More than one woman who is struggling to lose weight has complained that her husband, who knows that she's trying to avoid certain foods that she "can't resist" will go out and buy exactly what she "can't" eat. Invariably, the women rave about how their significant others are trying to "sabotage" their efforts. They are angry and frustrated, but the truth is that this is an act of love, not an attempt to short-circuit their success.
For many years, my husband watched me go from around the 160 lbs. I weighed when he met me to nearly 400 lbs. During that time, he worried about my health. Sometimes, the fear that I would die and we would be denied many years of time together because of my weight bubbled to the surface and I could see it in his eyes when he looked at me. It was a look of sadness, not of disgust or disappointment. It was because he loved me so much and didn't want to be denied years of life with me because of my issues with food.
Despite his fear, my husband still did what these other men did. That is, he would buy me food that made me happy and kept me fat. He didn't do it because he wanted me to stay the way I was. It's safe to say that he, more than anyone including me, wanted me to lose weight for the sake of my health and improvement in the quality of my life. He knew that the food made me happy and comforted me in my misery. He also knew that not buying things for me that I enjoyed eating wasn't going to change things because the changes that needed to be made had to come from me, not from him.
When there is someone in your life who is obese or super obese, it is easy to imagine that you are an integral part of the dynamic and that you are "enabling" them if you give them food that "keeps" them fat. This is simply not so. Anyone who makes the decision to eat a particular food in a particular quantity is doing it for reasons you have no sway over. They can't lose weight for you and you can't help them do it for themselves. That is not to say that they don't need support, but they don't need diet police. They need love, care, and attention.
One of the hardest transitions for me when I started living my life differently was not so much the loss of eating every type of food in unrestricted quantities (though that was hard) but the loss of an easy dynamic by which my husband could make me happy by surprising me with some food I'd enjoy. It was a two part process in which he demonstrated the way he thought of me and what would make me happy by giving me a gift, and then I would enjoy that gift. I lost that when I changed my relationship with food.
That loss was also multi-part. First, I couldn't eat just anything any time. I still eat treats and sweets, but the portions are very small such that it takes a long time to eat up whatever I buy. Also, since I eat so little, it's something I am careful to choose based on mood and quantity. My husband really can't be making such choices casually for me anymore. My body is not a garbage disposal that I toss great amounts of food into to get rid of it. The other loss is simply that my psychological changes mean that food is no longer the emotional comforter that I wrap around myself. I enjoy it as a sensory pleasure, but it's not a panacea for my pains anymore.
This loss has required profound adjustments in other areas of my life. My husband has had to restructure how he deals with me because he can no longer buy me food to make me happy. He's got to do more of other things, and it takes time and effort for both of us to figure out what more is required. Our relationship is important to both of us and we've worked hard on finding a new balance. I've also had to find peace and comfort through much more difficult and developed methods than simply eating. This is a profoundly difficult thing and has made me prone to depression, though that has gotten better through working more (which in and of itself has introduced other issues).
I knew for a long time that my husband suffered watching me destroy my health and mobility through my eating, but I knew on a "I know this feeling exists" level. I didn't know on the deeply empathetic level that one has when one stands in another person's shoes. Today, I got a taste of true understanding and deeper empathy when I talked to my sister. I'll go into that though in a follow-up post.
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Friday, August 12, 2011
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Hungry Young Me
When I was about 14 years old, I became infatuated with the guy who sat in the seat behind me. He always sat behind me because teachers arranged us alphabetically and our names were locked together in an unbreakable fashion due to the inflexible nature of the roman alphabet. On those rare occasions when a teacher didn't force us to follow this convention, he sat with other people. This gave me more than a small clue about the fact that perhaps he wasn't fond of talking to "the fat girl" at the start of every class.
Since I'm 45 years old, I grew up in a time when "the fat kid" really was only one in the class. In our small rural grade which totaled around 85 people, I was "the fat girl" and there was also "the fat guy". Everyone else was thin or not more than vaguely chubby due to the vagaries of puberty.
