unachievable. I don't like my stretched out and wrinkly form, make no mistake, but I'm also not questioning the value of my efforts in light of the fact that I'll never look like anything but a disaster naked.
There are many gifts that my husband has given me, and this is just one of them. It's something that I didn't even realize was the case and a blessing that is worth noting and being incredibly grateful for. People who go into this with a significant other who has helped shape their thinking such that they value the impossible to attain ideal rather than the doable are working at a disadvantage I have not had to cope with.
I think this advantage, along with many other things such as valuing changes in action and thinking patterns rather than the end results, has made it easier for me not to fall into certain thinking traps. In particular, there is the weight loss burn-out near the end of the process in which someone says, "good enough" before they reach the goal they set and they start to slide back into old habits. Essentially, they miss enjoying food and accept the body they have, often with a load of cognitive dissonance quieting self-justifications.
Make no mistake, I have no problem with body acceptance at any size. If you're happy with who you are (whether you are healthy or not), it's nobody's business what your weight is. However, the reasons are paramount. "Good enough" thinking is spurred in part by the focus on appearance, which I generally do not have and I'm pretty sure I have my husband to thank for that in large part.
I note this here in part because I think that it's important to understand the dynamic involved with your choices and the opinions of others close to you. They can shape you in ways you can't easily detect at times. Sometimes it is highly destructive, or, as is my case, it can also be highly constructive.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
The Percentages
Recently, my husband has been losing a little weight because he had some blood test results which were cause for some small concern. It's nothing incredibly serious, at least not yet, but even someone who is not greatly overweight can have health issues related to body fat. In particular, visceral fat, or fat around your organs which you can't necessarily see easily by looking at a person's body can cause Type 2 diabetes because this type of fat causes more issues with insulin resistance. This is likely the reason he needs to lose a little weight.
It's actually a little ironic that my husband, who has always weighed less than me by a wide margin, has had troubling blood test results while I seem to be okay. It does seem that my fat on the outside is less damaging than his fat on the inside. At any rate, my point is not to compare my fat to his fat, but rather to talk about his weight loss and mine.
As is so often the case with men, he is losing weight relatively rapidly and without much of a struggle. He has cut back on portions and cut out obvious things like sweets (and the donuts that he loves so well) and has lost 10 lbs. in about 3 weeks. He has always exercised for about 40-60 minutes on a regular basis, though he has made an effort to do so 5 days a week instead of 3 or 4 as he was doing. All in all, his changes have not been what anyone could consider radical and he hasn't chafed mentally against them much. The fact that he is not a food addict (like me) is evident in the relative emotional ease with which he has made the changes.
My husband told me that one of his work acquaintances remarked that he looked different and asked if he had lost weight. He has lost only 10 lbs. and someone has noticed already. It took me about 50 lbs. before any appreciable change was noticeable by others. I noticed in my wrists about 30 lbs. in. These differences remind me of the fact that every pound is more meaningful the smaller you become. As a percentage of his starting weight (and of the weight he needs to lose), each pound is more meaningful to him. Each pound for him is perhaps 1/30th of what he needs to lose. Even after all of my losses, each pound is 1/130th of what I still need to lose.
I try to keep in mind that when I started all of this, each pound was about 1/230th of what I needed to lose and every pound I lose makes the next one more meaningful. The percentages keep getting better and more impressive the longer I keep at this. Since I don't look much "better" in my opinion (just different - smaller fat as opposed to bigger fat), this is one more thing that can motivate me to continue when I start to feel like my success is relatively unimpressive or inconsequential.
It's actually a little ironic that my husband, who has always weighed less than me by a wide margin, has had troubling blood test results while I seem to be okay. It does seem that my fat on the outside is less damaging than his fat on the inside. At any rate, my point is not to compare my fat to his fat, but rather to talk about his weight loss and mine.
