Shame shame shame

[darkemeralds]

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.

Comments

[scribblemoose]

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

[darkemeralds]

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!