My lingering crush on this fellow lasted well over a decade. It waxed and waned. He was my friend during parts of it, and out of touch during other parts. It was quite literally a spell over me that I could not shake or break until I fell in love with my husband and I hated being controlled by my feelings for this person. There were days when I would have done anything to not feel for this guy the way I did. I did not want the burden it placed on me. Falling for my future husband finally shattered this sense that my affection was painfully tethered to a person who would never feel for me the way I felt for him. In my mind, this was the case because I was always "the fat girl" to him. Since he grew up watching me go from chubby to ballooning up to "big" and then close to what I thought was "huge", he'd never see me as sexually attractive.
Even when I lost weight in college, I was still too fat for "normal" guys and getting down to about 180 lbs. didn't change the object of my long-standing love's feelings for me. When I finally got the courage to admit to him that I was in love with him, something that I'm sure he had known for a long time, he told me he just didn't see me that way, and gave me a pity kiss on the mouth. I was around 21 when that happened, and it was the first time anyone had ever kissed me.
Fast forward to the future, where I have the benefits of 20/20 hindsight and over 20 years of blissful union with my husband who I adore and adores me back. I'm immensely grateful that my unrequited love never returned my affections because I can't imagine how that may have affected my potential future relationship with the man who is my perfect match. Either it would have "worked" enough to dissuade me from pursuing my future husband, or it would have failed and possibly left me too jaded or wary to give a relationship with my future husband a chance.
At the very least, I wouldn't be the open, fresh, and, yes, even naive, person who entered a relationship with a man she met and developed a distance relationship with. Frankly, I believe that a lot of people who have bad relationships are worse for it when they enter future ones. They are scarred by the things that went wrong and may be unreasonably wary of seeing the same things happen in the next relationship. My husband had the benefit of not competing with the memory of anyone from my past, either in terms of positives or negatives. He deserved this "fresh" and undamaged "relationship me" (the only part of me that probably wasn't damaged), and I'm grateful to have been spurned by the person who I focused my affection on throughout my youth.
I have been in touch off an on with my old friend throughout the years, and am currently in contact with him through FaceBook. He married a woman he met at a job he held a long time ago (about two or three years after I married). My husband and I met briefly with him and her about two decades ago and she seemed nice enough. My friend confessed that they were marrying at that time because his girlfriend had gotten pregnant, but quickly added that they were going to marry anyway. The pregnancy just hastened the time-line.
In the past several months, my friend had gone rather quiet on FaceBook, and what I suspected might be the cause turned out to be true. His marriage was ending. He and his wife have two children and the oldest recently finished high school and the younger one is a young teen. He told me that he had been unhappy for quite some time and felt that he couldn't "be himself" in their home. I concluded that perhaps the oldest child entering adulthood and the youngest definitively being out of childhood may have given him the courage to walk away from a situation he was dissatisfied with.
For many years, when I have been occasionally in touch with my friend, I have had a deep sense that his marriage would not last. This was not some petty notion that he would have been happier with me and that I wanted to see his marriage end to validate that. As I said, I'm grateful that we never ended up together. The reason I thought his marriage might fail was based in some information he confided in me a very long time ago when he was engaged to a woman from our small hometown. He cheated on her with not one, but two other women and eventually ended the engagement. I should mention that my friend is a lovely person. He is very kind, intelligent, artistic, talented, and very charming. He is not "good-looking", but has a very appealing personality. Many people are drawn to him because he has a particular energy. His actions with his long-ago fiancee should not indicate anything about who he is at his core.
Let me say that I don't believe my friend is some sort of Lothario or a "cheating dog" that can't be taught new tricks. The case in my opinion has been that he is deeply insecure on some level (a feeling I can truly identify with) and that it would be hard for any one woman to meet his needs adequately, and such a woman would have to be both immensely self-aware and other-directed. Also, he is moody and passionate, and that is a hard combination to live with on a daily basis. Frankly, though I am both incredibly self-aware and other-directed, I've realized in retrospect what a horrible combination his personality and mine would have been and that it would have been me who he would have been divorcing had we ended up together.
