The Price of Change

My life is an unusual one in many aspects. I know a lot of people believe that, but, in my case, it really is true. I have access to my past in a way that few people do because of the unique nature of how my husband and I came together. When people hear that I married a pen pal, I'm not sure what they imagine constituted the content of our distance "courtship". No matter what they may speculate on, it's almost certainly not the reality.

I have a large box of greeting cards, postcards, and letters that my husband and I exchanged over our year of separation. They paint a certain picture of how things were between us, but they are actually far less descriptive than may be expected. Most of them talk less about our thoughts and lives and more about our undying love and missing one another terribly. I wrote to him nearly every day in one form or another. He wrote to me less, but there was a reason for that. The printed material we have is revealing, but not nearly as much as the other materials that we kept.

My husband and I primarily talked to one another on old-fashioned cassette tapes. We didn't merely send a few hours here and there, we narrated our entire lives, played games together (question-based ones), talked about the mundane and the epic details of life, had fights, made up, cried (mostly me), and expressed joy. The full range of a life "together" is on those tapes. We didn't save every one of them, as it would have been economically unfeasible given the cost of tapes at the time, but we saved about 50 of them. This constitutes a broad cross section and hours and hours of our lives at the ages of 22 and 24.

I have been listening to these tapes over time and, while I'm delighted by my husband's old tapes as they bring me such joy, I'm fascinated by mine as well. The truth is that the emerging me, the one that went from being in control of her weight and her lifestyle habits to plummeting back to super morbidly obesity is right there. In fact, she deconstructs herself, tears down the psychological walls that gave her the toughness to make hard changes, and becomes a creature of utter vulnerability. When I finally got together with my husband, I was a nicer person, a better partner, a more rational, productive and constructive communicator, and one small psychological breeze away from utter physical destruction.

There are two instances on tapes in particular which I listened to which were utterly devastating in revealing what I had done to myself. The shocking part is that the process is so obvious, palpable, and can be pin-pointed directly to my technique of mental rewriting. I was actively rewiring as I spoke to my husband, and I was falling apart emotionally as I did so. It was hard, painful, and it tore down defensive walls that were hurting him. Until I listened to those tapes, I had no idea that I had started doing this to myself so early in my life. I also, of course, did not conceptualize it for what it was. I followed the process, but this was me "feeling my way through it." It was a process as it unfolded, not consciously undertaken.

I don't want to be cryptic here, but it is hard to detail the contents of hours of self-reflection spoken into tapes. The first stage of this is seen when my future husband and I suffer a conflict in which I am angry with him and confront him in an aggressive and "attacking" manner. When he asks me if I could talk to him about these problems in a way which is loving and supportive rather than hostile, I respond to him by saying that I want to do that, but I have no idea how. I tell him that all of the role modeling in my life and all of my experiences were carried out in the manner in which I dealt with him and that I would try, but I didn't know how just then to be the better communicator in the midst of heated conflict.

On another later tape, after some particularly stressful and difficult times in my life, I tell my husband that I believe that I am "sick" emotionally and psychologically and I'm not sure that I know how to get well or if it is even possible. I was at an acute turning point at which I realize that behavioral changes alone were not going to "fix" me in a meaningful way.

I was a staunch follower of behaviorism, a psychological philosophy which neatly addressed stimuli and responses in order to change, but it came crashing down on me that this sterile and ordered way of dealing with issues was not nearly enough. Yes, it helped me lose weight and gain a sense of control in my life, but it didn't deal with the deeper issues. I looked better, felt better, and had all of the trappings of external accomplishment, but I was filled with pain and lacked emotional control. No matter how disciplined I was, I was not happy and still dealt with people, and my then-boyfriend-now-husband in destructive ways. Behaviorism was not the answer, at least not the all-healing and encompassing one.

Surrounded by people who were as "sick" or "sicker" than me, I could not see how I behaved as anything but a reflection of "normality". My interactions with him and how I dealt with him, because he was and still is the most psychologically "well" person I have ever known, revealed the depths of my dysfunction. Those issues hurt him, and they hurt out relationship and I wanted desperately not to infect him with my "sickness". At that time, though I loved him deeply and completely and wanted nothing in life more than to have a future with him, I told him that if he didn't want to deal with someone as messed up as me, I would understand if he ended our relationship. Being the person he is, he said that my perspective was that he may catch my "sickness", but his was that it was possible that I might not instead catch his "wellness".

During a long-running conflict over interactions with an ex-girlfriend of his who we were both still in communication with, I engaged in another long and tearful period of self-revelation. It was this tape that was pivotal in the sequence of tapes I was listening to that made it clear to me that I was now practicing the "reflection" phase of my rewiring as well as having an emerging awareness of patterns. While listening to this tape, and realizing what my 22-year-old self was doing, I started to weep. There was a truth that I have been rejecting that was undeniable after what I'd heard my younger self say.

This truth is one that I have not expressed in this blog because I have largely rejected it to date. My husband said to me quite some time ago and on several occasions that he believes that I regained weight because of the way in which I tore down my defensive walls and made myself greatly more vulnerable in order to be a more suitable mate for him. The woman he met was superficially "stronger" than I feel I am now. She exhibited mental toughness that I feel I no longer possess. As my mother used to say, I didn't "take any guff." People were intimidated by me, and that made sure they didn't find a soft spot from which to hurt me. I stood alone, and I made my own way.

Instead of being hostile, defensive, and keeping people out, I became positive, loving, and accepting to let him in. Unfortunately, this change opened me up to a world of suffering. Though he did not hurt me, what was to come when we finally got together physically and moved to his home area, absolutely destroyed me. I had put down my emotional shield and sword, and I got slaughtered.

I resisted this truth for a variety of reasons. One was that I did not want to "blame" him for my weight gain in any way. I felt that even considering his observation as the truth would be tantamount to doing so, albeit in an indirect fashion. Another was that I felt it was wrong to not take full "responsibility" for my fatness, especially since doing so allowed me to hate myself and confirm a poor image of myself.

Another tape revealed the completion of my alteration from the tough and combative "bitch" I was when I was upset to what I was by the time our distance courtship reached its conclusion. I was combative with my mother's verbal and emotional abuse when my then-boyfriend and I came together through our pen pal relationship. By the time I was packing up and leaving to join him in his home area, I was not engaging angrily with people anymore. When my family dealt with me with hostility, I would calmly say, "there is no need to be hostile." They would angrily mock me for having taken on this new pattern of behavior. I had changed fundamentally.

The reason I'm writing about this is that I have a record of myself which is detailed, covers a long span of time, and is historically undeniably accurate. As a record of personal change, it cannot be doubted in any way. I can see how changing to become a better person in one way took away the fragile structures which held my weight maintaining and loss habits in place. When I could not fight back, I had to seek solace and comfort. I couldn't cope by being angry and hostile, so I turned inward and ate and self-hated. The price I paid for the changes I made was that I got super fat again, and I stayed that way for over two decades because I couldn't turn back to what I was without damaging the relationship I had with my husband or hurting him and I couldn't move forward because I didn't have the self-understanding required to build new coping mechanisms.

My husband was right. The changes I made did have a profound effect on me such that I regained weight. Of course, that's not the end of the story, but it is a very important piece of it. This piece reveals that we operate in balance in our lives and that the ability to operate in the world in a particular fashion is impermanent. When a critical change occurs and the balance is upset, the ability to make positive choices can crumble like a house of cards.

