I struggled with food and weight for over fifty years because of my childhood. I finally found a way out...I'm writing a book on the subject, here is the introduction.
Let me start by saying…no one consciously wants to be overweight.
The amount of people carrying around extra weight is at all-time high. Everything about it is uncomfortable and it’s as uncomfortable to talk about as it is to live with. It’s easy to laugh with friends remembering a night on the town when you over indulged in alcohol…not so much with food. There are no funny stories to be told about over-eating. It’s no laughing matter; it feels taboo; like we hope it will just go away, which is why I felt so compelled to write this.
I know exactly what it’s like to be stuck in a constant battle of food and weight; each passing year feeling more despondent and utterly defeated. I understand the heavy frustration when the strongest desire to be at a good weight is unreachable and the feelings of anger and pain when you can’t explain, even to yourself, why. When something you want so badly is out of reach for unexplained reasons, the frustration just keeps piling on higher and higher. You feel confused, you feel responsible and you feel like no one cares. If you are lucky enough to have people who do care you feel like you are letting them down. Misery does not love company in this situation it just increases the feeling of hopelessness.
I didn’t feel like I mattered as much as other people do because I was fat.
I felt like I was on the sidelines watching as life passed me by with no idea how to jump in there and have fun. It’s like being picked last on a team every day of your life. It’s almost like living in a separate culture in which we see the world differently. For many years I never understood when I would see a friend push away a half-eaten plate of food at lunch and I thought people who worked out were just wasting their time. At the same time I saw those people as the normal people and being “normal” was never an option for me.
I was constantly on edge about my food choices. In my case I discovered food choices had nothing to do with losing weight even though what I truly wanted was to lose weight. I was tired of looking in the mirror and seeing myself as someone who was waiting to start my life after I lost weight. So I began a personal journey of discovery; and it has to be just that, personal, because you are truly your own most reliable source. We need to learn to listen to our instincts with more confidence. But when you’ve struggled with your weight trusting yourself seems like the last thing you can do.
We’ve been putting our trust in areas where there is a ton of money to be made and that continues to fail us miserably. The problem is there is a lot more money to be made if we all stay fat than there is if we lose weight. It’s ridiculous that the worst things for us are the biggest money makers; and the worse we feel the more money there is to be made. Just imagine the profit margins on so called solutions and distractions. We’ve subtly been trained to accept that the food industry is entitled to feed us anything they want and still call it food. We’ve been suckered into believing the weight loss professionals know how to help us after we’ve lived our lives consuming supersize portions of non-food substances. Then we’ve been forced to turn to the medical profession to correct or fix the shape our bodies have become. Then they call in big pharma will fix everything else we’ve since we suddenly have become riddled with disease or disorders. We spend less on food and more on medical than any other country and it is the far less healthy way to go. We’ve created an entire world-wide community committed to fixing each other because we can’t be vulnerable enough to fix ourselves. We’d rather pay someone to do the work for us. And boy are we paying. We are spending ridiculous amounts of money trying to feel better about ourselves because we have bought into the idea that we are not good enough just as we are.
Everywhere we go now we are subject to very lengthy commercials and multiple page ads about prescription drugs and a myriad of disclaimers like it is normal. The pharmaceutical industry spends more on advertising than on research. We purchase food in boxes labeled natural filled with nothing but ingredients we can’t pronounce. We’d rather join a gym than plant a garden.
Social morality seems to have become non-existent in these arenas. There are so many factors combining together in the decay of our health making it hard to assign blame and too easy for things to stay status quo continually preying on our emotions; especially exploiting emotional weaknesses. We’ve been the test subjects of big business long enough. We’ve been sold addictive products and ineffective remedies all under the guise that we are making our own choices. The worst they can make us feel the more we keep buying right into it all.
Fortunately the tides are turning away from industrialized foods and farms. People are slowly learning what happened to the crops and the animals and understanding the effects of GMO’s and they don’t like it. We don’t have to be mad about what these companies are doing; we just have to be willing to seek out better nutrition for ourselves.
I wanted to lose weight and keep it off. I’d already failed over and over again using conventional methods. We all know if we eat less and exercise more we will lose weight; so why aren’t we doing that successfully? Instead of focusing on what I needed to do to lose weight I decided to focus on finding out why I couldn’t get those methods to work. When it comes to weight loss; we focus too much on what we are doing and not enough on why we doing things. So I went against the grain. I worked on losing weight by focusing on the mental aspect rather than the physical one. It became my mission to understand exactly why I overate and what exactly makes our thoughts can push us to go against our own best interests over and over again. I clearly wasn’t using the logical part of my brain when it came to food. I looked for a new way to think about things and my subconscious became my ally in connecting with myself on a different level. There are reasons for everything we do. The steps I first took mentally were more important than any steps I ever took on a treadmill. Having a choice is not the same as having control.
I once read that waking up was the most important part of grieving. On my journey I learned how I had been grieving for myself or lack of self for my entire lifetime. This is about the times I was most out of control, when I made the worst choices and how it sometimes felt like I was outside myself and out of my mind at times. This is my story; one of struggle, acceptance, understanding and finally resolve. This is how I was able to finally understand why I couldn’t lose weight but more importantly what the weight was telling me in the first place. It’s about the subliminal fear and insecurity that causes you to gain weight and then leaves you paralyzed, stuck beyond movement. And why we gain the weight back that we’ve lost because we haven’t overcome those issues. It’s about realizing my subconscious anxiety was driving me causing my inability to be present and let my conscious make the better choice for me, the choice I truly wanted. All the things bothering me were subliminal, unreachable, and not easy to understand or fixed until I looked to my subconscious. This is about how I learned to listen to the parts of myself stuck in the past that were blocking my real confidence, authentic self and my life’s purpose.
I am certain there are many other people who feel the same way and I hope this will them help begin to process their own stories. I started out with two things; willingness and determination. This is my story…of how I finally made it comfortably into my own skin.
Comments (0)