I grew up in a cranky Southern female family that emphasized looks over achievement, the perfect body over brains, style over substance. I was ninja trained in the black arts of judgment, comparison and self-hatred by a mother who could eviscerate the toughest-skinned cowgirl with an evil look or a few words. In the face of unbearable beauty, her final clawing words were:
“Yeah, she’s pretty, but she knows it, so that cancels it right out.”
It wasn’t easy knowing you’d never be good enough, and, if you did have the luck to grow up pretty, you couldn’t even enjoy that knowledge without the dreaded cancellation effect occurring.
Talk about a lose-lose situation!
I was only ten when she put me on my first diet. Even though I wasn’t fat, there was fear I would be… because she was fat. Mama taught me to closet eat and to use food for every possible doubt, fear, delay or frustration. She also taught me to diet with a vengeance after days, weeks or months of channeling the power of food into bodyfat.
Through the years, my major dieting efforts looked like this: 145-135-155, 160-145-170, 179-155-190, 195-170-212, 230-190-235. There are three triangulated weights in every effort because every diet rebounded me to a higher weight.
The thing was, no weight was good enough. I never held onto one of the lower weights more than 15 seconds because they weren’t good enough, even though they sometimes represented big weight loss.
I hated those lower weights, because they were the frustration points. Despite effort, struggle and deprivation, I was deeply unhappy with 20, 30, even 50 pounds weight losses. The heavier I got, the more I honed my skills of judgment and recrimination. I assumed, the more disgusted I was with my size, the quicker and more effectively I’d make change.
But did that ever happen?
No.
Not only did it NOT lead to successful change, it took my self-esteem from the low range to the netherlands.
Let me put it this way: Did hating ever dismiss a bully?
So, why would we expect ripping our fragile senses of self into confetti to inspire us?
My toughest year of weight loss was year 3. I lost 32 pounds the first year, which research later proved was precisely the amount of bodyfat a female body could burn in a year. I lost 23 lbs the second year. And Year 3… well I lost 9 pounds that year. It was tough. I kept looking at the scale and seeing the same numbers.
This was exactly where I usually threw it all away and slipped back into negative food habits. But I was on the quest to lose weight permanently, even if I, deep down, doubted it existed. I had adopted a “never go back” theme to may approach. This time, losing weight involved changing ME inside and I wasn’t about to give that back to the dark gods of recrimination.
That third year was when I learned real self-love: patience, understanding, encouragement, support.
That was the year I stepped into a new sense of responsibility – no diet could accomplish what I wanted, and no person could do it for me. I realized, despite the file cabinets full of diet information and research, I knew nothing about the deeper change needed to sustain weight loss.
That was the year I was completely humbled by love.
I learned loving yourself at 242 doesn’t make 242 healthy. And it doesn’t mean you don’t want to change it.
But it does mean you can see past it, to something more important.
