I was always a little chubby, growing up. As far back as I can remember, my mother was always round. So was my aunt, and my grandmother. My other aunt and uncle followed a little later on, but yeah, it pretty clearly ran in the family. I didn’t really feel bothered by it until, ironically, after I lost a ton of weight in my late teens to early twenties. After losing all that weight, I was close to this idea I had of the ‘right weight’. I started looking into the science of weight loss online and after doing some research I found out that I would have to eat even less, and do even more, than I was already doing to get to what my ideal BMI was. That information totally derailed me, and it wasn’t long before I started putting weight back on. It wasn’t much longer until I was heavier than I’d ever been, and I was perpetually dieting, i.e. I developed an eating disorder.
The Struggle of Gaining Weight
If you’ve heard of a diet, I’ve probably tried it. I tried for all of my twenties, and thirties, to lose weight. Of course, I only put weight on. I even started avoiding my doctor because I knew she would not only tell me to lose weight, but to have a gastric sleeve put in to help with my weight loss. FYI, I am strongly against gastric sleeves and the like because they do not address the cause of the over-eating, 31% of patients don’t lose weight anyway, and a significant portion end up with severe complications in the short and long term, such as hernias, a leak from the sleeve, infection, pneumonia, blood clots, etc. I have Lipoedema in my legs, and didn’t go back to see the specialist six months after my initial appointment because she’d asked if I could drop a very reasonable 5kgs in that time, and I’d confidently asserted I could drop 20kg in that time. When the six months was up, so was my weight. So I didn’t go back, even though I should have, because I was too embarrassed.
I’m a very accepting and loving person, even of myself most of the time, but this one area… It was like I was wearing blinders. I kept trying to diet, and lose the weight. I put off making awesome things for myself because I wanted to save the fabric for when I had lost weight. I didn’t accept myself as I was, and even though it never worked, I just kept trying to diet over and over again, all the while slowly gaining weight.
Many years ago, I read something that has stuck with me all this time, and it was from a fellow eating disorder sufferer, though she went the other way. It was from Portia de Rossi’s autobiography, not the sort of thing I usually read, my husband read it and suggested it, and again, it’s not the sort of thing he reads, either, but read it we did. She talks about her battle with anorexia and when she finally had her breakthrough and began to recover. She said she gave herself permission to eat whatever she wanted. It sounds silly, but when you’re stuck in unhealthy eating patterns, so much of it comes down to compulsion, not actual desire.
Most people don’t know this, but the whole concept of dieting is less than 150 years old, and it began with the goal of putting weight on. It was aimed at men, and was trying to teach them how to look fashionably robust! We see dieting for weight-loss begin in the 1920s, which also coincided with fashion no longer using undergarments to create a desired silhouette, but rather the expectation that the body would be adjusted to suit the fashionable silhouette. Over and over again in the 20th century we see fashions come in that are predicated on very slim bodies, and dieting became a billion-dollar industry. And yet, in countries like Australia, the U.K., and the U.S., the average size has gotten larger and larger. Not in spite of, but because of, the cultural fixation with diet and exercise, we’re heavier than ever before. Don’t get me wrong, there were stout people all throughout history, but the percentage of them is vastly higher these days.
Let Yourself Loose!
After trying for close to two decades to lose weight, I finally gave up. I just decided to live my life, and stop actively trying to lose weight, and it is what it is. I gave myself permission to eat whatever I wanted. Guess what’s happened since then? I’ve been losing weight.