As is so often the case with men, he is losing weight relatively rapidly and without much of a struggle. He has cut back on portions and cut out obvious things like sweets (and the donuts that he loves so well) and has lost 10 lbs. in about 3 weeks. He has always exercised for about 40-60 minutes on a regular basis, though he has made an effort to do so 5 days a week instead of 3 or 4 as he was doing. All in all, his changes have not been what anyone could consider radical and he hasn't chafed mentally against them much. The fact that he is not a food addict (like me) is evident in the relative emotional ease with which he has made the changes.
My husband told me that one of his work acquaintances remarked that he looked different and asked if he had lost weight. He has lost only 10 lbs. and someone has noticed already. It took me about 50 lbs. before any appreciable change was noticeable by others. I noticed in my wrists about 30 lbs. in. These differences remind me of the fact that every pound is more meaningful the smaller you become. As a percentage of his starting weight (and of the weight he needs to lose), each pound is more meaningful to him. Each pound for him is perhaps 1/30th of what he needs to lose. Even after all of my losses, each pound is 1/130th of what I still need to lose.
I try to keep in mind that when I started all of this, each pound was about 1/230th of what I needed to lose and every pound I lose makes the next one more meaningful. The percentages keep getting better and more impressive the longer I keep at this. Since I don't look much "better" in my opinion (just different - smaller fat as opposed to bigger fat), this is one more thing that can motivate me to continue when I start to feel like my success is relatively unimpressive or inconsequential.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
"Warning: Fat Ahead"
My husband had two girlfriends before he found me. In fact, I was well-acquainted with the first one ("GF1" from henceforth), and fairly decently acquainted with the second one ("GF2"). GF2 had ended her relationship with my future husband because she realized that there were some core incompatibilities in regards to needs for attention, time spent together, etc. that were never going to work out. Also, she found another guy closer to home who she was more attracted to and didn't want to string one man along while courting another.
I always had the impression that GF2 may have wanted to fob her ex-boyfriend off on someone else because the break-up was so painful for him and he needed a lot of interaction with her in order to recover. He needed to talk and understand what went wrong and she just wanted it all over with. This was one of their core incompatibilities. Whatever the case, she was relieved when he got involved with me (at least initially).
For those who may not have read or recall my earlier posts, I'll state that I got involved with my husband after losing a tremendous amount of weight. I probably weighed around 180 lbs. when we became acquainted and was on a fairly strict healthy lifestyle kick. Since I had known GF1 for quite awhile, she had known me during the time when I was greatly heavier and had seen pictures of me as a fat child and young teenager. She knew I had lifelong issues with weight.
While GF2 was happy for my future husband and I, GF1 was outwardly supportive, but inwardly unhappy at the notion. This may have had something to do with the fact that he ended their relationship after finding out she had lied about many things that had happened between the two of them to GF2. I should mention that GF1 was also friends with GF2. We were all one little group of friends passing around the same guy at that point.
GF1 put on a big show of saying how happy she was for us that we seemed to be hitting it off so well. She maintained this for awhile, but when my husband and I were traveling abroad together, she sent him correspondence beforehand saying, "You know (my name) used to weigh a lot more; I thought you should know."
There it was... a warning that he was dating a (well-proportioned) chubby girl who was a former very fat girl who might get fatter again. She was using my past to try and drive a wedge between us because she couldn't stand that we were succeeding where she and he had failed. All of her proclamations that she was happy for us rang false, and the way in which people can be malicious and evil with a smile and a sense of doing something morally "right" (he needed to know I used to be fatter, it was only right) was clearly demonstrated.
Her efforts to break us up probably would have worked better had I not exhaustively informed my future husband not only of every single character fault that I believed I held (and yes, I did this - I gave a laundry list with explanations of all of my flaws), but also of my past in glorious Kodak-worthy color pictures. He knew I used to be fatter, and had seen just how fat I used to be. He knew how long ago I'd lost weight and by what method. He also knew that I believed I was temperamental, neurotic, and prone to many unappealing behaviors. And he still loved me, wanted me, married me, and has been with me happily for over two decades.
