I’ve been doing a fair amount of thinking on something that I’d like to share with you.
My most successful weight loss effort resulted in 140 pounds lost — and probably 100 or so of that was in the first year. I dropped weight quickly. What I was doing worked. Mind you, it helped that I was a bit younger than I am, now, and more capable of a wider range of exercise, which sped the process. At one point in the second year of loss, though, things slowed down considerably and I had a lot of difficulty achieving further losses, and finally ground to a halt at 140.5 pounds lost. In my mind, it just couldn’t be good enough. I was grateful, yes, but I was also angry because I felt like I was doing everything right and not getting results, and even the slightest backslide resulted in an immediate gain.
There are probably 413 different physiological reasons for why that happened, and I’ll likely never know many of them. So instead, in this effort, I’m working on what I can control, which includes the psychological reasons for blocking my own success. On some level, I really do think I was terrified of being thin and being noticed for it.
I still feel that fear. An online group I belong to was discussing mental reasons for weight issues, a while back, and while I’m usually pretty emotionally removed, I actually started crying when I typed out the words that I think I might be afraid of being thin. Whoa! It just hit me in the gut. And I’ve been doing a fair amount of thinking about that, and I believe I have a lot of head work to do in this regard, because I think that might be at the heart of why I’ve held myself back in the past.
I haven’t always been heavy, although like a lot of girls and women, I’ve always thought I was heavy. As a young adult, I might have been twenty pounds overweight, at most. I didn’t become obese until after marriage. Unlike many who have been obese their entire lives, I’ve experienced life as a thin person. I’ve walked for miles on end for the sheer joy of it. I’ve hiked, sailed, spelunked, biked, played tennis. I remember a time when I didn’t ever worry about finding clothes that would fit, wondering if I’d get squeezed into a restaurant booth, being embarrassed by not being able to ride a carnival ride because of weight. Those issues meant nothing to me.
Now, they certainly do. Being morbidly obese brings with it the awareness that size can be an issue every single day of my life. I’ve been over the weight limit for using a tanning bed. I’m unable to sit on bar stools, in part because of my knee, but mostly because of my weight, and have had to ask friends to sit somewhere else because of it. I was looking at cars recently, and got in one for a test drive, only to be thoroughly embarrassed when I couldn’t adjust the seat enough for me to be able to safely drive the car. I’ve felt claustrophobic in social situations where I’ve been seated in crowded bars, and been in a position where I couldn’t have gotten out of the restaurant without asking people to stand up from their seats and move for me. These are actually the smaller issues at hand, but still some that people of normal size rarely if ever encounter.
There’s also that sense of being singled out because of size. I just might be one of those women some have pointed to, over time, and thought to themselves “at least I’m not that fat!” Photos with friends embarrass me, because in my mind’s eye, I’m happy and equal to my friends, only to see the truth of a photo that shows me to be huge in comparison. These issues are just the tip of the mental iceberg the morbidly obese must deal with.
The 140 pounds lost came off fairly quickly; quickly enough that people could see a difference in my size from one week to the next. I crossed a line into normalcy, and at that point, people started talking about how concerned they had been about me as an obese woman. Some were only concerned with health; some bordered on rude in their comments on how much better I looked as a normal size woman. Regardless of size, I’m still a human with emotions. Simply put, that shit hurt.
Along with the weight loss came some pretty phenomenal physical accomplishments. People started to hold me up as an example, a success story, not only for weight loss but for physical strength. There were expectations of me. I found myself as defined by my weight loss as I had been by my weight, and I started to rebel against that. I got pretty tired of people constantly asking how much weight I’d lost, expecting a larger number every time. In the small town in which I live, strangers actually used to stop me and talk to me about my weight loss.
I think it triggered a fear that I’d never be normal, and that unless I moved somewhere where no one knew me, I’d always be defined by something that I was trying hard to escape. In addition to this, those who didn’t know that I’d formerly been such a fatty treated me much differently than they would have treated me, a hundred or more pounds heavier. Most of that was good, but frankly, some of that was scary, too.
Although I was thin as a child and young adult, that was decades ago, and my brain has to relearn what it’s like to be thin. I think my body was far ahead of my brain. I didn’t know how to deal with the different input, existing in a different world with different rules. I’d catch myself realizing that I’d avoided a gap between chairs at a restaurant because my brain gave me basic input that said I wouldn’t fit, when I’d fit easily — that happened a lot, but it’s not even really that.
While I was far from thin as a 200 pound woman, I was within the range of what people considered to be normal, size-wise. People don’t really realize that they’re treating someone differently; even my friends changed in how they addressed me or dealt with me. Some wanted to pull me in and get me to do all the things I hadn’t done with them, before; others subtly reminded me that I still wasn’t thin. And, frankly, there were some who decided I wasn’t friend material anymore.
I’m trying to lay this out for those who may read it at some point, and as a reminder to myself: I was in the unique situation of having lost so much weight that I’d say hello to someone I knew as a large woman, and they wouldn’t recognize me. This happened many times. On the surface, it felt good. But I think now, on some level, it added to this insecure feeling inside of me that said I was just faking it. That I didn’t deserve the good changes I was experiencing. That I didn’t deserve the differences in treatment, the ability to shop for clothes without worry, or even to simply sit down at a restaurant and order a meal without being judged for it.
Somewhere inside me, I felt like a fake. Like an imposter, hiding out in a body that wasn’t mine and I didn’t deserve. I felt like people were surely laughing at me for believing I could buy clothes that weren’t plus sizes. For whatever reason, my brain couldn’t accept that I really was doing all those things, and I hadn’t somehow cheated to get there. If someone complimented me, I didn’t want to accept the compliment without some sort of explanation for not being thinner. If someone flirted with me, no matter how harmless, I wanted to run and hide. Inside, I was still very much a morbidly obese woman. I could not convince myself that I had already achieved what I firmly believed to be unachievable.
It’s quite the eye-opener to realize this about myself, and to have to accept that if I want to get back to being thin, I have to find ways to incorporate those thought processes as my own. I have to accept that many things will change for me as I continue to lose weight. I have to believe that I deserve it. That’s probably the biggest hurdle of all.