The truth is that I let down dark, spiky and hurtful defensive walls before putting solid, stable, protective mechanisms in place. I did not know that I was attempting to address this very problem over the past three years as I have lost weight again, but I had a strong sense of the price I'd have to pay this time when I lost weight if I didn't dig down deeper than simply deciding to "eat less" and "move more". Yes, I needed to change behaviors, but I needed to know why I engaged in those behaviors in the first place and what changing them was going to mean to me emotionally.

A big reason that I explore the psychology of weight loss is that I was terrified of losing a lot of weight again and then regaining and I wanted to make sure that that did not happen again. I knew identity would be an issue and that I'd have to work on building a new one. I knew I was losing a source of comfort and would have to find other ones. I knew my routines would be lost and I'd have to find more productive ones. I knew that I couldn't dismantle one critical aspect of my life (that with food) without building others simultaneously or I'd be at risk again. I just didn't know that I was actually attempting not to repeat a particular mistake that I'd already made 24 years ago.

Preoccupied with "beauty"

As anyone who has been following this blog knows, I didn't lose weight to attain beauty. I'm 47 years old, soon to be 48, and I know that the best I could hope for physically was to escape the stigmatizing and physical pain that come along with being nearly 400 pounds. Nonetheless, the idea of "beauty" has been on my mind a lot lately, and I want to explore why.

One of the things that makes me think about beauty in this way is the manner in which some of my friends talk about how men interact with them. These women are contemporaries of mine, a few years older than me. One of them lost 40 lbs., but is still a little chubby and decidedly looks like your average middle-age lady from a physical characteristics point of view. Even at her lightest weight ever, she has had a flabby neck and double chin (much to her chagrin).

There's nothing wrong at all with her appearance, but she's also not some hot mama who you could see strange men walking up to and hitting on her. She has been married, happily from all external appearances, for a very long time. She mentioned on Facebook that a guy hit on her in the supermarket while she was buying a deli salad.

Another one of my friends is very, very short (4' 11", I think) and somewhat apple shaped with disproportionately large breasts and possesses a classic middle-aged Italian lady look (if you're thinking Sophia Loren, think again). Again, there's nothing wrong with her appearance, but she's no Roman beauty. She's just an average woman in her early 50's. She has mentioned that a friend of her ex-boyfriend has always wanted her and started hitting on her after her former relationship ended. I believe that, from time to time, she has talked about other men wanting her, but her having no interest in them. She is unmarried (never has been) and is actually one my my husband's former girlfriends (though he chose her, like he chose me, for personality, not appearances).

After losing so much weight, I feel as if something must be very "wrong" with my appearance when I hear about contemporaries getting hit on despite the fact that they don't appear to possess any special beauty. I realize that this is unproductive for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I'm pretty sure I'd be creeped out if a man tried to pick me up and I am utterly devoted to my  husband. However, a part of me wants this sort of validation, and I'm not happy about it.

I've been pondering why I want this because my husband is the only person whose opinion matters, or at least it should be the only one that does. He adores me and tells me he feels I'm beautiful. I adore him and think he is the sexiest creature on the planet. I have never wanted another man after committing to a life with him, and the truth is that, if something horrible were to happen and I lost him, I don't think I'd ever want another man in my life again.

I should also note that I don't like being touched by people other than my husband, but I absolutely love to be touched by him (as much as possible). We are incredibly physically affectionate, sometimes to an extent which makes other people a little uncomfortable. We always hold hands when we walk together, kiss or hug intermittently when walking around, put our arms around each other, and sit in contact with each other if it is at all possible and not socially inappropriate. I am not one of those people who just doesn't want to be "pawed". I love it, as long as it is coming from him.

Despite my high level of comfort with being physical with him, it's sometimes an effort for me to engage in social hugging because I really don't want to have such contact with others. This probably stems from a certain amount of distrust of others as well as deeply ingrained fear that they secretly are repulsed by touching me, a remnant of being so overweight for most of my life and knowing people were repulsed by touching a morbidly obese person. I mention all of this because I want it to be clear that I'm not sitting around desiring other men in any way.

Though I've been picking at this psychological knot for awhile, I haven't quite untangled it. I think that there are a variety of insecurities at play in this. One is that, when I was much younger and lost weight, no men expressed any interest in me. I look back on pictures of myself from that time (age 21-22, around 170 lbs.), a time when I thought I looked pretty good "for my weight" and wonder what was wrong with me. At that time, I believed it was because I was still fat and any fatness at all was a huge turn-off to men. There was a man who was far fatter than me (about 75 lbs. overweight) who I was interested in who did not return that interest. There was a man who I had a crush on for over a decade who was not particularly attractive who turned me down even after I'd lost weight. In both of the cases I'm citing here, it's important to note that I knew both of them well, socialized with them a lot, and made my interest clear. I didn't hint, I directly asked, and was nicely told I wasn't seen that way by them.

I never got any validation that I was physically appealing even when I was younger and had a greater potential to be seen as such. Since my picture is not on this blog, you'll have to trust me when I say that I do not have any unappealing facial features. I don't think anyone would look at me and say I was "ugly". In Asia, where I was considered "exotic", I was often told I was "beautiful" by the natives. Their standards are different and some of them were almost certainly just flattering me, but I think that if I was actually strongly physically unappealing, they wouldn't have said that.

Looking back at some women who had boyfriends at the same age as me (in my early 20's), frankly, I think they were not very visually appealing at all and many of them were as dull as dishwater to boot. In retrospect, this continues to baffle me. Not only did young women get more attention than me then, but middle-aged women I know get more than I do now.

So, I wonder, what was/is wrong with me? Well, the answer is that I still am seeking external validation for my worth based on my appearance. This is not a good thing for two reasons. First of all, even if I got it, it would never be enough. In fact, getting it would very likely make me want to seek more of it and start to hang more of my esteem on a continuation of such validation. Second, it's more of placing control of my sense of worth outside of myself.

I think what I'm experiencing here is a re-occurrence of a life-long pattern. People have always invalidated me based on appearance and I have accepted that that is their right. Now, I want them to validate me based on appearance because I think that is also their right. I'm so accustomed to my appearance being a critical factor in how my value is determined that I continue to look for cues that I am valuable (or value-less) in this area. Clearly, this is a point which I have to work on.

I'm Not You

I haven't been writing here for awhile because the emotional difficulties stemming from my transition from the life I knew in Asia for so long to a "new" life in America have been pretty overwhelming for me. There are many aspects to this transition, but one of them is that I have had to deal with other people in a way that I did not have to for most of my adult life. Specifically, I now have to deal with family in general and my in-laws in particular.

The difficulties I've had have led to self-reflection about what is important to me and why, but also the limits of empathy and the seemingly limitless capacity of people to be self-centered in their thinking. Neither of these are exactly revelations, but personal experience is a powerful reinforcer of such thoughts.

In the place that I'm currently at, a group of islands in which people who are wealthy tend to vacation, I have found it hard to enjoy walking as I did back in the country I lived in in Asia. The reason for this difficulty is multi-fold. One is that the island I'm on is small and carved up into pieces of public and private land such that one can rarely walk far on a hiking trail before encountering a sign saying you cannot go any further or you'll be trespassing. Before I came here, I imagined long walks in nature and escaping the hectic sidewalks and crowds of the metropolis that I had been living in. Now, I find it hard to wander longer than 20 minutes on a nature trail or beach without being road-blocked by private property signs.