All of that being said, and here I finally reach the point of this post. There is a small nagging voice in me that wants to hear him say something to the effect of, "I wish I had married you instead". I am incredibly disappointed in myself for this tiny, little voice that whispers from a small corner of the immense cavern of my insecurity. It's my ancient need for validation of my value aside from my physical presence tapping at my psyche and asking to finally be fulfilled. The fat girl I was always wanted to be loved and accepted by this person because she was intelligent, witty, funny, kind, and loving. That girl was never accepted by any boy or young man because her body was a deal breaker.
Even though I am an adult now and am utterly validated as a desirable character by my husband's bountiful unconditional love and frequent professions of admiration for all of the qualities no one else appreciated, that tiny voice still whispers at me. Some part of me still needs validation from this friend of mine who I held affection for for so very long and I am ashamed of this need.
That shame is not because of the need itself because I think that anyone who has been so battle-scarred in life because of her weight may need a lot of pointless validation to help heal some of those old wounds. I'm ashamed of it because I want someone to profess some sort of wish to have had me in his life (but not to want me in it at present) when I have absolutely zero desire for him now and haven't had any since falling in love with my husband. This desire is incredibly selfish and self-serving. It is merely a need for a quick, pat stamp of approval that I never got when I was younger. I don't care about what the stamp means or brings, but I want to have it nonetheless, as if it completes a collection with a missing space that I just want filled for no good reason.
Recognizing that I have this need is not new to me nor unique. I'm sure that many people want the people they pined for to want them later even though they no longer want the object of their former affection. For me though, it's a little different as I'm not looking for spite or revenge at being rejected. I have some deep need for this friend to have "liked" me, but have been afraid to have acted on his feelings because it was too embarrassing to have a fat girlfriend. Frankly, I don't believe for a second that any such feelings ever existed. I don't believe he ever was attracted to me in any way other than as a friend just like his male friends.
It's this rather sad and pathetic need to feel that my character transcended my physicality and to have that verified with an assertion from him. At its core, it's me wanting someone to say, "prove to me that I was a good person who was worthy of loving, even when my body didn't allow me to be loved." That's the hungry part of me that has been pulled to the surface from this experience, and I'm going to have to work to reconcile the unfulfilled feelings of that very young me with the more mature me who is truly blessed to have it all when it comes to love and validation from a person she worships and adores in the here and now.
Since I'm 45 years old, I grew up in a time when "the fat kid" really was only one in the class. In our small rural grade which totaled around 85 people, I was "the fat girl" and there was also "the fat guy". Everyone else was thin or not more than vaguely chubby due to the vagaries of puberty.
My lingering crush on this fellow lasted well over a decade. It waxed and waned. He was my friend during parts of it, and out of touch during other parts. It was quite literally a spell over me that I could not shake or break until I fell in love with my husband and I hated being controlled by my feelings for this person. There were days when I would have done anything to not feel for this guy the way I did. I did not want the burden it placed on me. Falling for my future husband finally shattered this sense that my affection was painfully tethered to a person who would never feel for me the way I felt for him. In my mind, this was the case because I was always "the fat girl" to him. Since he grew up watching me go from chubby to ballooning up to "big" and then close to what I thought was "huge", he'd never see me as sexually attractive.
Even when I lost weight in college, I was still too fat for "normal" guys and getting down to about 180 lbs. didn't change the object of my long-standing love's feelings for me. When I finally got the courage to admit to him that I was in love with him, something that I'm sure he had known for a long time, he told me he just didn't see me that way, and gave me a pity kiss on the mouth. I was around 21 when that happened, and it was the first time anyone had ever kissed me.
Fast forward to the future, where I have the benefits of 20/20 hindsight and over 20 years of blissful union with my husband who I adore and adores me back. I'm immensely grateful that my unrequited love never returned my affections because I can't imagine how that may have affected my potential future relationship with the man who is my perfect match. Either it would have "worked" enough to dissuade me from pursuing my future husband, or it would have failed and possibly left me too jaded or wary to give a relationship with my future husband a chance.
