Be Honest With Yourself

Be honest with yourself.

It sounds easy to say 'be honest with yourself' yet my experience as a morbidly obese person is that I delude myself, I am not honest with myself (even now sometimes). Lies we tell ourselves (and others):

I am overweight because I have a slow metabolism;
I am overweight because of genes;
I eat like a sparrow;I gain weight on 600 calories (24 checks) a day;
I remembered to write everything down that I ate and drank yesterday and counted every check;
I have been good with my diet today, nothing passed my lips that I had not planned to eat;
I do like myself;I only weight myself once a week, at weigh in day;
I reported my correct weight through to my Dietline consultant;I don't care what other people think about my body, I love it anyway;
I am happy.I am sure you can think of many other examples of ways in which we lie to ourselves and others, if not everyday at least once in a while.

I am overweight because I ate too much, exercised too little and deluded myself about what I was really eating. Example 1: when the girls were small they would leave their Easter and Christmas chocolate lying around the house half finished and expect it to be where they left it so that they could finish it off. It was always there when they were looking for it because I was careful to replace it after I had eaten the original.

Example 2: When I was on my own in the house I would raid the cupboards for anything I could binge eat on, toast, cheese, cakes, biscuits, chocolate (usually something bought for a particular meal later in the week) and eat the whole lot, then I would carefully replace it so that it was still in the cupboard when the OH came home from work/girls came home from school. I would tell them I was not hungry and skip dinner, trying to look the slimming martyr. I would be so full up I could barely manage a pea, let alone dinner!

Example 3: I ate like a sparrow in front of people (only able to manage small helpings) because I had binged on 2 or 3 boxes of chocolate, whole cakes and packets of biscuits when on my own. Always careful to hide the evidence.

Example 4: When I say I was always careful to hide the evidence, that is a lie as well. I used to hide it in my wardrobe and hope that my OH would find it and realise I had a problem. Years later he admitted that he did find it but did not know what to do to help me!

Example 5: I like myself, I take care of my appearance and always look clean and presentable with a cheerful smile on my face. Behind that is the dark days where I can barely get out of bed, let alone get washed and dressed. Whole weekends can pass my by in a state of miserable unwashedness, and I certainly don't smile. The harder I try to be cheerful, without a care in the world the more I come crashing down afterwards. That is not a person who likes themselves.

Example 6: on 3 occasions I have lied about my weight to my Dietline consultant because I was embarrassed, upset, felt I had let her down (and let myself down) about weight gains. That is my one new year resolution to myself this year, tell the truth about weight gains as well as weight losses. The daft thing is that if you lose that weight and more you cannot share the joy of the weight loss either! The madness is that I am talking about 2 or 3 lbs only! No more. The positive is that I am on my second set of 12 weeks with Dietline and am sticking with it and achieving success. I weight gain in the past would have seen me avoiding the class so that I was not confronted by my shame and the class manager. That would have been the end to the weight loss attempt. Not facing my weight gain shame has at least kept my going successfully with Dietline. Funnily, I never lied on my ticker - that would have been too much!

Example 7: I don't care what people think. Yes I do, very much. I have been abused in the street, called names, sneered at and commented about/to on buses and trains. I have been made to feel a freak, a 'less than person', a circus side show. There are a lot of very cruel people out there who feel they have the right to tell me what they think of my obesity. Every time I felt humiliated, hurt, upset, and would often console myself with food. I do not feel I have the right to make comments about other people unless those comments are invited, and I do not feel I have the right to make hurtful comments to anybody - I always try to be encouraging. It is a shame others do not feel the same, but yes I do mind those comments very much and I do care what others think.

You have to start to like yourself and keep liking yourself, warts and all, in order to successfully face the battle of dealing with 50 years of weight gain which has left you at 26 st 2 lbs.

diet, dieting, obesity, weight loss, fatblogging