Since I grew up very poor, I'll admit that I have a negative reaction to the idea that wealth buys people a piece of the beach such that the public can walk for such a short time before being driven back. There's this huge world of trees, beaches, and natural beauty that someone has laid claim to because they don't want anyone coming within miles of their land. It just seems wrong to me that anyone can possess such things, especially when it isn't being used outside of the most attractive tourist times (the summer).

At any rate, this post isn't about my social views, as I realize that it can be argued that the possession of such property may be as much about protecting the habitats as privacy. This is about how bothered I have been at not being able to walk much here as compared to where I was before. Unless my husband and I walk along a relatively narrow public road with little shoulder and almost no protection from the beating sun and share it with intermittent vehicles passing by, we cannot walk for long before having to turn back. We have tried going to various public parks on this island to find better spaces, but have been stymied again and again by various problems.

On one particular occasion, we planned a trip to a particular park based on web site information and when we arrived, the trail leading to it was a virtual swamp. We tried to walk along the beach, but the stretch that the public had access to was no longer than a 10-minute stroll before we were barred access. Even the road itself dead-ended onto private property. This was extremely frustrating and, for about the third time, we complained about the way in which we couldn't walk anywhere on Facebook.

I need to mention that we are staying in a vacation cabin that is owned by my in-laws and they adore this island. They own two houses on it and have been coming here for more than 20 years. However, when they come here, they spend the vast majority of their time sitting in the cabin and just looking out the window at the view. They watch T.V., use the internet, and go to the tiny local village to shop. Occasionally, they will go crabbing or drive the car to some scenic spot and sit there and look at the view. Most of their time here is spent doing almost nothing different than what they do at home. They just do it with nicer scenery around them.

For my husband and I, this is a nice enough place, and we are grateful to have a place to stay while we work out our lives in America (a sentiment that we have expressed many, many, many times), but this environment is not only sleepy, but practically comatose. We are not the type of people who enjoy sitting around staring out windows looking at the same scenes again and again nor do we see value added to internet use or T.V. watching for having done it in a cabin on an island instead of at home. We are accustomed to a more stimulating existence, and, since I have lost weight, a more active one. We really don't watch much television at all (never did), and that makes up a lot of my in-laws' lives.

You may guess that one of my in-laws, in this case, my father-in-law, took the critical comments about the limits of our ability to walk personally. He was upset and said that he felt we mustn't like it here and his feelings were hurt. It's important to note that this is the only point which we have complained about and has no bearing on our immediate environment. I have also commented on Facebook about how lovely the cabin we are staying in is and my husband has been very positive about the local wildlife. However, my father-in-law was agitated about these repeated complaints.

That being said, my father-in-law has had his complaints about this place as well, and his have a far greater bearing on the immediate environment around the cabin. There is an area at which people practice shooting their guns not too far from the cabin and another at which they ride their dirt bikes. He complained at least 3 times and at great length about the noise from the gunshots. He also talked about how he lobbied to limit their ability to do shooting practice and failed. He went on about these things at length on multiple occasions. My husband and I have never complained about this noise. In fact, each time my father-in-law complained, I said it didn't really bother me at all (nor do the dirt bikes). He has also expressed less than glowing opinions (though not actual complaints) about other aspects of this place (the food at certain restaurants) and has complained about the behavior of some of the neighbors.

So, if my father-in-law has an issue with something on the island which limits his enjoyment of his time here, it does not mean he hates it here. If I have an issue with something on the island which limits my enjoyment of my time here, it means I hate it here and he is personally offended. This hypocrisy illustrates all too well how people expect the world to be processed in the way in which they process it and are confused, upset, or even offended when others perceive things in a different manner. He expects others to emotionally process everything as he does and can't understand why they do not. In fact, when he "had" to tell us how he felt, he said that he just can't understand why anyone would not "love" it here as he does. Well, we aren't him for starters and enjoy different things and are bothered by different things. This is not a rejection of the entire place, but merely the fact that we have different values than someone who prefers to sit around all day doing very little.

Of course, there is more to the story than that. One thing that I learned from this experience is that my complaints weren't merely coming from a sense of frustration and disapproval of people of means hogging up as much land as they could. Walking is much more to me than mere exercise or diversion. If it were merely that, I probably would  not have complained at all.

I realized that walking for me after nearly two decades of being crippled by my body and unable to do so without pain represents my liberation from my former self. It is a demonstration of my success and my hard-earned independence. I need to do it not only to move my body and maintain my health, but also to feel free. I was not so removed from being a person confined in a wheelchair who was able to learn to walk again and I felt as if that ability was being taken away.

For my father-in-law, walking is something he is indifferent toward doing because he has never lost the ability to do it. To him, it's just the lamest, slowest form of exercise and locomotion. It's a diversion he doesn't enjoy. To me, it is the only exercise I am physically capable of doing due to a bad knee and bad back (which don't limit my walking too much, but make more strenuous exercise inadvisable at best and likely dangerous). But, it is much, much more than that, but he never asked why it bothered me. He never asked me about the roots of my feelings. He didn't care about me because he only cares about being him and he didn't realize that I'm not him and may have different feelings and needs.

Unfortunately, I realized that this is only the beginning of what is likely to be a long and difficult adjustment. My husband's family is very insular and much more self-centered than any group of people I have ever known. Their rejection of me when we first married went a long way toward shattering my hard-earned esteem at the end of college and setting me onto the path that got me to nearly 400 lbs. The challenge for me is to maintain a decent relationship with these people, but not allow their selfishness to have a destructive impact on me.

Fortunately, I have insight and my husband sees them for what they are now (he did not before). I know that it is not me. It is them. I don't say that as a way of dismissing them, but merely recognizing that their actions toward me do not reflect my value nor my behavior. They are selfish and ignore other people's needs because they don't know any better. Many of them have mental health issues which are masked or mild enough not to need strong treatment, but present enough to make them, at times, unpleasant to deal with. I didn't realize this before since my husband had praised them so much before I met them, but he was naive (by his own admission) and we see it now. With his support, I hope that I will not be dragged to the head of the same self-destructive path I was at before.

The lesson I would hope readers will take from this, and the one I'm taking as well, is to remember that others will judge you by your actions while letting themselves off the hook for theirs. Others will view the world through their emotional responses while trying to reject the validity of yours. Others will not understand or see why you value things they do not, but that does not mean you should not or are not entitled to value those things (much as they may try to convince you otherwise). Others will react to you based not on your value, but on their own psychological needs. Most people will treat you in a manner which is gratifying for them personally regardless of the effect on you or their relationship to you. They don't do this out of malice or meanness. They do it because they lack awareness.

That means that you have to protect yourself, though it doesn't mean you have to do it in a retaliatory or nasty way. For me, it's going to me structuring interactions and holding back when it comes to my nature. That is a nature in which I try to be kind and helpful to people because that is what I think the world should be like. However, sometimes you can't give of yourself to people who are selfish and clueless. They will take from you with one hand and then slap your face with the other hand because they don't have any idea how to build a relationship. They act on need and lack the reflective capacity to see their own behaviors. Knowing this, I will try to adapt to this situation and not allow it to tear down what I have built for myself after years of hard work. It has not and will not be easy.

Self-stroking: part 2

Sometimes when I am feeling frightened or insecure, I ask my husband if he will always take care of me. He always tells me that he will. At those times, my fear is that I can't make my way in life and if I fall, I'm afraid no one will be there to catch me. I need to know that he will be there, just in case I fall.

