Things I wish someone had told me about weight loss
Aaaaaah vacations. Best. Time. Ever.
You’re experiencing a new country, you turn into a better person. You’re surrounded, ideally, by only the people you love but not the ones you felt obliged to be around in order to not hurt their feelings (you know who you are!). Life is good, worries are at an all time low. You want to remember this moment, look back at it when you’re back in the hustle and the daily trott.
You pose for a picture and as you see your wide, careless smile, the only thing you think to yourself is:
I look so….FFFFATTTTTT!
And that’s it.
You maybe spend the rest of the day tugging at your shirt and thinking about how everyone looks at you and asks themselves how you have the audacity to show yourself in public. You and your disgusting body. But the day is basically over.
Maybe something manages to distract you and let’s you forget about your physical inadequacies and how you in convenience everyone around you for a minute or two. But if you’re anything like me, that sort of distraction had to be in the ballpark of suddenly finding yourself standing in oncoming traffic.
Can I start this topic with a collective UUUUUUUUUGGGGGHH?! This is how I feel about all of this and have felt about it for the past 20 years, which is approximately how long I have tried to lose weight.
I am highly suspicious of the entire dieting industry and at the same time, I am it’s obedient servant and sponsor. That being said, I was there for them all:
The Atkins diet,
the herba life pyramid scheme,
the various diet pills,
the egg diet,
the Cale diet,
the pro Ana/Mia (which was code for glorifying eating disorders, as we all know now),
the don’t eat after 6pm,
the ONLY eat after 6pm,
the keto,
the paleo,
the intermittent fasting,
the high protein,
the low carb,
the low fat,
the no sugar….yeah.
At least that was back in the 90s and early 00s. Now you can find your unlicensed dietician much easier on all kinds of social media and, of course, with a multitude of blogs and online courses. Gotta secure that passive income, millennials.
Isn’t it astonishing how much content you can bang out about this one topic? Type “what I eat in a day” on YouTube and enjoy many hours of skinny girls preparing açai bowls for an uncomfortable amount of time.
I wish, after such a long time, I had stopped being susceptible to it all. Well yes and no. No, because I can proudly say that I am not even remotely interested in your 5 calorie almond meal cookies Ashley, but yes, because…well because I am writing this article right now and am still approximately 20 lbs overweight.
Ever since I was a kid I was sporting some extra pounds here and there. And even at my slimmest I felt like that chubby kid. Somehow it seemed like “fat” was not just a state of body, but definitely also a state of mind. Which is where it becomes super tricky. But how could it not have been? Looking back, it feels like so many things that happened carried that extra “you’re kinda fat”-spice. It’s what my parents talked about, it’s what my friends talked about. It’s what my teachers told me (yes, welcome to the late 90s, folks). I’m sure none of them really did it in order to hurt my feelings. Or at least I don’t think they did.
I remember my aunt once gave me a book for my 7th or 8th birthday and back in 1998, getting a book as a gift was like getting an iPad in 2022. It was called “Chubby Diddy and Fat Felix” and oh ho ho ho it was just as charming as it sounds.
It’s about a girl called Diddy who was, you might have guessed it, fat. She was a sweet girl, but unfortunately her muffin top was louder than her winning personality. I mean, as a kid you wanted to be friends Charlie, who can climb every tree or Amber, who knows the best hiding spots. But the only thing Diddy had to offer, apparently, was obesity.
She meets this boy called Felix, who was also heavily invested in the love-handle game (he was also fat, in case you didn’t get it) and she fell in love with him. They became the fattest of friends (see what I did there?), which was a very one sided relationship, because Diddy crushed on him and Felix didn’t have a choice. He didn’t really want to be her friend but was also a chunky oink oink and didn’t have any other friends either.
The story went on explaining how they had playdates on the playground but couldn’t fit into the little toy house on top of the slide, which is hilarious, because obese children who don’t experience love and support are hilarious.
One day, Felix stops coming to the park because he fell ill with the flue or something, probably somehow linked to his fatness.
Anyways they don’t see each other for a couple of weeks and when they finally meet again, he is super skinny.
