Stephanie

My Point of View

Here is what I found out about weight-loss:

1. I believe that the general conversation around weight loss is mostly not going to help you, sadly.
2. I do not believe that anyone chooses to be obese.  I think it is a condition, like depression.  Yes, you can find ways to support yourself and change certain aspects but you don’t really beat it, you just get better at handling the struggle, building and strengthening support so it doesn’t run your life as much (emphasis on: as much). It is also similar to depression in that a good amount of people think you’re just being lazy by giving in to it.
3. I do not believe that people who don’t struggle with weight loss know how to help you, but they have a lot of great information for you.  I learned a lot about myself and my relationship to food by asking thin people to open up to me about their relationship to food.
4. It is easier for men to lose weight than women, so i take their advice with a grain of salt.
5. Take everyones advice with a grain of salt.
6. I think we who struggle with weight are blinded by wanting to be thin so bad,  we focus on what it means about us that we are fat, rather than the actual physics of losing weight.
7. No diet is one size fits all. From what I see, you have to find what works for you.
8. If you have struggled to keep weight off, you will always struggle. The general mentality is pretty unrealistic. How many people do you know (make a list – I love lists to prove or disprove theories) lose weight and keep it off. Start with your family. Then your friends. Then co-workers. Then whoever is left.

Here is what I believe guides me personally on a daily basis:

1. I realize I may never lose any more weight and its okay.
2. Acceptance, education, patience and self awareness is another key.
3. Beware what you share with others (well-intentioned people have gotten in my head and have triggered a lot of doubts, backslides, binges I didn’t know if I could stand it) and remember people mean well.
4. There is no urgency when it comes to weight-loss. And urgency won’t work.
5. Even if I hate being fat today and perhaps have a moment where I hate myself for being fat  I don’t think it’s right to think that about myself.
6. I am doing this for me. You need to do this for you. Ugh, so preachy. I didn’t do it for me for the first eight years, i did it only because i wanted a man to love me.  See my post “I Had a Dream”.

I have spent most of my life daydreaming about being thin like my friends.  What would it be like to have men chase me, want to do things for me and have my pick of the best guys around.  They would take me out, do things for me, like, for example, listen to me complain. Hahaha. My most “sensual fantasies” about men don’t involve bedroom time. There I am, I’m me of course, but I’m thin and you can see my hipbone through my skin. I would be snuggling on the couch with my fella in some cream colored pottery-barn-decorated apartment at the end of a long day whining to this man with broad shoulders saying something like “I hated the drive home today it was so long and my boss was mean to me…” and he would say back something like “Oh babe, he was mean to you! That’s not okay. You deserve better. That makes me mad.” and “…you’re so pretty when you talk about how much traffic. What can we do to cheer you up?” That’s my “erotica”… a man that thinks I can’t do any wrong or annoy him because I live high up on a pretty pedestal.

This is embarrassing, yes, but I tell you this story, because it’s the truth. I wanted a man and a world that would make me happy.  When I felt bad, he would cheer me up, he would never see me as less, he would derive joy from making me happy.  This is how thin women get treated. I knew in my bones that if I got thin, this would happen. I’d finally “have everything I wanted”.

About five years ago, I was living in New York City and I hired a coach to help me with goal setting and we were talking about my weight-loss.   He stopped me and asked why I wanted to lose weight.  I told him the truth–that it would make me “happy finally” and he said “no, Estefanita, being thin will not make you happy.” He had a Spanish accent (so I’m incorporating it for you) and a kind of flat unsympathetic candor when he coached me. His name was Michel and he was a good man, a very smart man who did not coddle me (I believed he would be nicer if I was thin.  hahahaha).  I began to disagree. This meeting was in person and I remember we were sitting side-by-side on a grassy hill on a hot summer day with our legs propped on the downward slope. I turned more toward him and said “You know what? Yes, I would! You don’t know what its like to not be thin! How most men don’t like you that way.  They’re not always very nice.”   He said simply “…No. Thin does not make you happy. Neither does a relationship” with no smile on his face, no affect, and then continued, “you are incorrect, Estefanita, only if you work on changing your relationship to being thin, will you ever be happy.” I said “What?? I’ve lost 100 pounds! I am changing it” feeling insulted and missing his point. He continued “maybe you will be happy temporarily and then, he will go on a trip and you will be insecure you aren’t enough and these feelings will be back. Those feelings are your feelings, but you are just attaching them to thoughts about your weight. If you get thin, you will still feel this way.” He was so wrong. How could he not see it? It’s like he didn’t want to see the truth (aww, the power of my projections).