On an objective level, there's no reason to believe that I am incapable of making my way in life. For 12 years, I worked full-time and was the primary support while my husband worked part-time and was a househusband. I also worked full-time at various other jobs concurrently with my husband working full-time. About 6 years ago, after about a year of undiagnosed clinical depression (or nearly so) I went part-time, he went full-time, and I took over the household work. I have far more of my adult life under my belt being responsible for myself, but I don't think my fears are really about money or jobs.

I think my anxiety about being cared for is more generalized and I think it stems from the insecurity I spent my formative years dwelling in. Though I had a roof over my head and there was food on the table, my parents were constantly speaking about us being on the edge of insolvency. Money problems were always on the table and nothing was ever hidden from my sister and I. What was more, my parents were very absorbed in their own issues. They spent their days arguing about my father's alcoholism, my mother's spendthrift nature, and complaining about whatever trivial issues perturbed them. Neither of them was an adult in any way.

I know it may sound like an exaggeration to say neither was an adult, but they truly were not. My father refused to do anything that required even minimal interacting with other people if it didn't happen in a bar or a garage. He wouldn't go into a bank, shop in a market for food, go to my sister's and my school, or shop for clothes (not even his own). He abdicated all responsibility and my mother used the power that came with that to indulge her shopaholism and to live beyond our means. She created a loop in which she medicated her unhappiness with food and spending money and, in turn, created her unhappiness by being fat and being forced into bill juggling and loan consolidation to handle her debts. Her failure to be an adult was not in her refusal to take on responsibility, as she had it all, but it was in her inability to control her temper and the way in which she battered my sister's and my esteem to elevate her own. She heaped responsibility on us too young, shared her problems with us when we were incapable of understanding them or helping, and verbally abused us. Her failure was in not acting emotionally like a grown-up to her children.

In retrospect, I know that my mother created all of my family's financial suffering through her issues with spending. She had a vision of the life she wanted to live, and part of that was "keeping up with the Joneses". She was devastated when her siblings, especially her 3 sisters, lived a material lifestyle that was clearly superior to hers. Had my mother practiced moderate fiscal control, we would have been alright. We wouldn't have been rich, but we could have been secure and stable. Unfortunately, both of my parents were more interested in using what money we had to do what they wanted (my mother to buy junk and my father to drink alcohol and smoke everyday) than in providing a stable life for their family.

I mentioned in the previous post that food was the co-parent in my childhood, and the support that I carried with me into adulthood. It is the way I "stroke" (comfort, validate, reward, etc.) myself. Unlike my parents, food never hurt me, abandoned me, or disappointed me. It always gave pleasure and asked nothing in return. While my parents were inconsistent and my mother so mercurial at random intervals that I was driven to extreme nervousness and tension at times because of my fear of her wrath, food was the "good parent".

I realize now that my husband has taken on some of the role of a "parent" for me. I ask if he will take care of me because I was never taken care of by anyone as a child and I need to feel cared for and secure. No, I was not abused physically, nor did I starve, but I never felt secure, loved, or worthwhile. Neither of my parents gave me those things because of their own damage and immaturity. I don't blame them for it and this post is not about holding them responsible for my problems. That being said, ignoring the connection would undermine my ability to heal myself. I have to understand the roots so I know where to start tearing out the damaging weeds of my problems and planting more psychologically healthy "plants". Too many people think that "blame the parents" is what excavating your childhood issues is all about and that it's about finding reasons to be mad at them rather than change your life. It is not. It's about finding out what went wrong so that you can figure out how to make it right. My parents messed up. I forgive them. However, if someone breaks a complex mechanism (such as the human psyche), it really helps to know exactly how and where they broke it if you want to repair the damage as quickly and effectively as possible.

While my husband is functioning in part in the role my parents failed at, I know that he can't do it all and that is where the "self-stroking" that I mentioned in the previous post comes in. It's not wrong for him to do some of it because, after all, we all validate, comfort, and soothe our mates. It's part of the role they play. However, the fact that being separated from him for a finite period of time is so difficult for me means that I need to develop certain coping skills in this regard. As I mentioned previously, I used to have food to stroke me in his absence, and now I don't, so I need other things.

After yesterday's realization, I figured out, much to my chagrin, that I still use food to stroke myself and not terribly infrequently. The main difference between how I used it before and how I use it now is that I use extremely tiny portions now. Instead of eating a bag of chips, I eat 2 or 3 nuts. I don't eat a whole candy bar, but might eat 6 M & M's or a mini-candy bar. The calories are low enough to not be an issue, but the comforting still goes on.

That is not to say that every small treat I eat is an act of food-based stroking. Sometimes, it's merely that I want to enjoy these foods. Sometimes, it's a craving for a dessert after a meal (which is common for me anyway). However, there are definitely times when it is an act of stroking. It's not compulsive, but it is an act that tells me that "I'm okay". The food tells me, I'm going to be okay. Everything will be okay. This connection was forged in my childhood, and now I have to work to unravel it. This is the next stage in the evolution of my relationship with food, and I am not looking forward to the emotional fall-out which is certain to follow.

My approach to this is going to be relatively unstructured. That is, I don't plan to forever give up treats or even to swear off of them on a particular day. Rather than take some sort of rigid or Draconian view of food (which I believe is ultimately destructive and untenable), I plan to practice concrete self-stroking exercises at times when I feel I'm grabbing a tiny bite of a treat for self-stroking purposes. I'm also going to try and develop conditioning techniques to self-stroke in a higher order fashion. This is not an easy transition for someone like me, because it involves positive messages about myself to myself. This comes with difficulty because of my feelings of worthlessness, fear of narcissism or self-aggrandizement, and modesty. My mother reinforced again and again that I shouldn't form too high an opinion of myself to make sure I never thought too much of myself. For instance, when I got excellent grades and pushed myself hard in school, she made sure to tell me that I was "book smart", but lacked common sense or other intelligence. Even when I excelled academically and should have felt I was smart, she let me know that I was dumb and shouldn't be too proud no matter what I accomplished. She bragged to her friends about my sister and I, then told us we weren't so hot.

I'm also not the type of person who subscribes to hollow affirmations of my own awesomeness. A lot of people practicing self-acceptance resort to pat mantras about how "good" they are, but this simply does not work for me. My issue is not that I think I'm a really "bad" person and need to tell myself that I'm a "good" one. It is that I feel that I'm in no way special and that my value is less than that of others because my needs are less important than theirs (my mother always told me that it was selfish to put myself before others). Without my husband telling me regularly that I'm important, I can't keep the idea in my mind. I haven't internalized the notion that I am a person of particular value to anyone but him. If I am not with him, I cease to be anything because I am nothing to others. If they see me as anything, it is my feeling that they only do so because they view me as useful in some particular regard. If I cease to be of use, they will not care for me because I'm nothing special to anyone but my husband. I believe that he is the only person who will ever love me, the only one who ever could.

So, what I tell myself in affirmation has to be specific, important, and have deep relevance to me. It can't merely be that I say, "I don't need this chocolate because I'm a good person". I'm not sure what I need to say, just that I need to say some things which strike at the heart of the shortcomings of my childhood. One of those things might be simply to say, "everything will be okay," whether I eat this or not. I doubt that that will be all it takes, but it's a starting point after so many years of my youth being spent being told everything was not okay and I was not okay. As I explore this, I will post more about the process.

Above Average

When I read the thoughts of others who want to or are losing weight, they seem to ruminate on and be more than prepared to step into the shoes of "normality". I guess this is because I've been greatly overweight for most of my entire life and many of them may have either spent more time at "normal" or closer to it. I've spent more time at or over 300 lbs. than under it. Living like other people do isn't something I'm accustomed to and it's an emotional transition.

