Talking It Off

Yesterday, for the first time in forever, I went for a mind-clearing 5 mile walk – in under 72 minutes, I might add – and found myself thinking about where I am today with my weight/body/mind insanity sanity.

It’s almost three years since I stepped on the scale and realised that I’d put back on all the weight I’d worked so hard to lose for a big family wedding.  I’d done it many times before, but this time I also heard a voice from deep inside that said, “NO MORE”.

I didn’t feel any sense of thrill about dieting; I just knew I had to do it. Surrounded by supportive cyber-friends I decided to combine hard work with writing about the weight loss process – no “click”, no dieting euphoria.  That was the start of breaking a cycle that I had been perpetuating in my life since my teens.

So what about now?  How is it possible that the first 20 pounds has stayed off and I’m on my way to the last 10 being gone forever?  I’m not talking about losing the weight – dieting is not a problem – I’m talking about keeping it off.

• No whining.  No excuses.

Ah, BCB.  If I hadn’t learned this, I never would have learned that there was no one but MYSELF who was responsible for the amount of fat on my body and for the negative way I was feeding my body.  Years of food/body issues can make a person take on a victim role.  No excuses means the following: If there’s junk food in my cupboard, I put it there.  If there’s wine in my belly, I put it there.  If there’s fat on my body – I put it there.  There’s been lots of complicated life stuff to sort through, but in the end, if I feed my sadness/anger/boredom  (fill in your own favourite state of mind), then I will gain weight. I may not be able to fix my life, (just call me Queen of Understatement), but I CAN choose how I deal with those emotions.  I’m not a victim.

• Permanent change.

For the first time ever, I realised that this couldn’t be a “diet” followed by “normal”.  It was all a new normal.  This meant that I actually bothered to find new foods to love not just new “diet foods”.

For the years and years and years (30 plus) that I regained every pound lost through dieting, I can see now that I simply didn’t want to change.  I didn’t want a new way of eating.  I didn’t want to not eat when I wasn’t hungry.  My body proved quite dramatically that these weren’t great decisions but it took me a long long time to work out the (obvious) connection.

• Move for the sake of your health, not for weight loss.

This is a new one for me.  Years of earning “Points” have led me to equate exercise with being allowed to eat more.  This past year I’ve been learning to eat according to what by body needs – to feed my body so that it can move well.  This is quite a leap from moving so that I can drink more wine. 

• Write

For some reason, writing about this process has made it happen. Or helped it to happen. I suppose it’s a combination of my temperament and my talents but getting it all down on paper makes the process more understandable.  It’s as though, for all those years and through all those diets, I just wanted to do it without thinking about it.  I didn’t want to think about why I stuffed myself with food when I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t want to think about my body shape or how to dress myself.  I didn’t want to think about how food and relationships were all tied up.

Writing has helped me to hang onto the “A-ha” moments of this process, to cement the permanent changes rather than just rushing through a diet as fast as I can so that life can get back to normal.  Writing about it all has helped to establish a new normal.

Is that really all there is to it?

• No whining, no excuses
• Make permanent changes
• Eat to move – don’t move to eat
• Write

Of course, each one of those involves a whole lot of trying and failing and figuring out and quitting for a bit then starting again where I left off.  It’s meant getting to grips with the woman in the mirror and the body in the changing room and I’m still a work in progress.

A work in progress.

You don’t use food as a drug for 30 years and “just change” over night.  If someone had told me, back in the summer of 2008, that three years from now I was still going to be working on this, I’m not sure I would have just said, “Well let’s get on with it anyway!”  I didn’t know at the time what was going to happen in my life.   But I was SO SICK of feeling like a failure over something that I knew was within my control.

And so I keep on writing and working and looking forward to the new phase ahead.