Do You Ever Have Trouble With the Mental Side of Losing Weight?

I used to. Not so much the mental part of weight loss, but the mental part about body image and how i perceived myself as a person and as a woman.

I was always insecure, and my image problems started in 2nd grade with classmates calling me fat. I was definitely taller and sturdier, but looking at photographs, I was not a fat child, and my height and weight were proportionate (confirmed by medical records). But i became hyper-conscious early that being bigger was not girl-like or feminine to those around me.

I started aggressively counting calories and exercising at 12, desperate to make my 5'8" frame fit the same size as my classmates. I grew three more inches by 13, and was appalled to be two sizes larger than most of my classmates, completely discounting the effect of being tall and having a large frame, and viewed my 150 lb weight with horror and anxiety. I felt like a giant among beautiful fairies, not recognizing the beauty in my athletic strength.

At 14 i gave up on being "normal", but not in a good way. I quit exercising and controlling food entirely, swinging to 200 lbs before my 16th birthday. By 19 I was up to 225 lbs. I knew i was fat, I knew it was unattractive to most people. I focused on school and music, and pretended feeling like an outsider because of my body was irrelevant to me.

And then suddenly I cared again. I wanted to date, I wanted to be pretty, and I was interested and willing to put in the effort to get to a better weight.

Enter disordered eating.

I went on slim - fast. I adhered rigidly. I swam an hour a day. I biked or walked to work/school every day. I started losing weight. People noticed. I started hanging chronic digestive problems. I lost more weight. I knew the digestive problems were related to the slim - fast , but becoming slender became more important than not feeling like crud. More people praised me. Men started showing interest in me. I decided the price of being normal and attractive for me meant being sick all the time.

No one around could see I was getting 850 calories a day and at least two hours of vigorous exercise, and losing most of whatI did eat to chronic diarrhea. I dropped to 165 lbs. I went to the doctor because I'd developed anal fissures. He told me that i was still obese at 5'11" and prescribed weight loss. I became depressed and developed crippling anxiety. I latched onto the first man who showed me attention. I dropped out of school and married, seeking validation as a person. You could count my ribs and the spines on my backbone.

I still thought i was fat.

The man turned out to be abusive, physically and mentally. He told me how heavy I was compared to anyone he'd ever been attracted to. He forced me to go on juicing purges and laxatives and suppositories. He pushed Chinese herbs and vitamins on me. I got sicker. I just wanted to be normal, I thought that this was the price I had to pay. I thought I was Gulliver in Lilliput. My depression worsened. I was losing energy. He finally said I had to eat. He put me on the Atkins diet and I gained weight. Quickly. A lot of it, because i wasn't counting calories and I was so hungry, and the digestive problems stopped. At the time I thought Atkins was a failure, in retrospect it probably saved me. I found myself at 200 lbs again. I got depressed again. The abuse worsened.

I finally left him, when I admitted to myself that the relationship was abusive, when I quit making excuses and blaming myself for his behavior. It was like a light switch turned on in my brain one day. "I might be fat and unloveanle, but I don't deserve to be treated like this".

This was ALL tied to my self image and revolved around weight. 100% . I'm not going to blame anyone, the insecurity was mine. There are always mean people who will hurt others just to be cruel. I let those people have inordinate power in my life, untilI didn't.

The journey to accepting myself took years. And unfortunately a trip through autoimmune disease, significant life losses, terror of dieting again and revisiting that very dark place from my early teens. I discovered that being larger didn't mean I was unattractive, undesirable, or unlovable. I found out I could do athletic things without letting them become obsessive obligations. I took up dance, and started swimming again. I found out the reason Slim Fast made me sick was an undiagnosed allergy to soy. But I remained terrified of revisiting the misery of my late teens, of my disordered thinking. So I neglected to adequately balance my intake.

And then I found myself 36 years old, standing on a scale and seeing "260" (and that scale was off by 10 lbs butI didn't learn that for 6 months). I cried. And cried. I wept, my heart broken at what that meant. I recognized that my weight absolutely was a problem on its own. Where art 225 I could put on a 1.5 hour bellydance show (and did), at the bigger weight , everything wad hard. And I'd developed lupus, and pericarditis, and I just knew the weight was not helping. I knew i was one accident away from becoming completely disabled, and I knew, deep in my bones, that making someone take care of me at that weight would be grossly unfair to them.

And that was my second light switch moment. AfterI got done crying, I logged into MFP. I set up an account, and started logging. I gave myself compete permission to fail this time, but not to quit trying. So I logged, kept to my calorie goal, felt sorry for myself, and found myself down 6 lbs the first month. Success. With no shakes or exercise (wasn't possible with the pericarditis).

And that was that. Once i got over felling angry at, ashamed of, or sorry for myself, the whole mental thing fell into place. Watching my diet became routine body maintenance, like checking the air in my tires or vacuuming the house. I managed to let go entirely of perceiving my worth as being defined by my appearance or the number on my pants or the scale. This has been incredibly freeing.

Today I weigh 156, with no disordered eating. I'm physically active because my lupus is finally being controlled. I am thankful for where I'm at. I only wish I'd been able to arrive at this wisdom, treat my value as a person is not determined by my physical size, years earlier. It would have saved me a lot of grief.