We went back and forth some more and I felt stuck.  He then asked “are all the thin people you know happy?” and I said “no, of course not.” and he said sarcastically  “how can that be? being thin makes you happy?”  He had a point, but was still, you know, 100% wrong. He didn’t know what it was like. I think I cried and said he wasn’t listening to me and this was hard to talk about. That it’s hard to find someone “…that likes you the way you are.”  He smiled (which he rarely did) and said just “it’s hard for all of us.”

Michel started to tell me a personal story about how he used to chase women and he thought he just needed to find that “one” that would make him happy.  He said that he would only feel good when he had found someone new, and sure it didn’t work out, but he knew what he wanted. A few years back, he met someone and she made him feel so amazing that he was going to move away from his job, friends, and family to be with her. They had known each other for a month and a good friend sat him down and told him something similar to what he was doing with me that day. His friend asked him why her and then asked him a lot about their relationship. His friend would ask questions that Michel didn’t know the answer to. How does she handle stress? Who is her favorite person in life? What is her philosophy in life? Is she generous? He felt like his friend wasn’t getting it–he had never felt like this, all of that stuff his friend was asking would get worked out. His friend told him “this is what you do, you meet someone, tell me “you’ve never felt this way”. He protested that he had never felt this way and it was true. He hadn’t ever been willing to sacrifice so much to be with someone. His friend pushed him to see that he was blaming his unhappiness on women. That he was objectifying women and he used them to feel good. He didn’t relate to them. He didn’t want to get to know this woman. And he hadn’t gotten to know the previous one. He just wanted to feel good, and that’s not reality. You can’t leave every time it gets hard. I could picture it, the more he shared the details. In this moment, I could see my judgement of that kind of guy. He was describing someone very immature and lame.

Then, without warning, I started to think of one of my friends who had all the things I wanted to make me happy and she would always have something she was upset about. Then, I thought of my other friend who was always worried her boyfriend would break up with her, and mostly, they fought because she would accuse him of not really being in love with her.  Oh crap, it started to sink in.  Mich had “my number” and after that conversation I would tell him that that was “the day you killed my dream.”

Wasn’t my being fat the problem?  He and I would go on to talk about this for the next year.  He would probe me about why if I never lost weight, that would be bad. I would struggle but could never explain it with any rationale that made sense. “Men would ask you out more”  and he would ask how that would make me feel better and then he would ask me how I would feel if they were late and didn’t call. Or, worse, what would happen if a guy broke up with me. And then I said the dumbest thing after “well, they wouldn’t because I’d be thin.”  But all my thin friends had that stuff happen to then. The more we talked, the more embarrassing it got. He was objectifying women and so was I.  We worked on what losing weight would mean to me and not the weight-loss itself.  The more I looked, with his guidance, the more unhappy people seemed only because their expectations were ridiculous.

I was just being a victim. Google “victim mentality” I fit all the criteria #killme. I also realized how self absorbed I had been to think that my life was harder than others, and never took responsibility for a lot of the ways my life was easier and I had lots of advantages and a lot of love around me.  I also was didn’t like dating. (Weird I hadn’t met anyone. Ha.)

My dream was dead, but now what do I do. I was not happy. Michel suggested I get out of the habit of suffering all the time and I look at being happy like a muscle. So, once a day, I set a timer for five (5) minutes and would close my eyes and think about things that made me happy and focus on that feeling in my body.  I would connect to feeling good. Calling up any memory that would make me feel good in my body. I would think about floating in the ocean with my nieces. I would remember times I laughed really hard. I would think about how happy I was when a man I had dated years ago looked at me (which is even funnier because I was probably 250 lbs at that point and we had a lot of issues – none of them had to do with my weight- and I was always pissed off –damn Michel was so right!! #dreamkiller).  I started to build the muscle for feeling joy.  A few months later I noticed that I was waiting for a friend at a coffee shop and she called and said she wasn’t coming and I didn’t get in a bad mood. I was now actually losing the heaviness I felt on the inside and I would start bringing that warm happy feeling up when I wasn’t in the five minutes and I started being happier all around.

