Matter Over Mind: The Battle Will Never End

A funny thing happened yesterday.  I closed my eyes to blink, and when I opened them, I had gained ten pounds.  I worked the Weight Watchers program for three months and lost 14 pounds.  Fourteen pounds!  And I felt successful, proud, confident, healthy, and beautiful.  And then I stopped.  I knew I was no longer eating 1200 calories a day, but it just didn’t seem possible to gain the weight I’d lost.  It was hard work to get rid of those pesky pounds.  I’d sacrificed!  I’d said no!  I’d eaten many more leafy greens than I’d thought possible!  

I got too confident.  That’s what happened.  It’s like there is some force out there waiting for all of us to say, “Okay, I’m good where I am.  I don’t need any more self-improvement.”  And then this force comes along and hits us over the head with the reality hammer as if to say, “Oh yeah? Ha!  Get back to work!” 

It seems that just the day before, I felt so satisfied with my NBW (new body weight) and content to leave thoughts of my IBW (ideal body weight) where they belonged—in the past with my high school memories.  How could it be that without any warning my body had morphed yet again into something I don’t recognize, something I don’t want to have to claim as my own?  It seemed that overnight, the weight crept back into my body as I slept soundly, innocent to the invasion.  But I know the reality.  I stopped writing down everything I ate.  I stopped measuring my food.  I stopped thinking I needed to be a control freak hiding from food because I wanted to be a normal person again.  And over the course of about two months, the weight found me. 

                The truth is, I’ve battled with my weight, and the body image that goes along with it, since I was 12.  That’s when I started to get fat.  Actually, that’s when I started to be un-starved.  That’s when I was removed from an abusive foster home and placed with the people I now call my parents, the two most generous, loving, kind people I know.  So that’s when my entire life began to change for the better.  However, I still had to survive the strange bodily alterations of pre-pubescence and the angst of adolescence.   

                Anyone who’s ever gone without food due to homelessness or abuse will understand this perfectly, and everyone can probably imagine this to some degree—when you are denied food and then you no longer have to worry about when or where you will get your next meal, you will still worry about when or where you will get your next meal.  To put things simply, when there was food, I ate it.  As much as I could.  Just because I could.  Because it was in front of my face or on my plate or in the cupboard.  And I never learned how to stop.  I never felt full until after I stood up, walked away from the table, and felt the guilt of gluttony burning in my mind.  But more importantly, I ate because I was free.  So I came home from school and ate my way through a bag of Chips Ahoy before dinner.  And I rushed through a plate full of food without feeling my stomach’s response.  I thought about food constantly.  What was I going to eat for breakfast? At breaktime?  Why wouldn’t lunch come sooner to answer the growling in my stomach?  And I wanted more of everything immediately.  One scoop of ice cream could never be enough.  A small soda wouldn’t cut it.  My mind was always in preemptive mode, always knowing what my heart felt—that I was hungry.

                On some level, food became my therapy.  I was eating my emotions and my inability to deal with my childhood.  I didn’t realize this when I was a teenager, but looking back, I know that food was something I could control (or so I thought), something that I physically held in my hands, and eating it was my choice, and having that control empowered me.  Ironically, overeating is ultimately a weakness, illness masked by the delusion of control. 

                When I’ve shared my battles with overeating and wanting to lose weight, people have responded in the typical fashion: “You’re not fat,” “You’re crazy!” “People would love to look like you!”  What these comments do is invalidate my feelings of powerlessness.  Each person’s body is an individual journey.  Our bodies carry us through the sufferings of our lives, and they should be praised as such.  However, we must also be realistic about our relationships with our bodies.  It is not someone else’s job to make me feel good about my body.  It is my responsibility to be my own parent, to treat my body with respect.  That means I need to see my body as deserving of good food, moderate exercise, kind words, and a lot less pressure than I put on it to be better than it is.

                Women have it tough.  We live in a world that loves the beautiful and thin and shuns the ugly and fat.  And as we age, it becomes even harder to sustain that outer layer of beauty that passing eyes will either accept or avoid.  Isn’t it enough that we are smart and productive and kind?  Yes.  And no. 

But I’m tired of feeling like I’m not good enough, not thin enough.  And you know what I’ve realized?  I’m the only one who thinks this.  I’m obsessed with whether I look fat or whether I lost a pound or gained three.  Who cares?  Nobody.  Everybody else is obsessed with how fat they are

                As I round the corner of forty, and my body rounds itself out a little more every time I blink, I hope I can remember to keep some perspective.  Calories are like a runaway train.  They get away from you when you aren’t paying attention, rip through the hillside, destroying villages and laying waste to everything in their path.  And before you know it all you can do is sit down, glued to the television, anticipating the horror as some journalist regrettably reports the tragedy that has unfolded. 

Studies show that some bodies like to hold on to fat more than others.  I was given the gift of this glorious fat gene.  And I got my grandmother’s bright blue eyes and her child-bearing hips.  I wish I’d known when I was twelve that once I allowed my body to create fat cells, my body would always have more of a propensity to fill those fat cells up again.  But would it really have made a difference?  Psychology usually wins over science in the mind of a troubled girl.   It’s a difficult thing to have your mind at war with your body.  I see myself in a body that’s 20 pounds lighter, firmer, tighter.  But my body wants to be where it is. 

What is twenty pounds, anyway, but 8% of my body weight pressing on my heart, pushing on my knees, pulling on my ego?  What good is a stomach if you can’t rest your soda can on it when you’re watching TV?  What good is Weight Watchers if I stay at my goal weight?  Mustn’t I always be striving for something…better?  They say that stress creates cortisol, which makes you fat.  If we’re always stressing about being fat, aren’t we just making ourselves fatter?  Maybe if we thought less about what we weigh and thought more about eating to live instead of living to eat, we would take the guesswork out of staying healthy.  Maybe it’s a simple as “Listen to your body, and be good to it.”

I know it’s not fair that your friend Betty Bones can eat her weight in Oreos and never gain a pound while you are gaining ten pounds right now just thinking about those delicious chocolaty lard treats.  I know it’s not right that Skinny Sally never exercises and her size 2 clothing hangs freely over her shapely form while you Zumba for an hour a day, followed by Pilates and a 2-mile hike, only to wake up the next day bloated and convinced you either have to stay home or go to work naked because none of your size 14 clothes fit.  Life is not fair.  We are all different and complex and broken and beautiful.  And we each have a unique path.  And some of us just need to work a little harder at weight management.  Once we stop comparing ourselves to others and once we stop demanding that our bodies be what we want them to be instead of what they want to be, we might find some semblance of peace, some tiny morsel of contentment.   We must be confident in our own skin, own and love our bodies unconditionally.  We are who we are, not what we eat.  Thank God for that, because I don’t have any clothes shaped like miniature peanut butter cups.