My husband has told me on many occasions that what he loves about me is that I have a "spark" that you don't always encounter in other people. Fortunately, that spark can't be drowned out by layers of body fat so he has loved me unconditionally and without reservation through weight ups (mostly ups) and downs.
GF1, who was shallow, vain, and a compulsive liar, couldn't begin to conceptualize why he loved me if it wasn't related to my physical beauty, and thought that she could use my (then former) fat as a weapon against me. It's something which reflected badly on her, and for which she never apologized. I confronted her about it, and she defended her actions by asserting that she felt it was the right thing. He "needed" and "deserved" to know the truth as hitching his wagon to a former fat girl carried implications she felt he needed to be aware of, as if I had some infectious social disease that he deserved to know about before he got too seriously involved with me.
In perhaps a karmic backlash, years later GF1, who had always eaten abysmally (hot dogs and sugary Coke) and remained thin, went through a bad patch in her life and put on a lot of weight. She eventually lost it and went back to her trim self, but I hope she learned a few things about being fat and looks back with regret on her devious behavior. I don't know if she did though since my friendship with her, unsurprisingly, had long ago ended.
I always had the impression that GF2 may have wanted to fob her ex-boyfriend off on someone else because the break-up was so painful for him and he needed a lot of interaction with her in order to recover. He needed to talk and understand what went wrong and she just wanted it all over with. This was one of their core incompatibilities. Whatever the case, she was relieved when he got involved with me (at least initially).
For those who may not have read or recall my earlier posts, I'll state that I got involved with my husband after losing a tremendous amount of weight. I probably weighed around 180 lbs. when we became acquainted and was on a fairly strict healthy lifestyle kick. Since I had known GF1 for quite awhile, she had known me during the time when I was greatly heavier and had seen pictures of me as a fat child and young teenager. She knew I had lifelong issues with weight.
While GF2 was happy for my future husband and I, GF1 was outwardly supportive, but inwardly unhappy at the notion. This may have had something to do with the fact that he ended their relationship after finding out she had lied about many things that had happened between the two of them to GF2. I should mention that GF1 was also friends with GF2. We were all one little group of friends passing around the same guy at that point.
GF1 put on a big show of saying how happy she was for us that we seemed to be hitting it off so well. She maintained this for awhile, but when my husband and I were traveling abroad together, she sent him correspondence beforehand saying, "You know (my name) used to weigh a lot more; I thought you should know."
There it was... a warning that he was dating a (well-proportioned) chubby girl who was a former very fat girl who might get fatter again. She was using my past to try and drive a wedge between us because she couldn't stand that we were succeeding where she and he had failed. All of her proclamations that she was happy for us rang false, and the way in which people can be malicious and evil with a smile and a sense of doing something morally "right" (he needed to know I used to be fatter, it was only right) was clearly demonstrated.
Her efforts to break us up probably would have worked better had I not exhaustively informed my future husband not only of every single character fault that I believed I held (and yes, I did this - I gave a laundry list with explanations of all of my flaws), but also of my past in glorious Kodak-worthy color pictures. He knew I used to be fatter, and had seen just how fat I used to be. He knew how long ago I'd lost weight and by what method. He also knew that I believed I was temperamental, neurotic, and prone to many unappealing behaviors. And he still loved me, wanted me, married me, and has been with me happily for over two decades.
My husband has told me on many occasions that what he loves about me is that I have a "spark" that you don't always encounter in other people. Fortunately, that spark can't be drowned out by layers of body fat so he has loved me unconditionally and without reservation through weight ups (mostly ups) and downs.
GF1, who was shallow, vain, and a compulsive liar, couldn't begin to conceptualize why he loved me if it wasn't related to my physical beauty, and thought that she could use my (then former) fat as a weapon against me. It's something which reflected badly on her, and for which she never apologized. I confronted her about it, and she defended her actions by asserting that she felt it was the right thing. He "needed" and "deserved" to know the truth as hitching his wagon to a former fat girl carried implications she felt he needed to be aware of, as if I had some infectious social disease that he deserved to know about before he got too seriously involved with me.