At the very least, I wouldn't be the open, fresh, and, yes, even naive, person who entered a relationship with a man she met and developed a distance relationship with. Frankly, I believe that a lot of people who have bad relationships are worse for it when they enter future ones. They are scarred by the things that went wrong and may be unreasonably wary of seeing the same things happen in the next relationship. My husband had the benefit of not competing with the memory of anyone from my past, either in terms of positives or negatives. He deserved this "fresh" and undamaged "relationship me" (the only part of me that probably wasn't damaged), and I'm grateful to have been spurned by the person who I focused my affection on throughout my youth.
I have been in touch off an on with my old friend throughout the years, and am currently in contact with him through FaceBook. He married a woman he met at a job he held a long time ago (about two or three years after I married). My husband and I met briefly with him and her about two decades ago and she seemed nice enough. My friend confessed that they were marrying at that time because his girlfriend had gotten pregnant, but quickly added that they were going to marry anyway. The pregnancy just hastened the time-line.
In the past several months, my friend had gone rather quiet on FaceBook, and what I suspected might be the cause turned out to be true. His marriage was ending. He and his wife have two children and the oldest recently finished high school and the younger one is a young teen. He told me that he had been unhappy for quite some time and felt that he couldn't "be himself" in their home. I concluded that perhaps the oldest child entering adulthood and the youngest definitively being out of childhood may have given him the courage to walk away from a situation he was dissatisfied with.
For many years, when I have been occasionally in touch with my friend, I have had a deep sense that his marriage would not last. This was not some petty notion that he would have been happier with me and that I wanted to see his marriage end to validate that. As I said, I'm grateful that we never ended up together. The reason I thought his marriage might fail was based in some information he confided in me a very long time ago when he was engaged to a woman from our small hometown. He cheated on her with not one, but two other women and eventually ended the engagement. I should mention that my friend is a lovely person. He is very kind, intelligent, artistic, talented, and very charming. He is not "good-looking", but has a very appealing personality. Many people are drawn to him because he has a particular energy. His actions with his long-ago fiancee should not indicate anything about who he is at his core.
Let me say that I don't believe my friend is some sort of Lothario or a "cheating dog" that can't be taught new tricks. The case in my opinion has been that he is deeply insecure on some level (a feeling I can truly identify with) and that it would be hard for any one woman to meet his needs adequately, and such a woman would have to be both immensely self-aware and other-directed. Also, he is moody and passionate, and that is a hard combination to live with on a daily basis. Frankly, though I am both incredibly self-aware and other-directed, I've realized in retrospect what a horrible combination his personality and mine would have been and that it would have been me who he would have been divorcing had we ended up together.
All of that being said, and here I finally reach the point of this post. There is a small nagging voice in me that wants to hear him say something to the effect of, "I wish I had married you instead". I am incredibly disappointed in myself for this tiny, little voice that whispers from a small corner of the immense cavern of my insecurity. It's my ancient need for validation of my value aside from my physical presence tapping at my psyche and asking to finally be fulfilled. The fat girl I was always wanted to be loved and accepted by this person because she was intelligent, witty, funny, kind, and loving. That girl was never accepted by any boy or young man because her body was a deal breaker.
Even though I am an adult now and am utterly validated as a desirable character by my husband's bountiful unconditional love and frequent professions of admiration for all of the qualities no one else appreciated, that tiny voice still whispers at me. Some part of me still needs validation from this friend of mine who I held affection for for so very long and I am ashamed of this need.
That shame is not because of the need itself because I think that anyone who has been so battle-scarred in life because of her weight may need a lot of pointless validation to help heal some of those old wounds. I'm ashamed of it because I want someone to profess some sort of wish to have had me in his life (but not to want me in it at present) when I have absolutely zero desire for him now and haven't had any since falling in love with my husband. This desire is incredibly selfish and self-serving. It is merely a need for a quick, pat stamp of approval that I never got when I was younger. I don't care about what the stamp means or brings, but I want to have it nonetheless, as if it completes a collection with a missing space that I just want filled for no good reason.
Recognizing that I have this need is not new to me nor unique. I'm sure that many people want the people they pined for to want them later even though they no longer want the object of their former affection. For me though, it's a little different as I'm not looking for spite or revenge at being rejected. I have some deep need for this friend to have "liked" me, but have been afraid to have acted on his feelings because it was too embarrassing to have a fat girlfriend. Frankly, I don't believe for a second that any such feelings ever existed. I don't believe he ever was attracted to me in any way other than as a friend just like his male friends.
