Catching myself

I’ve realised as I have thought and read about my feelings over myself, my body and my weight that I was still following so many rules and setting myself up to fail yet again. The point of what I am doing and why I am writing this is that I want to give up dieting, but without being aware I was still clinging onto a few rules, justifying that it was down to health reasons rather than losing weight.

I wanted to give up dieting but I still had weight loss as my aim: I knew that dieting didn’t work for me but I still didn’t want to be overweight so how could I marry up those two things? I’ve been a very successful dieter over the years and yet I have ended up heavier than when I started. What does this tell me? Yes, diets don’t work but how can I just accept myself as I am so that my way of eating is no longer a thing in my life?

I realise I have learned a great deal about the way I eat and progressed a lot. Now I am ready to reinforce my commitment: I am never dieting again, I am fine the way I am. I am not aiming for weight loss; I am aiming to step away from the dieting madness and the rules I have continued to follow because I hadn’t, until now, totally committed myself to this. So I am giving up fasting between dinner at night and lunch the next day as that is just a form of dieting which I hoped would make me lose weight. I am giving up always leaving food on my plate as this is just a way of restricting the amount I am eating and hopefully helping me lose weight. Those are just two rules I have in my life but now they are gone.

I am going to eat what I want when I want it. I am going to eat consciously and try to be aware of when I begin to feel full. If I eat when I’m not hungry or continue eating when I have had enough that’s ok: I am learning, changing, developing. I am going to enjoy the process of what I am doing rather than try to hurtle to the end. I have learned so much and now I am going to learn more.

Blown off course

The last few weeks have been really stressful: there is nothing like having a sick child to take your mind off the size of your body and I didn’t give what I was eating a thought. Thankfully things are better now so I have a bit of brain space to think about where I am, and, probably more importantly, think about my health.

What we eat has such a huge impact on how we feel. I know sometimes I reach for a snack to give me an energy boost, something that tastes good, like chocolate for example, even though I know I won’t like myself for eating it later. When there doesn’t seem to be any time it’s easy just to pick something handy but I have been aware that picking the food that is good for my body is very important for me. It’s so easy to just grab something, something processed, ready straight away, rather than think about making something that I would probably prefer the taste of and definitely would appreciate the effect it has on me, especially mentally. I have a friend who has type II diabetes but carries on eating and drinking in a way that doesn’t help him and yet I haven’t applied the same logic to my own consumption. I have a number of health issues, and am definitely feeling my age at the moment, so how about I eat what will suit my body, make me feel healthier, or is this just me trying to sneak back onto a diet by another name? That’s what I normally do.

The past few weeks I have needed to feel full: if I eat less my stomach complains and when it is already tied in knots with worry then I don’t need any more upheaval. I eat to quell the anxiety and yet at the end of the stress I feel blobby and bloated so start feeling anxious about me, the way I look, my weight, all the same old baggage.

So what can I learn? I know that I need to keep the balance of my diet in the healthy range because it suits my body better. I know that I use food to dampen my feelings. I know I will try to sneak back onto the dieting treadmill if I don’t watch myself.

So am I any further on than when I started? I’m not sure….

Sitting comfortably….

I haven’t been well over the last few weeks when the two weeks it took me to get over flu was followed by a spell of bad weather that kept me housebound. I realise now that when I was feeling down or unable to do anything I was using food to comfort myself. I felt rough and the answer seemed to be in a bar of chocolate or a bag of crisps. Of course those things didn’t make me feel any better (exactly the opposite) but I fell into an old way of behaving without even thinking about it very much and then felt even worse as a result.

But now I am better and the weather has improved I have automatically started eating the way I was before all this happened. I won’t say that I am there yet but as my health and mood has improved so has my need to comfort or reward myself. I don’t think I am unique in this: bad weather brings out an array of foods that we feel will make us feel warmer, better and there are endless foods suggest to combat the winter ills. What I would like to do in the future is maybe just allow myself to feel ill or fed up rather than resorting to food in the hope of overcoming these feelings.

So the crux of all this is my feelings: I can feel miserable, allow myself to feel it, allow myself to do nothing rather than trying to make myself better as quickly as possible. I can understand that I am simply ill or low without that making me a bad person. I can also understand that any time of eating in a way that I don’t want to is not going to last forever. I suppose what I am saying is that I can care for myself better without relying on food to do that for me.

I’m not thinking…

I haven’t been writing for a while because I’ve been ill: a nasty chest infection keeping me awake at night and on the sofa all day. Happily I am beginning to feel better but it’s interesting that I didn’t think for any length of time whilst I was ill is my eating and my weight.

For the first few days I didn’t really want to eat anything at all but tried to have something to stop the tablets making me ill and then when I felt a bit better and bit hungrier then I just ate what I wanted. I didn’t judge, I didn’t estimate the calorific value or the impact it might have on my thighs I simply found the food I wanted and ate it. I could have eaten more if I wanted (and my previous brain would have said “hang on, you didn’t eat for a few days so you can reward yourself with extra food”) but I ate what I wanted and then stopped. At the time I didn’t have the energy to think about all the stuff I write about here but I do remember briefly thinking that I didn’t care about the size my body ended up at I just needed to eat what I needed, if you understand what I mean? And here I am, nearly recovered, and my body seems to be ok, my mind seems to be ok, I seem to be ok. All this stuff was lurking in the background, waiting to come back in when I allowed it to, but it didn’t seem important at all.

