darkemeralds | Shame shame shame

Reading dieters' blogs leaves me with the impression that nothing bad ever, ever happened as a result of losing weight. It's all good, all the time, right? Rah rah zis-boom-bah, go team!

(NOTE: I'm only referring to reasonable, intentional weight loss attained through moderate calorie restriction and good exercise. Just so we're clear.)

But it's not. There are difficulties. At least, there are for me.

Having overcome some of the initial weight-loss hurdles now, I'm noticing something that I haven't seen any dieting cheerleader mention: shame.

I'm not a big believer in psychology--I'm not even sure there's such a thing as "mind"--so this is talky-meat using psych terms for want of accurate biological ones. I feel physically vulnerable. I want to hide. I'm assailed by intrusive head-voices reminding me of past failures, and when I shut them up, the horror-movies start.

Seriously, I'm riding my bike down a quiet side street and involuntarily envisioning being run over by a bus--with all the details. This is not normal, intelligent, risk-aversive awareness here. This is crazy.

And when I manage to shake those images off, I find myself having attacks of vagueness. I brought groceries home on Monday night and completely forgot to put them away till this morning (yeah, that salmon was a big waste...)

All of these things are familiar symptoms of shame. I know them very, very well. It's just that I haven't been troubled by them much for the past couple of years.

So I'm developing a metaphor. Again, I don't believe this is literally, physically what happens, but it's all I've got: it's as if my history is bound up in my fat, and as layers melt away, I'm reliving the bad things that I put the fat on to buffer myself from.

No, I've never been hit by a bus. That's just a stand-in for general traumatic shame, horror, helplessness and damage at the hands of careless others.

Maybe I'm unusual in this. Maybe I'm hypersensitive to these particular nuances. Maybe I'm full of shit. I don't know. But if anyone else ever had this kind of reaction to fat-loss, it's no wonder they rush to regain it.

It's not life-threatening. It's not even diet-threatening (so far). But it's not nothing either, so I thought I'd write it down.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm not making light of what you're experiencing, because it certainly sounds challenging, but don't you think it's possible that if instead of aiming to and beginning to lose weight, you were going off to graduate school, or putting up anarchist posters in support of a cause you believed in, or teaching your first series of fly-fishing classes, or whatever, it would still take a certain amount of mental adjustment, and involve a certain amount of feeling vulnerable?

People don't get fat by accident. (Well, maybe if they fall into a vat of peanut butter and have to eat themselves out *g*) There's a reason we eat too much and/or the wrong things and/or don't exercise enough - a reason we don't look after ourselves properly.

By looking at how you feel, and perhaps looking back at what happened before you put on the weight, or when you learned the habits that encouraged your weight gain, you can see what's going on. Like all our habits, healthy or otherwise, they serve a function for us. If you strip away those habits, you're bound to feel the feelings you were using them to avoid. You need to put new, healthy strategies in their place - finding healthy ways to protect yourself and build your self-esteem - to replace them.

Were you intending to address me, or did you accidentally hit Reply in the wrong place?

Sorry, I hit reply in the wrong place! It's been a long day. My apologies!

That's okay,

scribblemoose.

I'm fairly certain that I personally gained a lot of weight because I had no inbuilt control that said to stop eating, and a very strong inbuilt control that said "OMG stave off the coming starvation! EAT ALL THE FOOD! QUICK!"

Coupled with a deeply held mystical belief that no extraordinary (read "unnatural") measures should be necessary for me to have a "natural" weight, this was a recipe for the exact degree of obesity I've managed to attain. But I would never say that I gained weight with conscious intent. I didn't do it "by accident," but I certainly didn't do it on purpose.

That said, I agree completely that I can't just remove old habits and not replace them. Extraordinary measures are required, and will be required the rest of my life if I don't want to be a fat person anymore. These weird days of shame and trauma-reenactments are certainly reminders to me of how easy it would be to go skittering back to food-land, and I want to be fully conscious both of the dangers and of the need for new safety strategies other than food.

I didn't mean to say you did it consciously on purpose, by the way, I'm talking more about the subconscious.

I've been thinking about this for a couple of hours and trying to articulate my thoughts about it. In a nutshell, I think we're saying the same thing in different terms. I've abandoned psychology and most of its concepts, including "the subconscious mind," and have found that "the body" and "biochemistry" are effective substitutions.

So where psychology might talk about drives and motivations, I would try to think in terms of chemical imbalances, hormones, evolutionary imperatives, and so on.

Both paths lead to the same general place: in this instance, that things more or less outside my conscious control drove me to get very fat. The difference--and I feel like it's an important one--is that the biological, deterministic view dispenses with the subtle morality of the psychological view, and leaves aside all questions of "why", which I've found to be without value in actually making change for myself.

Embracing the purely-physical has opened the way to solutions that are imperfect, partial, incremental and technological, and has freed me from the quest for the Ideal Solution that I believed was supposed to come from healing my psyche.

So (whew!) thank you for giving me the opportunity to organize all those thoughts into clear(ish) sentences!

Absolutely. There's some element of the new here, and newness and vulnerability go hand in hand for me, as I imagine they do for many people.

By staying conscious of the negatives, I hope I can mitigate them. That way, I'm less likely to abandon my fly-fishing class halfway through, and then have to live with the shame of failure.

I have more past shame about weight and its loss and gain than with anything else, so it's natural for me to learn these lessons and play out these trials on that field than on any other.

Absolutely. There's some element of the new here, and newness and vulnerability go hand in hand for me, as I imagine they do for many people.

Logically, then, it is likely that as time passes, you will feel more comfortable. Hope so!

I expect so. It certainly helps to be no longer in the Male Gaze, and able to go through my changes more or less privately.

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