Weight, Weight-Loss and Self-Acceptance

I recently read a moving memoir that taught me a lot about weight, weight-loss and self-acceptance.  In It was Me all Along, Andie Mitchell describes how food became such an integral part of her life and how she coped with her stressful family life. “That girl version of me learned that I shouldn’t experience discomfort. That whenever I start to feel even one inkling of boredom, doubt, anxiety, or anger, food would soothe me. At least temporarily.”  Food became the way for her to cope with the discomfort of an alcoholic father and a mother who worked so hard she was rarely present.  By 16, she weighed 210 pounds, had been on and off of many diets and was a practiced secretive eater.

When she finally lost weight, what helped her? After reaching a high weight of 268 at age 19, she began to consider its impact on her health in addition to her appearance. She started with the gym—thirty minutes on the elliptical—and went with a supportive friend. She focused on the present: “Can you exercise today, Andie? Not tomorrow, not the next day, not even a month from now. Today? Eat the best you can, work your plus-sized heart out….today?” She tried to eat healthfully, which was okay during the day, but torture at night, the time she had been used to eating to numb her feelings. Eventually, she moved to Weight Watchers and found the structure of the point system and the consistent self-monitoring to be motivating. She accepted that it would be hard: “Oh, it’s just going to suck for awhile.”

What else? She developed “an arsenal of ways to distract myself, if only to narrowly escape a binge.” Here are a few: writing in a journal when flagging, calling a friend and talking about something unrelated to weight, losing herself in movies (without snacks), spending more time in nature. A semester abroad in Italy helped her start to appreciate and savor food.

But while losing weight helped her feel better about the way she looked, she still felt like "the fat girl."  "I looked into the mirror and loved what I saw so completely that all I wanted was to snap a picture of the girl within the frame…Without that mirror, without any way of physically seeing my own form in plain sight, I still believed myself to be the fat girl. My mind and eyes were in opposition.” Moreover, she did not feel like the happy thin self she had expected she would become. Instead, she felt anxious, sad, isolated and preoccupied with food. Finally, she went to a nutritionist and a therapist who helped her learn to see how she had been using food for comfort and soothing. She also learned to be more accepting of her appetite and less fearful of losing control.

I’m summarizing the book and perhaps making her painful process sound too easy and linear.  It took a tremendous amount of work and commitment to make the changes that led to her weight loss. But beyond those behavioral changes, it took work and attention to her attitudes about food, her feelings about herself, and the role that food played in her life for her to feel that the way that she felt on the inside and the way she looked on the outside were in sync.

New Year's Resolutions: Focusing on What's Important

In the new year, people often think about self-improvement and new year’s resolutions — losing a few pounds, for example. But though people have the best of intentions, these goals can send them in the wrong direction.

In this past Sunday’s New York Times, Pico Iyer wrote a piece — “Healthy Body, Unhealthy Mind” — touching on this very issue. Iyer writes about his efforts starting in his fifties to wean himself off of Big Macs and start to exercise. He admits, however, that he was ignoring what he took in emotionally. While he wasn’t gorging on calories, he was “gobbling down” a junk-food mental diet of useless information and gossip.

Iyer labels himself an “externalist,” or someone, he says, who “will dwell at length on everything he can see, in order to distract himself from the fact that it’s everything he can’t see on which his well-being depends….He interprets health in terms of his body weight, wealth in terms of his bank account and success in terms of his business card.”

So many of us work hard not to define ourselves solely by these external markers. Indeed, many people find themselves in therapy when they feel they are not measuring up on these counts. Weight and bank balances fluctuate — it’s risky to rely on them as measures of self-esteem. Part of the work in therapy involves helping someone find value in less concrete areas. With weight in particular, it can be tempting to focus on a number — a calorie count, a carbohydrate gram, a scale number — but when the number doesn’t go your way, it can be devastating. It helps to widen one’s lens beyond the concrete.