So what does it all mean? Firstly I was distracted: food wasn’t a big thing in my life as I had to focus on my health and getting better. Food simply became fuel: I wasn’t going out for food or even cooking very much but just, mainly, eating nurturing foods that it seemed my body wanted. Secondly I realise that my health is more important than the size of my hips: wanting to feel better took precedence over thinking about how I appeared to the outside world and whether my jeans were tight (they weren’t, mainly because I spent all day in my pyjamas!). At the end of this time it makes me realise how unimportant a lot of this stuff is; of course it matters more when I am going about my normal everyday life, but when my world became a bit smaller I saw it wasn’t a priority. Of course I want to conquer this for ever but if life gets in the way, and teaches me other lessons, then that’s ok too. Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned is that I might get some sort of control over eating, weight, size etc but I will never be a person who is able to forget about it completely. Maybe I will always be a dieter at heart regardless of what I eat, maybe that just who I am in the same way as someone you used to drink too much, and maybe I can live with that.

Thank you

I’ve written before about how the opinion of other people about how I look matters so much to me: I think they are contemplating any changes in my body even though I know they don’t even notice and if they did they don’t find it very interesting. That’s my stuff.

And yet…. The odd kind comment, compliment, positive remark makes such a difference to the way I feel. This week, for example, two people told me how well I was dressed (I do like to make an effort) and then I get a few messages through this blog, kind messages of encouragement. This positive feedback allows me to take a deep breath and keep my focus on this plan of mine. Over the years I’ve tried to do this over and over again and kept creeping back to the scales, the diets, the worry, the endless boredom of it all, but this times feels better, it’s lasted longer and other people have given me the boost to keep going.

I felt pleased with myself yesterday as I had a glass of wine! So what, big deal, BUT I didn’t feel the need to have another, finish a bottle with my partner. Instead we went out for a walk and I felt proud that I hadn’t used food or drink to fill the emptiness inside me. I walked in the early evening sunshine with my partner and daughter and it felt good, I felt good and the size of my body simply didn’t matter. It feels good.

Starting now?

I’ve been reading (surprising I know) and thinking (even more amazing – not) and think I might be able to take the next step – I think I might be able to permanently stop dieting. And by dieting I mean anything that comes anywhere close to that: detoxing,eating plans, giving up food groups, doing anything other than being normal around food. Of course at this stage it all feels very frightening, giving up everything that has been the structure around which I have built my life, the thing I have thought in my adult life about more than anything. Can I actually do it, do I have enough faith in myself to keep going until I don’t have to think about food anymore apart from when I am really, stomach hungry? It makes me anxious just writing this but I can’t carry on like this anymore.

My first motivation to do this is the boredom I feel at having to keep thinking about all this stuff: it hasn’t taken over too much of my life, I have passed my issues around food down to at least two of my children. I don’t want to do this anymore.

My second motivation is my health: I have stomach problems and eating normally makes me function better. It also helps with my general energy levels: I can do more when I have the right fuel in my body. I am not thinking about my hunger, planning my next meal (which can be bigger because I have starved myself to deserve it). I have strength and energy.

So that all makes sense when I write it down but how do I do it? I worry that if I eat “normally” I shall wake up tomorrow the size of a house, I shall have to eat everything, I don’t feel calm and relaxed around food. I feel anxious and edgy just thinking about it but I know (or I think I know) that I have to go through this stage, I have to live with the novelty to come out the other side. It feels horrible, alien, scary (all the things that might make me feel that I need to eat when I am not hungry) but I have to stay with it, I have to persevere, I have to keep going because as awful as these feelings are they are better than wasting any more time. I need to have faith in myself.

I don’t want to do this

Well, you’d think that someone who has spent most of their adult life dieting, studying nutrition, trying one plan after another, might feel that they had gained something, moved on from their starting position but I would have to say “No, I haven’t”. All those years of worrying about eating, throwing myself into the latest diet, getting to my “target” weight, slowly creeping back up again and then repeating the whole boring process has taught me completely and utterly nothing. What a waste of time and in the meantime I still had boyfriends, a husband, children, a career, a new partner, studied some more, had a different career, life went on and still I worried about the size of my bum, what people were saying about me, how fat I actually was or more importantly how fat I looked to other people. Were they talking about me, discussing my increasing waistline? Or when I was at my slimmest (for the five minutes I seemed to spend there) were they admiring me from afar, wishing they could be me, the person who seemed to be able to eat anything and never put on weight? I can’t measure how much time and energy I have wasted on this and yet I still can’t put it down. I can’t eat normally, I can’t forget about it: it’s like carrying around a huge weight and yet I feel unable to put it down.

Let’s start with some facts: I weigh something over 83 kilos (I have refused to get on the scales for a few weeks as I don’t think it actually helps me) and I am 1.7 metres tall. I have a bmi of 28 which puts me in the overweight category and my rational mind tells me that for a woman pushing 60 with a number of serious health problems that’s ok. I wear a UK size 14, something a 16 (I have very large boobs) and again I can say that’s ok but it isn’t really. I don’t want to look like this, I don’t want to think about this all the time, this to be the biggest worry in my life when so many other things are going so well. I want to be a size 12, slipping comfortably into size 12 jeans that don’t cut off my circulation when I sit down but most of all I want to be somewhere with my weight where I know I am going to stay, I want to stop thinking about dieting, I want to eat like a normal human being, I want to stop filling large parts of my brain with this so I can use that capacity to think about more interesting and important things.

So where to begin? Yes I know how to lose weight but do I simply weigh myself, go on another diet, get down to another target? If I do that will I be reading this in a year’s time whilst I slowly slide back up again? How can I get this sorted for ever?

It’s so depressing writing this: I just don’t know what to do and all I can think of is stopping this and then I can have my lunch! I do eat healthily most of the time: cooking from scratch, lots of vegetables, I try to keep crisps and chocolate (my two big temptations) to a minimum but how do I sort this? What is the answer?