I am stuck. While I once had the drive to lose and maintain
my ideal weight, I am now slowly losing the will power and have fallen into
repeated cycles of yo-yo dieting. I struggled with weight most of my life,
while never FAT per se, I was always on the chubbier end of the spectrum and
was never confident about my body or my appearance in general. This was made
worse by my parents pointing it out and making comments such “Should you really
be eating this” or shooting me a sideways glance whenever I went for seconds.
While that contributed to my overall negative relationship with my body and
food, I can’t say I resent them for it. Due to my neurosis concerning my
weight, I always remained within a healthy weight frame (not one that I found
attractive though).
My first year of college I fell victim to the freshmen 15,
well actually, in my case, the freshmen 22! Yes my first year of college, I
gained 22 pounds! An I’m barely 5ft! I managed to lose the weight, and more,
and even kept it off for more than a year. Then, some kind emotional turmoil
struck. My second to last semester at university, I took some really hard
classes, I was nervous about graduating, had no clue what would come after and
a few other emotional hardships (from the perspective of a university student)
I slowly lost the extensive dietary control and restrictions I was following.
Luckily, I’m rather athletic which prevented me from gaining too much weight.
In addition, I went through phases where I thoroughly watched what I ate, but
those were always followed with a period of binging.
While the healthy phases were usually longer than the
binges, lately, it seems that my unhealthy days are outnumbering the good ones.
By unhealthy I mean days where I eat peanut butter, pizza, cookies and ice
cream icing... Pretty much the entire junk food isle finds itself in my
stomach. And every time I tell myself it’s just today. I had a long day or I
did so well this week or everybody’s eating and the list of excuses go on! I
realized, after my several failed attempts at “today is the day when I will no
longer disappoint myself, and will go back to my old healthy self and fit into
my favorite jeans again!”, that there is a much deeper issue here. I have a
very unhealthy relationship with food, one might even say I was a compulsive
eater or a food addict. The stress of being a recent graduate, my volatile year
(moved around different countries), lack of confidence in my ability and my
current yet temporary living situation in Palestine have all lead to an overall
sense of confusion and chaos in my mind.
After several rants on the phone to my cousin, who suffers
from similar social distresses and is a co-author on this blog, she suggested I
read the Marianne Williamson book “A Course in Weight Loss” and that we
work on the exercises together and use the blog as a means to keep focused,
driven, encourage each other and share our experience with other who may have
similar issue. Today was day one, which comprised of reading the intro and
talking about it. Personally, she gets too into her “divine being” and God is
the only way you will heal this wound that is causing you to over eat.
Basically, it’s eastern philosophy worded in extremely North American and
pop-culture metaphysical lingo, something I always found irritating. Moreover,
I am not a religious individual at all, nor do I believe in God I don’t think.
So telling me that I can’t do this alone, only God could help me, that’s
basically setting me up to fail. Therefore I will approach this with a Buddhist
mind set: I need to connect with my own inner being and let go of the ego (a
very brief summary of Asian philosophy). Alas my friends, other than telling
you that I ate well today and worked out, there’s not much else I have to
offer. I shall bid you good night and let you know how day two went!
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