I wanted to have my cake — blame all my problems on being fat— and be thin–never look at things I needed to work on to be happy at any weight–too.

It took me a very long time to realize that the shame I felt for being fat didn’t help me lose weight.  Shocking. I’d eat something “bad” and then feel upset. I could just think about overeating, and I’d be mad at myself because I should be ashamed of being fat. I didn’t want to be okay with it!! I couldn’t! Because then I’d never lose weight!!  As I lost and lost and lost slowly, my anger toward myself was always there.  The way I lost weight may seem evolved and like i’m patient, but I wasn’t.  I only did it slow and steady because doing it quickly never worked for me or anyone I knew.  The weight-loss was slow and steady, but beating myself up was constant, harsh and came on fast right when I woke up, lasted all day until I went to sleep at night.

I wanted to have my cake–to lose the weight slowly by punishing myself–and be thin–love myself— too

After I lost 100 pounds, I didn’t think I should be proud.  When someone complimented me, I would smile and hope we’d stop talking about it. I thought I shouldn’t have been fat in the first place so all I had done was be less of a failure. I would say things like this out loud only to my closest friends (which makes me sad to remember that, as I type this). Then something happened!  I took a personal growth seminar that was recommended to me.  It was their class on Self Esteem that got me. The class defined self esteem as being relative to the options you have in a given area.  So, for example, say there is a lawyer who is good at their job, and they know you can get a job at lots of firms– they would have high self-esteem about their work. Conversely, if your work is not that respected in your firm, your boss is always on you about making mistakes– you typically have low self esteem– because you know getting another job won’t be easy. More options, more self-esteem. Less options, less self-esteem.  But there are two exceptions to this because your perception could be deeply skewed: 1)  you don’t believe you have options. Meaning you don’t believe anyone would hire you even if people respect your work–you know these people– they give themselves no credit and they will deflect any compliments insisting that what they do is nothing.  So despite the reality, they have low self-esteem because they think it’s not true. They have self-imposed “stuck-ness”. And 2) is the opposite, they think they are gods gift and their work is actually mediocre–you know these people too– so even though you’re not as employable,  you think every law firm would be lucky to have you.

In this class, I saw for the first time, that I was like the lawyer who does great work, and doesn’t think it’s anything special. I had lost 100 pounds at that point – I had accomplished something great. I actually decided to take the class because I was depressed that I didn’t feel happier about it. I always thought “if I could lose 100 pounds, I will be so happy.” But I wasn’t. I was stuck in my head – not with my weight-loss. Something clicked and I shared that I had lost 100 pounds with my group, and for the first time I was proud. This door had opened to seeing how accomplished I was. Not overnight, but pretty soon after, I started to realize that telling people might be inspiring more than embarrassing.  Why wasn’t I allowing myself to be proud?

The part I see so clearly now. It’s the beating up on myself that made the weight-loss invalid. I remember driving down the 10 freeway about to get onto the 405 a couple years after that class realizing that morning I got on the scale and felt bad. This is what I always did. Just to be clear – I felt proud for the first time in that class- I still beat myself up. It took a lot of work after (!!) to pull my belief system apart. But I remember right then on the freeway for the first time, truly having a breakthrough, that beating myself up didn’t change the scale – diet and exercise did.  You may think this is no big deal but that realization shifted something deep. And there really was less punishment.

If we don’t start acknowledging that when we say/think we are “bad” for eating “too much”, when will we ever actually be able to separate it from the business of losing weight?  That’s right.  Punishing yourself does not help you lose weight.  (This is actually something that I have never convinced anyone to believe when someone asks me advice on losing weight. hahaha. its kind of funny because I totally get it! I couldn’t even consider this as true for 30 years).  Losing weight is about Physics. As in things that happen in the physical universe: eating, exercising and most importantly the physics of homeostasis in the body… meaning that the human body has memorized your weight, so even if an external circumstance happens – you go on a diet and drop 30 pounds – your body will always want to go back to “normal” and put the weight back on.  My theory is that because i did this so slowly, my body kind of forgot the 300 pounds.  My body today would have a much harder time

This was not a very “evolved” way to lose weight. Sure, I had decided that I would lose the weight slowly, which may seem very much like I was buddha on a mountain top but I only did it slowly, because I didn’t see another way out but I wasn’t some buddha on the mountain top about it.