I've talked before about identity, and part of my identity is that of someone who doesn't fit in. Part of that is how other people have objectified me and marginalized me based on body size. Part of that is also the basic facts of existence in a world designed for people of average size when you are far above average. This includes not being able to fit where other people fit when it comes to spaces, but it also, quite obviously, includes clothes.

When it comes to clothes shopping, most people squeal with delight at the prospect of fitting into smaller clothes, shopping in another department, or looking "better" (frankly, I think most people just look "different" when they lose weight, not "better"). For me, this remains something odious and stressful. Part of the reason for this is that I don't care about clothes much and I hate wasting money on them. Part of it is old associations and new confusion associated with a changed body.

Shopping for clothes for me used to be "easy" because all I had to do was get a mail order catalog and order the biggest plus size items they had and hope they fit me. Most of the time, they did. Sometimes, they didn't. This system allowed me to stretch fabric over my form to conform with standards of modesty in a socially acceptable way, but the process was utterly utilitarian. I didn't know how I was going to look when I made new purchases, and I didn't care. Now, I have to care because I work outside my home again.

Yesterday, I went to the store at which I found my first off the shelf clothing which fit. There is no such thing as a "plus size" there, so I can only shop from the larger sizes of "normal". I hadn't planned to deal with clothes there because I don't believe I "need" anything, but I decided that I should push myself to try on some clothes. The main reason for doing this is that I don't know what size I am and doing so would give me an idea. It may shock some people to know that I'm still wearing pants I wore 200 lbs. ago. I've just progressively taken them in as time has gone by.

I realize to some extent that I hang on to my oversized clothes as part of my former image of myself and a rejection of my femininity. I wear XXL T-shirts that fit me close to being a dress and pants that are too big even after being cinched and modified. I need to let go of these habits as a way of letting go of my perception of myself as a shapeless lump. To that end, I need to try on clothes and find things that fit.

This may sound like an easy and possibly even enjoyable thing, but for me, it is fraught with stress and paranoia. I still have to find larger things among normal sizes for starters, but it's more the fact that I'm still fat and I think "everyone" is watching me paw through the clothing racks and thinking, "she's too fat for anything there." This is very likely the result of the spotlight effect error, and not reality, but my feelings are my feelings. I can't deal with them by invalidating them. They can only be dispatched if they are recognized.

Not only do I feel like I'm being judged by people who are sizing me up and determining that I have no business looking for clothes among normal sizes, but this experience also taps into my feeling of being a "fraud". I don't belong in clothes designed for women because I don't have the "right" to be portrayed in a feminine manner because I'm a valueless, gigantic wad of flesh. I'm only fooling myself by painting myself with make-up and trying on "girly" clothes. I "don't belong" in the women's clothing department.

I realize that these thoughts are irrational, though they have been reinforced during nearly all of my adult life. I didn't invent them in my own fertile imagination. They are the clear messages from society for extremely morbidly obese women and I merely internalized them emotionally, despite rejecting their validity on an intellectual level .

The irony is that I know that I am not my body. One of the coping mechanisms you acquire when you live in a body society rejects so roundly for most of your life is the notion that you are your soul, psyche, intellect, or mind. You divide "you" from the meat sack that you inhabit because not doing so would be to exist in a constant state of self-loathing because you'd evaluate yourself as society does. No one can live like that for long.

However, you know, beneath the surface, that you also cannot escape your container, nor the responses to it. No matter how hard you try to distance yourself from your physicality, it is right there with you. It's a conjoined twin with your personality. Pretending it's not a part of you only helps cope with the pain of social censure but it doesn't change the fact that it is inescapably as much "you" in corporeal reality as your mind or soul.

On the surface, I have rejected this for as long as possible, but part of healing is welcoming my body into a partnership with my mind in which it doesn't take second place and isn't regarded as my enemy. For most of my life, I've felt my body has betrayed me and I've hated it for it. My mind has to shape its thoughts toward looking after the body rather than shoving its interests aside in favor of catering to the psyche. No matter how hard you try to separate mind and body, you can't in this world. That's a task for the next one, if there is another.

So, I made myself try on clothes, but not because I'm so infatuated with my new figure or want to "look good", but because it's part of a process of learning to respect my body and view myself in a less pejorative light. I still hate shopping for clothes, and I still don't care about how I look. And, I still hate how my body looks in most things, but this is how I'm moving forward.

Beauty

When I was younger, I used to fantasize about a beautiful blonde woman I named Christine. In my fantasy, she was voluptuous, but not fat. Her hair was long, wavy and thick. She was talented and intelligent, but quiet and reserved in manner. Because of her beauty and manner, everyone was intrigued by her. Men desired her and women admired her.

Christine was an avatar of my hopes and dreams. She had the aspects of me that I liked (my hair, except blond, and my general shape, but not fat, and she had my intelligence), and the ones that I desired (good temper control, beauty, thinness). In my fantasies, people treated her and regarded her in the manner I would have liked to have been. They were interested in her, wanted to associate with her, and were keen to be in her presence. Men not only wanted her, but they wanted to take care of her. Depending on the fantasy, she had wealth or power, but was still vulnerable and needed support. She needed a lot of what I needed, despite having more than I had.

I hadn't really thought about this fantasy and the implications for quite some time, but my thoughts as of late in regards to beauty brought it back. One thing I realized is that the beauty ship has sailed for me and it's never coming back to port. I'm too old to ever be considered "beautiful", and I was too fat when I was young enough to carry the illusion of beauty as youth can do. And, don't give me any crap about how fat does not equal ugly and thin does not equal beautiful. I've already discussed that before and it's not a concept I buy into. There are many ugly thin people (I see a lot of them everyday, trust me) and beautiful fat people. However, the sort of beauty that I'm talking about is never, ever seen as a part of being fat.

Fat people can be beautiful, but the kind of beauty I'm talking about is the type that society rewards with power. My fantasy was not so much about beauty as it was about what beauty granted one in life, and no matter how gorgeous a (truly) fat woman is, she's never going to get that sort of power, not the type that people recognize as aesthetically pleasing but society at large is disinterested in. I'm not talking about the imaginary version "fat" which comes from idealizing runway models who look like human coat hangers. I'm not talking about Crystal Renn "fat", but truly fat with rolls of tissue cascading off of you and all of the skin  damage (e.g., stretch marks, discoloration where skin rubs together, etc.) that comes along with it. This is not a beauty that can confer power, but rather gets some individual recognition by people who subscribe to more varied notions of beauty. It's the essence of self-acceptance and finding ones own unique beauty, but it does not give one the things I fantasized about.

Part of me mourns the fact that I'll never have the sort of power that beauty grants people, and part of me knows it's all an illusion. I've seen women who were once considered quite attractive reach a higher age and found that life is quite confounding for them. What was once given to them with ease is now retracted. They believe they earned what they were given, and struggle to reconcile the changes in the way people treat them with how they're going to live the rest of their lives. If beauty gave you power and that power is gone, what do you do now? I'm not saying such people lack skills, but rather that it's a real blow to their identity and notions of the way the world works which causes them to live in fear of how they will get by. They may have those skills, but they may not even know where to apply them having not had need of them before.

All of that being said, part of me wishes that, for just a little while, I had lived as a true beauty. It's an experience that perhaps I never had the capacity to live in because my basic physical structure may not have made any conception of me, fat or thin, "beautiful". I'll never know, because it's simply too late to ever be sure.