It's this rather sad and pathetic need to feel that my character transcended my physicality and to have that verified with an assertion from him. At its core, it's me wanting someone to say, "prove to me that I was a good person who was worthy of loving, even when my body didn't allow me to be loved." That's the hungry part of me that has been pulled to the surface from this experience, and I'm going to have to work to reconcile the unfulfilled feelings of that very young me with the more mature me who is truly blessed to have it all when it comes to love and validation from a person she worships and adores in the here and now.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Losing it for someone else
What is the number one thing that most people will say is absolutely required for happiness in life? Health. If you don't have good health, you can't be truly happy. All of the money in the world means nothing if you are in physical pain or at risk of becoming debilitated (or dying). After health, a wide variety of other factors contribute to happiness, but clearly the needs and demands of the body come first.
A psychologist named Abraham Maslow created a pyramid which defined the needs of people. His theory was that the needs at the bottom of the pyramid formed the base, and we had to have the base needs met before we could seriously concern ourselves with needs at the next higher level. Unsurprisingly, at the bottom of the pyramid are physiological needs - food, water, sleep, etc. The things which contribute to our basic survival as organisms are first and foremost. On the next step up, is health, and on the third step, family and love. This pyramid, which is an imperfect representation of the needs of humans, is nonetheless fairly accurate for most people. We act in accordance with it most of the time, though we don't always realize it.
During one of my many failed attempts to pull my act together and lose weight, I tried to motivate myself to succeed by seeing things as a choice between my husband (who I love so dearly that it's impossible to express in mere words) and food. I visualized the choice to help motivate me by conjuring up the image of a pile of delicious food and him. This worked for a very short time, but ultimately, I was unable to sustain it. In fact, the truth was that this only made things worse as failure felt all the more crushing when I viewed it in light of this type of choice. I was not only failing myself, but him and my "weakness" was seemingly greater than the person I valued more than anything in the universe.
Women who are trying to lose weight often say they want to do it so they're around when their kids grow up. They believe they can blackmail themselves emotionally into losing weight like I once did. If they taste some success, they soon want everyone around them who also may develop or who have already developed health issues due to weight problems to lose weight also. They display varying degrees of franticness about their spouses', parent's, etc. health risks and express frustration that these people, in their estimation, value the comfort of food more than their future as a family or couple together.
They see it as a matter of the value loved ones apply to them. They think that, if this fat person who claims to love me valued me more, they'd do what it takes to lose weight. I will note that generally these sorts of assertions are made by newly minted losers in the weight loss arena. They've been on a diet bandwagon and lost about 10-20 lbs. and now they play the loudest of anyone in the group. This tiny amount of success sets off a lot of judgment of everyone around them, and they generalize the concerns that motivated them to everyone else.
If choosing to lose weight or control your eating could be effectively motivated in this fashion, there would be very few overweight people in the world. In fact, if my love and value of my husband could drive me to eat well and be healthy, I'd be the healthiest person on the planet. I value nothing more than him. My husband once said that if he had to choose between having someone shoot me or him, he's not sure he'd choose himself because he knows I'd rather die than live without him. He knows he wouldn't be doing me any favors by sacrificing himself, though he clearly would want to do so.
So, if I love and value my life with my husband so much, why couldn't I lose weight "for him"? Unfortunately, the situation is more complicated than that. The relationship we have with food is intimate, deeper, and different than the one we have with other people. It is driven internally, by both biological and psychological factors. Both of these factors are not directly affected by our love of others. When my stomach is rumbling or my blood sugar is low, my body isn't going to squelch the desire to eat in response to my love for my husband and my desire to be with him.
You can't put off a "lower need" (food) by pitting it against a "higher need" (love and belonging). The lower need will win every time as Maslow's pyramid theory illustrates. The lower needs need to be attended to first. It's not just human nature that is at play. It is survival. People have to lose weight for themselves, and it's not about a choice of food or a longer life with loved ones, though they may often feel that is so. My relationship with food came long before the one I have had with my husband, and it is integrated with me on a cellular level. Placing one relationship in a competition against the other is not only counterproductive, but potentially destructive.