In perhaps a karmic backlash, years later GF1, who had always eaten abysmally (hot dogs and sugary Coke) and remained thin, went through a bad patch in her life and put on a lot of weight. She eventually lost it and went back to her trim self, but I hope she learned a few things about being fat and looks back with regret on her devious behavior. I don't know if she did though since my friendship with her, unsurprisingly, had long ago ended.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
My Marriage and My Weight
Sometimes I think about my relationship with my husband and how it has affected my weight. Before I get into this, I want to state unequivocally that this has nothing to do with "blame" or assigning responsibility to my husband. This post has to do with my responses to my relationship and the things that have happened which may have affected my weight. Just as I don't blame the existence of ice cream for my being overweight, I don't blame the existence of my relationship with my husband for my weight. Both may be factors in my problem because of how I acted on them (eating the ice cream, for instance), but that doesn't mean they are responsible. I'm merely looking at pieces of the puzzle in order to grasp the big picture, not playing some pointless blame game.
When I first got to know my husband, I was just out of college and on a very healthy living kick. I exercised 90 minutes a day, 5 days a week. I didn't eat sugar, white bread, pork, beef, butter, or fried foods. I was about two and a half years into some pretty serious weight loss and at my lowest weight in my adult life. This lifestyle melted away rapidly after I moved in with my husband. I had to change jobs (which didn't allow me to exercise because of a different schedule), lived in a situation which was highly stressful (and where I had little to no control over anything, let alone my eating), and became a part of his lifestyle choices. I also had to deal with the emotional aspects of our new relationship.
During our first year together, my husband and I fought nearly every day. That sounds awful, but we've been together now for 22 years and I can tell you that it's normal to have a lot of conflict early on and to have almost none as the years go by. Part of the process of getting to deeply know one another and learning to live together is conflict. There's a lot to learn, compromise on, and adapt to. Once you go through the process, it's all downhill. The important thing is that you grow to fit one another better and become better people, not that you are all sunshine and lollipops all of the time.
During that first year together, I gained at least 50 lbs., possibly more. My husband being the wonderful, loving person that he is never said a word, and he married me anyway. He also knew about my past weight and childhood obesity. He didn't care. He loved me anyway and always has. My husband has never been anything but accepting of my weight, even when he was frightened deep inside that I was digging my way to an early grave through a food-filled tunnel. His main concern, and he has very rarely voiced it because he knew that I would deal with my problem when and if I could, was that I would die young and he wouldn't be able to spend more of his life with me.
I view my husband as an extraordinary man because he is absolutely devoid of any shallowness and unconditionally loving. Some people may aspire to be as he is, but battle niggling voices that tell them to be preoccupied with the superficial. In this way, I am absolutely fortunate, but I wonder at times if this has played a role in my gaining more weight than I otherwise might have. Sometimes I wonder if my husband's absolute acceptance took away my motivation to keep my weight under control while the stresses associated with our relationship early one compelled me to lose control. If I had felt a risk that I would lose him if I got too fat, would I have then not become so fat? It's a terrible thought that I may not have gotten this way if my husband had put an emotional gun to my head. The fact that I feel that may have helped reflects more on how messed up I am (I need external validation for my actions or I don't take them).
My husband was the first person who ever accepted me unconditionally, loved me openly, and provided a lot of the validation, attention, and affection that I desperately needed. Because he was the only person who ever made me feel like I was actually human (since I'd been dehumanized by everyone my entire life based on weight), I developed a mindset where only his opinion mattered. This is a view that he encouraged because he wanted me to stop allowing the arbitrary judgment and subsequent devaluation of me based on superficial analysis of strangers to continue to damage me. He knows me. They don't. Therefore, his opinion of me was the only one that mattered.