It's Not an Identity

There are no full-length mirrors in my home. The reason for this is two-fold. First of all, it's so small that there really is no place for one and I have a tendency to break mirrors or something happens beyond my control that shatters them (one once fell off my bathroom wall at my feet). Second, I have not wanted to look at my body for a very long time.

Not having a full-length mirror is both a good and bad thing. I'm sure that on the way up to 380 lbs., I might have been more aware of bodily changes if I had been looking at myself everyday. Maybe willfully ignoring your body is something fat people do so they don't have to face their self-loathing on a daily basis. Not torturing myself like that was probably a good thing. Now, I can't easily reassure myself that things are changing except by external environmental and lifestyle factors, like fitting in a chair with arms or being able to stand up more easily. Perhaps a full-length mirror would be a good thing now. Perhaps not...

Sometimes I leave my home feeling pretty good about myself, or at the very least not feeling bad about anything. I may have noticed some small change in my thinking or in my body and have my progress in mind or I may simply be in that brief, blissful state of not thinking about my weight or body at all. When you've been fat all of your life, you spend most of your time in front of other people thinking about your body because others are going to remind you of it. It's part of the way you develop your fat anger, fat PTS and defensive nature. Every time you walk out the door, it's into the war zone.

These days, it's possible for me to "forget" for brief periods of time that others define me by my body. That's when I walk out the door in a state of peace. Sometimes, I'll even walk for an entire half hour without someone drawing attention to my body. Even when others aren't there to bring me down, there are sometimes those reflective surfaces. I walk by a window or a mirrored metallic surface and all of my peace is tossed aside. At the moment that I catch a glimpse of my 240-something-pound-body, I'm no longer "me" as defined by my positive internal dialog, I'm once again this horrible fat person who still looks awful after losing the weight of an entire person.

One thing which I have realized as of late and that I'm going to start actively working on changing is that my body is not my identity. I think it is because all of my life people have focused excessively on it and judged me by it. They think they know everything about me and can define me with a glance. One of my husband's male friends when he first met me gave me a quick, vaguely-disgusted once-over and then pretended I didn't exist. He didn't even speak to me after that because my body was all he needed to "know" me.

There are two sides to this consideration of identity. The first is that I need to stop looking in reflective surfaces and feeling bad about myself when I otherwise felt good or at least neutral. "Fat" isn't an identity, no matter how hard the greater world would like to believe it is. Alternately, and this is perhaps of greater importance, "thin" also is not an identity. When I reach a state of no longer being overweight, I will not be defined by my body and I need to make certain that I don't attach value to a smaller body simply because people have been telling me all of my life that I lack value because I have a bigger body.

I have been thinking lately about people who have lost weight and continue to ruminate on their diet, exercise, and form. I have also been thinking about how they continue to write and talk about their BMIs, calorie counts, and exercise habits and how they wish to "inspire". While I am happy for people to be who they want to be and to achieve their goals, I'm not "inspired" by their continued focus on their bodies. I realize that for them "thin" is an identity, just as "fat" was an identity. They are the same people in different bodies, but their definition of self remains strongly tethered to their physicality. They have moved away from one bodily and food fixation to another.

For me, this type of body-based-identification is simply not my goal, so I cannot be inspired by the continued efforts of the super-fit out there. I don't want to be defined by my body anymore. I want to escape that place, not find another corner of that same room to live in. Essentially, moving from a socially condemned body status to a socially sanctioned one is what I see many people doing. Certainly, escaping the punishing state I find myself in as a fat woman is part of my goal, but no part of it is finding approval or praise from the same sources that have been abusing me for so long.

The thing is that people who have never been fat and have unremarkable and average-looking bodies in no way attach their identity to their form. They don't think of their average-looking body as defining themselves the same way that they don't look at their food choices as defining themselves. Their body isn't a factor in their self-image or the perceptions of others. They are who they are and their body is just a container. This is what I want to be at the end. I want to be me, not my body.

Jealousy

When it comes to weight, the word "jealousy" seems to pop up sooner or later. Generally, it comes along "sooner," and in a variety of discussions about weight and weight loss.

If the women involved are talking about losing weight, they eventually will find that someone at some time somewhere will say something about their change in weight or eating habits which seems to indicate that they disapprove in some fashion. It can be a criticism of the fact that they are losing too much or that the methods they are using are unsustainable. It can be a comment about how they look worse in some fashion at a lower weight.

The response to this is usually that they make these comments because they are jealous. I think this is actually a type of projection. Projection is when you take your feelings and project them on to others rather than assess or evaluate the situation more objectively. The person saying, "my friend is jealous" is thinking that if she were in her friend's shoes, she'd be jealous if the friend was losing weight. Instead of considering her friend's true motivations, she simply assigns her own thoughts to the friend.

While it is certainly possible that jealously is a motivator, I think it is a narcissistic conclusion that is reached too early and often. People tend not to think about you as much as you think of yourself. They think of themselves. They are definitely uncomfortable with the changes you are making and the changes in you, but this does not mean that discomfort is driven by jealousy. More often than not, it is simply a change in the status quo that may trouble them.

People dislike having their worldview substantially altered or challenged in any way because it creates pressure in them to change, and change is hard and uncomfortable. Even if that change is no more than re-assessing your physicality, it creates discomfort. This is almost certainly part of our nature as humans. Seeing people change in appearance is alarming. To the parts of our brain that developed for survival, it may indicate illness, a change of tribes, or that you are even a doppelganger sent to fool someone and infiltrate their group for destructive purposes.

If part of their view is that you are fat, then having to accept you in a different body with different life choices means they relate to you differently. They'd rather you stayed the same so that they could continue as they always have in the way in which they handle you. It doesn't help, incidentally, that people who lose weight can be so obsessed with food and exercise that it often isn't only a bodily transformation, but also a personality one. Is it any wonder a friend might make negative comments about a person losing weight when they are mentally mired in little else? The person who once discussed music, movies, or books with you now can only think about their food limitations and exercise goals.

More often than not, thin people or people who are reducing their weight think heavier people are jealous of their success or figures. They think this because they are often jealous of "skinny girls", and they believe you must be as well. In essence, they believe everyone values what they value, even when they freely profess otherwise. If I think it's important to be thin (with the unspoken collocation "and attractive"), then you must, too.

If you don't say being thin ("and attractive") is best and what you desire deep down inside, you're simply hiding your true feelings. This thinking is not only part of the self-centered nature of all people which we must constantly battle in life, but also a way of validating the immense energy invested in the weight loss process. If you don't convince yourself that it is "worth it", then you may not continue.

This application of ones values and worldview to others doesn't apply just to weight, but to religion, politics, and every other aspect of our existence. The bottom line is that, by default, we all believe all people should mirror our values, and it's only some sort of distorted worldview based on your neuroses that cause you to be out of sync with "me". A person must try hard in most cases to step away from this tendency to impose their values on others. It's a very difficult thing to do, particularly at a deeper level as it means you have to give credibility to diametrically opposed views of your own. It's hard not to do that and feel insecure about what you value.

If those who are losing weight had true empathy for other people's feelings or perspectives, the first response would not be "you're jealous of me," because that is an indication that you are central to the thinking process. You're not. Others are doing what you are doing and that is thinking mainly of themselves. A more constructive first response would be, "my friend is uncomfortable with my life changes" and most productively a discussion of how what they said makes you feel and exploring their feelings would be best. Rather than jumping to the "jealousy" conclusion, seek the reality. It may be that they are jealous. It may very well not be so.