Mixing up love with food in this manner carries a lot of emotional risks. The primary one is immense guilt when you fail, but there is also the potential for resentment of the person you're hoping to benefit with your weight loss. Since food issues are intensely personal, linking your food and lifestyle choices to other people is placing control and motivation outside of yourself. It's a tenuous motivation. If your spouse makes you angry, are you going to decide it's not worth it and binge only to be filled with regret and remorse later when a level head returns and emotions are quiet? One needs consistent motivation, and looking to others for that is not going to be very effective.
I would encourage anyone who thinks others should lose weight for their sake, or who thinks they should lose weight for the sake of the ones they love to look inside themselves for motivation and not to associate food choices with personal valuation. People can't and shouldn't be blackmailed into losing weight in this manner and attempting to do so will make it all that much more painful when there is failure. Your body and food are an entirely different order than your love for those who are dear to you. The needs and desires of your body and mind cannot be placed aside for the greater interests of others. They need to be dealt with for yourself.
A psychologist named Abraham Maslow created a pyramid which defined the needs of people. His theory was that the needs at the bottom of the pyramid formed the base, and we had to have the base needs met before we could seriously concern ourselves with needs at the next higher level. Unsurprisingly, at the bottom of the pyramid are physiological needs - food, water, sleep, etc. The things which contribute to our basic survival as organisms are first and foremost. On the next step up, is health, and on the third step, family and love. This pyramid, which is an imperfect representation of the needs of humans, is nonetheless fairly accurate for most people. We act in accordance with it most of the time, though we don't always realize it.
During one of my many failed attempts to pull my act together and lose weight, I tried to motivate myself to succeed by seeing things as a choice between my husband (who I love so dearly that it's impossible to express in mere words) and food. I visualized the choice to help motivate me by conjuring up the image of a pile of delicious food and him. This worked for a very short time, but ultimately, I was unable to sustain it. In fact, the truth was that this only made things worse as failure felt all the more crushing when I viewed it in light of this type of choice. I was not only failing myself, but him and my "weakness" was seemingly greater than the person I valued more than anything in the universe.
Women who are trying to lose weight often say they want to do it so they're around when their kids grow up. They believe they can blackmail themselves emotionally into losing weight like I once did. If they taste some success, they soon want everyone around them who also may develop or who have already developed health issues due to weight problems to lose weight also. They display varying degrees of franticness about their spouses', parent's, etc. health risks and express frustration that these people, in their estimation, value the comfort of food more than their future as a family or couple together.
They see it as a matter of the value loved ones apply to them. They think that, if this fat person who claims to love me valued me more, they'd do what it takes to lose weight. I will note that generally these sorts of assertions are made by newly minted losers in the weight loss arena. They've been on a diet bandwagon and lost about 10-20 lbs. and now they play the loudest of anyone in the group. This tiny amount of success sets off a lot of judgment of everyone around them, and they generalize the concerns that motivated them to everyone else.
If choosing to lose weight or control your eating could be effectively motivated in this fashion, there would be very few overweight people in the world. In fact, if my love and value of my husband could drive me to eat well and be healthy, I'd be the healthiest person on the planet. I value nothing more than him. My husband once said that if he had to choose between having someone shoot me or him, he's not sure he'd choose himself because he knows I'd rather die than live without him. He knows he wouldn't be doing me any favors by sacrificing himself, though he clearly would want to do so.
So, if I love and value my life with my husband so much, why couldn't I lose weight "for him"? Unfortunately, the situation is more complicated than that. The relationship we have with food is intimate, deeper, and different than the one we have with other people. It is driven internally, by both biological and psychological factors. Both of these factors are not directly affected by our love of others. When my stomach is rumbling or my blood sugar is low, my body isn't going to squelch the desire to eat in response to my love for my husband and my desire to be with him.