Though he did not intend me to take this message from his actions, I wonder if I stopped caring about my weight because he seemingly didn't care about it, and though everyone else still did, they did not matter. How could I reject their judgment yet act on their wishes? Beyond that, I believe that, despite my husband's complete acceptance of me, the self-loathing I had (and still have) made me disbelieve it on a certain level. I accept it as a possibility that I may have let my weight go completely on some subconscious level because I wanted to "test" whether or not his love for me was beyond superficial concerns. I can say, without hesitation, that it absolutely is.
Of course, I don't know if any of this is actually true. It is mere speculation, but I believe there is value in pondering it. I do want to know all of the factors that contributed to my getting to a weight close to 400 lbs. so that I can understand how not to get there again.
When I first got to know my husband, I was just out of college and on a very healthy living kick. I exercised 90 minutes a day, 5 days a week. I didn't eat sugar, white bread, pork, beef, butter, or fried foods. I was about two and a half years into some pretty serious weight loss and at my lowest weight in my adult life. This lifestyle melted away rapidly after I moved in with my husband. I had to change jobs (which didn't allow me to exercise because of a different schedule), lived in a situation which was highly stressful (and where I had little to no control over anything, let alone my eating), and became a part of his lifestyle choices. I also had to deal with the emotional aspects of our new relationship.
During our first year together, my husband and I fought nearly every day. That sounds awful, but we've been together now for 22 years and I can tell you that it's normal to have a lot of conflict early on and to have almost none as the years go by. Part of the process of getting to deeply know one another and learning to live together is conflict. There's a lot to learn, compromise on, and adapt to. Once you go through the process, it's all downhill. The important thing is that you grow to fit one another better and become better people, not that you are all sunshine and lollipops all of the time.
During that first year together, I gained at least 50 lbs., possibly more. My husband being the wonderful, loving person that he is never said a word, and he married me anyway. He also knew about my past weight and childhood obesity. He didn't care. He loved me anyway and always has. My husband has never been anything but accepting of my weight, even when he was frightened deep inside that I was digging my way to an early grave through a food-filled tunnel. His main concern, and he has very rarely voiced it because he knew that I would deal with my problem when and if I could, was that I would die young and he wouldn't be able to spend more of his life with me.
I view my husband as an extraordinary man because he is absolutely devoid of any shallowness and unconditionally loving. Some people may aspire to be as he is, but battle niggling voices that tell them to be preoccupied with the superficial. In this way, I am absolutely fortunate, but I wonder at times if this has played a role in my gaining more weight than I otherwise might have. Sometimes I wonder if my husband's absolute acceptance took away my motivation to keep my weight under control while the stresses associated with our relationship early one compelled me to lose control. If I had felt a risk that I would lose him if I got too fat, would I have then not become so fat? It's a terrible thought that I may not have gotten this way if my husband had put an emotional gun to my head. The fact that I feel that may have helped reflects more on how messed up I am (I need external validation for my actions or I don't take them).
My husband was the first person who ever accepted me unconditionally, loved me openly, and provided a lot of the validation, attention, and affection that I desperately needed. Because he was the only person who ever made me feel like I was actually human (since I'd been dehumanized by everyone my entire life based on weight), I developed a mindset where only his opinion mattered. This is a view that he encouraged because he wanted me to stop allowing the arbitrary judgment and subsequent devaluation of me based on superficial analysis of strangers to continue to damage me. He knows me. They don't. Therefore, his opinion of me was the only one that mattered.
Though he did not intend me to take this message from his actions, I wonder if I stopped caring about my weight because he seemingly didn't care about it, and though everyone else still did, they did not matter. How could I reject their judgment yet act on their wishes? Beyond that, I believe that, despite my husband's complete acceptance of me, the self-loathing I had (and still have) made me disbelieve it on a certain level. I accept it as a possibility that I may have let my weight go completely on some subconscious level because I wanted to "test" whether or not his love for me was beyond superficial concerns. I can say, without hesitation, that it absolutely is.
Of course, I don't know if any of this is actually true. It is mere speculation, but I believe there is value in pondering it. I do want to know all of the factors that contributed to my getting to a weight close to 400 lbs. so that I can understand how not to get there again.
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