I didn't form the idea that dieting fatties are jealous of thin women based on my psychological insights into the psyche of fat people. Frankly, I think a lot of fat people, especially those over 35, are not envious of thin people. They simply want to escape the pain and difficulties associated with being in their bodies (both physically and from society's prejudice). I'm not jealous of people thinner than me at all. Their bodies have nothing to do with mine and indeed I do not want their bodies. I want my own body at a weight which is healthier and more conducive to fitness and mobility and that does not draw unwanted and cruel attention.

The basis for my idea that some fat women who are trying to lose weight are jealous of thin ones is because they say they feel so. They say it often. They say it with resentment and meanness sometimes. They talk about "butterfaces" and how they see skinny women with cute guys and that they believe they are more attractive than those women and could steal the men away if they were thinner. They're jealous of skinny girls because they have completely embraced the idea that their value lies in their bodies, and they want that thing of value that others have. The bottom line though is that they want power and they think skinny girls have more of it.

Of course, this is an illusion. I will grant that beauty (which is associated with thinness) brings power, but that power is of dubious value. It's the ability to buy something which you may not actually want to possess. Would you want a boyfriend or husband who valued you based on appearance? Would you want friendships because of perceived beauty? A lot of women who have said, "I'm fat and I'm happy with the way my life is" don't want what beauty and being thin buys them. They have internalized the idea that it's like buying a great looking sports car that will break down the moment something changes. Part of the bodily acceptance movement is rooted in knowing and embracing the idea that power should not be assigned based on body image. They refuse to be a part of it.

Because some women who are losing weight value thinness so much, they think that the aforementioned point is a load of hooey. They think it's just jealousy and bitterness on the part of fat acceptance (FA) advocates or that they feel threatened by their success. I have never thought that FA was driven by jealousy, but there may be something to the idea of feeling "threatened".

Part of the reason fat advocacy bloggers are so anti-diet and weight loss is that they have a worldview which is undermined by successful "dieters". Most fat acceptance bloggers are doing what they do because they feel they absolutely cannot change their lot in life in regards to weight (and maybe they can't) and do not want to be abused for a situation they are convinced is unalterable. If other fat people lose weight, it threatens that mindset, so they have to undermine the credibility of the process of weight loss. Fat acceptance bloggers aren't jealous of those who lose weight, but rather their mindset is threatened by your success. It's not about you. It's about them.

What's the point of this post? My point is not to jump on the "jealousy" label so quickly when people deal poorly with your weight changes. It is an attempt to diminish them and it reveals your self-involvement and sense of superiority over nothing more than how much you weigh and what you eat. And, ironically, that really is the sort of thinking from others that we're all trying to escape by losing weight.

My Inner Masochist

The past five days or so have been difficult for me. From a mental point of view, it has felt like a real backslide. I've found myself hungry all of the time, watching the clock to see when I can eat again, and daydreaming about food while I'm working. Part of this, I believe, is biological as it could be PMS. Part of it, however, may be psychological.

Though I can say that I have done a pretty good job of beating back my impulses, the fact that these thought patterns have re-emerged after their having gone blissfully dormant for awhile has disturbed me. I had felt that I'd turned a corner and was living much closer to a "normal" (i.e., non-food-obsessed) existence for once in my life. With all of these mental struggles circling back around, I've been beating myself up for falling back into old patterns.

I have come to wonder if part of the resurgence of these patterns is related to some sort of unconscious need to find a reason to degrade myself. After all, my inner dialog for most of my life has matched the outer responses to my appearance. People let me know I disgusted them, so I told myself I was disgusting. People let me know that I was weak-willed and self-indulgent for wanting to eat too much, so I told myself I was a horrible pig.

Playing these negative inner mantras for myself day-in and day-out for much of my life is probably one of those routines that is hard to break. It is similar to the problems I discussed in my post on redefinition of ones identity. They need to be purposefully replaced with new thought patterns in order to vanquish them. If I do not make a concerted effort, then the vacuum will be filled with the old inner dialog, and that dialog cannot be motivated unless I'm either eating the way I used to or at the very least desiring to eat the way I used to.

What I realized today was that I have been castigating myself over the past few days for a backslide, but not one in which I have been eating too much or off of my desired plan. I've been berating myself for thinking about wanting to eat too often. In the absence of actual behavior to form a self-hating inner monolog, I have found a way to tear myself down for the equivalent of a "thought crime."

All I can conclude at this point in time is that my inner masochist was caught off-guard by the positive normality of my existence for the last several weeks. Since my ability to hold myself in check in terms of outward behavior thwarted some twisted need to hate on myself, I found a way to gratify that need by just thinking about such things.

The truth is that I think I'm not yet ready to love myself, and that deep down I still feel unworthy of anyone's love. The lack of worthiness is not merely rooted in my body (though it has found a way to brilliantly motivate and manifest itself thanks to my body for decades), but in my spirit. I've had so many incredible years of unconditional and oft-professed love from my husband, but that hasn't actually undone the damage to me that was inflicted in my childhood by my parents and those who I grew up around. On some level, I believe I'm duping him or that he loves me because of his greatness as a human being rather than mine. Some part of me still wants to think poorly of myself, and that part is asserting itself rather strongly at this point in time.

Among the many inner dialogs that I must battle to change, this one has been added to the list. If I really want to succeed in mastering my relationship with food, I have to deal with this need to self-hate, or I will find that I'll create reasons to do so. The easiest way to go back to a state of self-loathing is to do what I have always done, and that is something I absolutely do not want to allow to happen.

Redefinition

There is a woman, who I’ll call “Emily”. Every day, Emily gets up, prepares for work and goes to her car. As she approaches her car, her neighbor calls out to her and says, “good morning, Emily… how are you?” Emily says, “I’m fine.” The neighbor says, “you look tired, take care.” When Emily gets to work, her coworkers say, “hello Emily, you look tired.” Every day, Emily finds that this experience repeats itself. This happens not for a week or a month or a year, but for years. Every day, she is “Emily” and she is tired. Eventually, Emily no longer responds to “how are you?” queries with “fine,” but with “I’m tired.”

After several years of this type of exchange, people suddenly stop greeting Emily at all. When she approaches her car, her neighbor doesn’t say, “hello Emily,” but doesn’t seem to recognize her at all. Her coworkers don’t greet her either. Emily feels uncomfortable because of this because she is so accustomed to people acknowledging her and even saying that she looks tired. No one speaks her name anymore. She sometimes finds herself walking up to coworkers and saying, "do I look tired today?" She has grown so used to this definition that she now seeks affirmation of this reality.

I think we can all relate to the idea that someone who is greeted everyday would feel disconcerted if suddenly people stopped acknowledging them. This is easy to understand. Imagine that instead of being greeted as “Emily” and being told she looks tired, we consider someone who is greeted as “worthless fat person” and is told, “you’re too fat”. Day-in and day-out, you are treated as “worthless fat person” and told overtly or covertly that your weight is too much for society to tolerate without censure. It may seem that this is the sort of attention that one would not want, but years and years of being acknowledged in this fashion by multitudes of people isn’t mere abuse, it is externally imposed “definition”.

I have been pondering the feelings I have been having as I have been losing weight, and how it is not easier despite my weight loss success. When I say that, I am not referring to the mechanics of the process because that actually has gotten easier (but not easy). I’m talking about the mental aspects. The reason that it is harder is that the more weight I lose, the more of myself that I lose.