You can't put off a "lower need" (food) by pitting it against a "higher need" (love and belonging). The lower need will win every time as Maslow's pyramid theory illustrates. The lower needs need to be attended to first. It's not just human nature that is at play. It is survival. People have to lose weight for themselves, and it's not about a choice of food or a longer life with loved ones, though they may often feel that is so. My relationship with food came long before the one I have had with my husband, and it is integrated with me on a cellular level. Placing one relationship in a competition against the other is not only counterproductive, but potentially destructive.
Mixing up love with food in this manner carries a lot of emotional risks. The primary one is immense guilt when you fail, but there is also the potential for resentment of the person you're hoping to benefit with your weight loss. Since food issues are intensely personal, linking your food and lifestyle choices to other people is placing control and motivation outside of yourself. It's a tenuous motivation. If your spouse makes you angry, are you going to decide it's not worth it and binge only to be filled with regret and remorse later when a level head returns and emotions are quiet? One needs consistent motivation, and looking to others for that is not going to be very effective.
I would encourage anyone who thinks others should lose weight for their sake, or who thinks they should lose weight for the sake of the ones they love to look inside themselves for motivation and not to associate food choices with personal valuation. People can't and shouldn't be blackmailed into losing weight in this manner and attempting to do so will make it all that much more painful when there is failure. Your body and food are an entirely different order than your love for those who are dear to you. The needs and desires of your body and mind cannot be placed aside for the greater interests of others. They need to be dealt with for yourself.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
For the Love of Food
I love food. I love the smell, texture, and taste. It lights up a pleasure center in my brain that can’t be set aflame by any other sensory experience. I’m sure that is no surprise to anyone as we all assume fat people love food.
A lot of people with food control issues love food, but most of us have been in what could be called an abusive relationship with it. It controls us and we abuse it. We don’t appreciate its finer points and take it for granted. We take comfort as much or more from its mere presence and just using it as much as possible than we do in its essential merits. We hate ourselves for using it profligately and we hate food for its iron-clad grip on our lives.
I think part of the reason I failed in the past (and many others may have as well) is that we associate losing weight and living healthily with having to abandon our love. We can do it for a while, but then the need to be fulfilled in the way only food can make us feel comes nagging at us. It’s like a controlling boyfriend who makes us crazy, but we simply can’t live without him.
What I’ve discovered this time around is that I don’t have to let go of my love of food; I simply have to clean up the bad relationship I have with it. I can eat chocolate, cheese, eggs, squash, bananas, and ice cream, but I have to respect and appreciate the process of consuming such things. I have to give each bite the attention it deserves rather than simply use and abuse it out of habit. If I really love it, it will love me back rather than abuse me in return.
Today when I was shopping at the market and I picked up some cheese and crackers that looked interesting, I was thinking about how I was looking forward to eating them. I wasn’t questioning myself for the calories or hating myself because I’m fat and I shouldn’t eat or want these things. I really love food, now more than ever, and I don’t hate myself for doing so.
A lot of people with food control issues love food, but most of us have been in what could be called an abusive relationship with it. It controls us and we abuse it. We don’t appreciate its finer points and take it for granted. We take comfort as much or more from its mere presence and just using it as much as possible than we do in its essential merits. We hate ourselves for using it profligately and we hate food for its iron-clad grip on our lives.
I think part of the reason I failed in the past (and many others may have as well) is that we associate losing weight and living healthily with having to abandon our love. We can do it for a while, but then the need to be fulfilled in the way only food can make us feel comes nagging at us. It’s like a controlling boyfriend who makes us crazy, but we simply can’t live without him.
What I’ve discovered this time around is that I don’t have to let go of my love of food; I simply have to clean up the bad relationship I have with it. I can eat chocolate, cheese, eggs, squash, bananas, and ice cream, but I have to respect and appreciate the process of consuming such things. I have to give each bite the attention it deserves rather than simply use and abuse it out of habit. If I really love it, it will love me back rather than abuse me in return.
Today when I was shopping at the market and I picked up some cheese and crackers that looked interesting, I was thinking about how I was looking forward to eating them. I wasn’t questioning myself for the calories or hating myself because I’m fat and I shouldn’t eat or want these things. I really love food, now more than ever, and I don’t hate myself for doing so.
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