Self-Sabotage????

Yes I share that same issue. I work so hard to lose the weight and then once it starts coming off I self-sabotage by nibbling here, grazing there, just a few more because I'm an adult and can eat what I want...yada yada ya. This has been going on for years and I finally just this week began to seriously look at it in therapy. For me part of it is I don't know how to be happy. I don't know how to be joyful and free, I know how to be miserable, unhappy, sad, depressed, suicidal. I know how to long, wish and want. I don't know how to achieve and attain what I want. When I do achieve something I want, I look at it as a fluke or as an anomaly rather than acknowledging how much I worked and sacrificed to get to a goal.

Something else I have uncovered is that I use the weight to avoid living life to the fullest. If I'm fat and don't have a boyfriend or husband it is because I am fat. If I don't have friends it is because I'm fat not because I don't make an effort to make and maintain friendships. If I'm fat, then I can blame everything that is wrong with my life on my weight and not look at the real reason things are as the are.

So much of the self-sabotage is tied into my childhood. It goes back to all of the years I spent longing, wanting and wishing that things would be different but was powerless to change the beatings, the mental abuse, the isolation and the loneliness, the being different, not being able to be who and what I wanted to be. The fear that prevailed my younger life still holds me hostage and it shows in my body now. I hold on to the weight because it is a barrier between me and the world. It keeps me in a state of longing and it keeps the world away from me.

I am also a fearful person which is at the core of my self-sabotage. I am afraid that if I do lose the weight what happens then? What if I am not happy, if I am not joyous if I am not free. What if I am just as depressed and angry and unhappy and unfulfilled but now I'm thin? What then? Being thin is so foreign to me. I don't know how to be thin. I don't know how to like my body and to enjoy how I look. I do know how to be fat. It is familiar. Trying something new, i.e., being thin is frightening for me. I just don't know what that looks and feels like for me.

I am wanting and working toward letting go the need for the fat, the need to self-sabotage and the fear of changing. I am willing to do the work to release the work and to take the steps toward a smaller body. I am also willing to forgive myself over and over for not being brave all these years that I held onto the weight, for needing the be fat for all these years and for losing out on my life because of my food addiction.