While it may seem logical or rational that I would be happy to abandon a negative definition of self that has been imposed upon me by others for most of my life, it doesn’t really work that way. Just as “Emily” has always been defined as “Emily”, suddenly having no definition or recognition of who you are is going to be uncomfortable. When you start to lose weight to an appreciable extent, you don’t find that you have simply lost a painful and hurtful definition of who and what you are, but you have lost a profound and deep definition of self. The emptiness created by this loss is beyond disconcerting. It is gutting.

I have come to realize that, as a lifelong fat person, I have developed a powerful sense that I am defined by others. I have a very weak internal definition of self and tend to determine my self-worth and identity through my husband, my friends, my family, and random strangers who react to me. This is really the inevitable outcome of being the center of unwanted attention and judgment. It is rather similar to being famous, or should I say “infamous.” Strangers feel they know something about you and have the right to invade your privacy by speaking with you or interacting with you about something intimate to your life (your weight, your eating habits, your lifestyle).

We all know about the self-destructive behavior of people who were once child stars who outgrow their fame. They are also suffering from the same sort of external definition of self that a lifelong fat person is. Most of them never had the chance to build an internal definition of who and what they are just as I did not. They were defined by fame and some character they portrayed. I have been defined by my fat.

I think one of the reasons that people regain weight is that this emptiness is terrifying. You go from being the center of negative attention to being essentially a nobody. People used to pay attention to you all of the time, and now they don’t even notice you. Going outside of your home and being fat enough to draw attention defined you, and whether it was a happy definition or not isn’t the issue. Many people may think that they have other strong components to their identity, but most of them are internally imposed and not as strong. I may tell myself that I am a creative being, a writer, a wife, a counselor, etc., but I am so accustomed to the idea that others control my definition of self that I have not strongly internalized these at as deep a level as I have the idea that I am “worthless fat person.” No amount of effort to convince myself otherwise is going to change that fact. Asserting that I am a strong, capable person who is worthwhile and intelligent comes as a mere effort to fill my emptiness with platitudes. The psyche cannot be fooled with mere affirmations.

A lot of us expect that the end of the weight loss path will bring about a new and better definition of self, but I think that it creates a hole in our identity. We don’t fill that hole with food, but we may decide to refill ourselves with food in order to regain that old sense of self that was externally affirmed and recognized. Just as child stars may commit crimes to get the attention they once had as famous actors, bad attention is better than none at all when you’re so accustomed to having attention and being externally defined.

Many of the people who experience long-term weight loss success tend to be people who focus excessively on being “good” or who become relative fitness freaks. These are people who have taken on a new identity through their weight loss efforts. They are, ironically, still as defined by their bodies and food as ever before. They simply have a different definition that is dependent on new habits which don't contribute to being overweight.

This sort of redefining of self as being rigidly good in my life habits or exercising like a fiend is simply not for me. It is too high energy and too strict, and I'm too old and fragile to become a female Jack Lalanne. I want to slowly build better internal definition based on my unique qualities as a person. I won’t pretend that I know exactly how to go about this process, but I know how to start, and that’s by recognizing everything that I have just said as part of my life and being aware of the potential to fall back into old habits or to seek overzealous new ones.

Still a Freak

At this point in time, I’ve lost about 100 lbs., and I’m happy with all of the changes I’ve made in my life, but there’s no joy that going out in public won’t rob me of. Today, I decided to push my normal amount of exercise a bit and was out walking around on a longer trek than usual and got one of those all too common experiences where someone blatantly stares at me and looks me up and down with a lingering gaze on my stomach. The gaze is always accompanied by wide-eyed incredulity or revulsion.

There’s nothing like being treated like a freak to bring me down when I start to think I'm doing okay. I’ve lost a lot of weight, but in the eyes of the world, I’m just as disgusting as ever.

Is that the baby... ?

When I started doing this, I eased into reducing portions and changing my eating patterns. I also slowly incorporated calorie counting one day at a time. Given my level of emotional and physical dependence on food, I felt that this was pretty much all I could manage. Now, in retrospect, I see that this was a form of systematic conditioning. It was, in layman’s terms, baby steps to a point where I had much better control.

None of this is news, but one thing I sometimes wonder as I follow other people’s diet struggles is why some people take an approach that is so hard for them to sustain. They throw out everything they have been doing and jump onto a “healthy living” kick. While this is really great (and better for you than what I’m doing, I’m sure), I sometimes feel that it increases the chances of failure geometrically.

One case in point that always baffles me is the surrendering of diet sodas (or all caffeine) at the start of a change in eating habits. Diet sodas didn’t make you fat, so why give up sweets, bad carbs, salted snacks, and heavy fat usage and toss the diet sodas into the mix as well? Isn’t it better to give up what you have to to lose weight first and work on losing the artificial sweeteners later? With so much to change in life, it just feels like tossing the baby out with the bath water.

I wonder if the drive to do this is essentially a perfectionist one. It’s not enough to do better, we have to “do it right.” It’s all healthy or all unhealthy all the way. And if we do it wrong, we do it all wrong. It fits in with the “all or nothing” impulses that drive people to see an entire day’s efforts blown if they make one mistake in their diet. You know the deal, you eat three slices of pizza and have already overeaten, so might as well just go nuts and have some candy, etc. You’ll start the next day with a clean slate.

It took me a long time to realize it, but perfectionism is really just another way of setting yourself up to fail. In fact, in retrospect, I wonder if my tendencies in this regard were a way of staying with in a loop of self-loathing. If I set the bar too high, I was bound to fail. When I failed, I hated myself and derided myself for being inadequate in various ways.

I think that part of what makes it hard to change is that we don’t know who we are if we aren’t someone we hate. If we grew up as people who were tormented or made to feel worthless, we may not feel comfortable feeling worthwhile so we become perfectionists so that we can confirm our self-image. “I have no willpower.” “I’m weak.” “I’m disgusting.” Tossing the baby out with the bathwater on the lifestyle change front just might be another attempt to self-sabotage.

Thinking Yourself Thin

There's a school of thought which is trying to teach people that they can lose weight by simply visualizing themselves as being thinner. The idea is that you imagine yourself as a thin person and you'll get the body you want no matter what you eat. You should do things like imagine yourself in a slinky dress with a body to match, or with great legs or a flat stomach and it'll happen. You're also supposed to stop hating yourself and your relationship with food as a part of this process.

Since I've been fat since I was a kid, I can't even begin to really imagine myself thin. At my thinnest as an adult, I wasn't thin. Even if I could imagine myself as a thin person, I'm not sure that I believe this works as advertised. I believe it may work in a round-about way, but not in a direct fashion.

The way in which I think this type of thing may help people is that feeling happier with yourself likely reduces stress which both reduces insulin production and makes you less likely to eat compulsively to deal with self-loathing and stress. A positive self-image goes a long way toward helping people leave behind their self-destructive behaviors and start to embrace more productive ones.

Part of me thinks that this type of idea has a positive impact because anything which helps people, even a small number of them, is constructive. That being said, I can't help but think that this is someone selling people an easy answer and encouraging what one could call "magical thinking". You can make yourself feel better and give yourself the inner strength to adopt a healthier lifestyle through thinking positively. You can't magically make body fat vanish by thinking it away.

I'm actually a pretty strong believer in building the reality you want through directing your energies toward your goal. That being said, I don't think it's a process that you can push by thought alone. I think the thoughts carry through to actions, attitudes, and personality changes. And I also think that it's important to couple that change in thinking with efforts to repair the damage that has been crippling you and driving your destructive behavior. You can't do it by thought alone.