Yes, bone riddling disease will rid you of those nasty pounds and turn you into a snatched child-boss. Lucky him, because now he found other friends in school, who obviously liked him for his inner qualities. But he also didn’t want to be seen with Diddy anymore.
He was now part of the skinny elite and you cannot be part of the elite if you are an overweight mouth breather Diddy!
That basically broke little Diddy’s heart into many pieces and that made her ANGRY. Did she burn his house down? Well no, but she burned a bunch of calories rage playing on the playground and rage swinging on the swing.
Don’t ask me about any details, because I was 7 when I read that book, but she basically slimmed down doing cardio out of sheer hatred. Which, looking at it now, is the most relatable form of cardio.
I also remember her being friends with the mailman for some reason, and I am pretty sure he said some inappropriate garbage to her as well.
Anyway Diddy was not chubby anymore, Diddy was a skinny bitch and that’s how Felix be liking his bitches.
I cannot remember whether they were friends again or just in good favours, but that’s not the moral of the story. The moral of the story is: if you’re fat, you deserve to be shunned and children are goddamn animals.
Reading that book, even though I didn’t fully understand the message, made me feel strange and also, sad. Because as little as I understood the whole story, I did understand that Diddy was me and that people avoided me because I wasn’t living up to their aesthetic standards.
Just to be clear though, I love my aunt. She’s a really good person and, like all good people, tried to support me but didn’t really know how to do it. I think she might have hoped this would motivate me to work out more and eat less, but all it did was make me feel bad about myself and, ironically, eat more.
No matter whom I talk to, everyone who has ever struggled with their weight has similar stories of people giving them unsolicited advice. And I don’t just mean if you’re overweight, but also if you’re skinny. I guess no matter what you look like, someone will always think something is wrong with you. And frankly, so will you.
I’m torn about all of this. I don’t feel comfortable with my weight, but I also think it’s extremely inappropriate to tell someone they look too fat or too skinny, without being asked.
And, fun fact: nobody ever asks!
I think fat shaming is ridiculous, I think fat glorification is. And none of this public opinion mambojambo changes the fact, that I would like to understand why NONE of the so called “solutions” out there rarely are a true solution. Because if they were, we could finally stop talking about it. No one would be struggling anymore.
Shouldn’t it be easy by now? Calories in vs calories out?
You cannot out exercise bad nutrition?
If it’s just as easy as eating less, why isn’t that thing already over? That’s a question I have been asking not just myself, but also other people who were struggling and the answer is always:
It’s YOU! You’re weak, you have too little self-control. And probably yes. Probably true.
And now? Just pull yourself together? That kind of like telling someone with depression to just smile more and go for a walk once in a while.
“Go stretch, it always makes ME feel better huahuahuahuahua.”
Well guess what I did: I told my therapist about all of this. I have decided to treat it like a mental illness and then actually TREAT it…like you would a mental illness, get it?
He didn’t tell me to track calories and go for 10k step walks, but instead asked me a bunch of questions about my eating habits and then concluded, that I basically eat when I am bored.
Here’s how that works: Boredom is, what I didn’t know, apparently a form of anger.
Interesting.
When you’re bored you’re angry about things not going your way, basically and very simplified. When that happens, your dopamine levels reach a low. The quickest way to raise them is with food. It releases dopamine, especially when you’re full to the brim. Perfect stress reduction tactic.
Also interesting.
So what’s the solution?
He suggested to identify situations where I feel the need to eat but am not hungry and then get my dopamine fix another way. So I started doing cocaine, the end.
I’m just kidding. Dopamine is released usually by things that are fun. Simple as. I’m supposed to take a break from whatever it is I’m doing and immediately do something I 100% enjoy.
And I don’t mean go stretch and journal or whatever else Acai-bowl Ashley tries to gaslight you into thinking is fun.
Switch on the playstation, play a game, watch a funny video, paint your nails, scream like a banshee, set something on fire, leave the country, join a cult, accept the pet snake from Spongebob as your lord and saviour, escape the cult because Gary is a sham, become a farmer and sell goat cheese, paint a picture, whatever floats your boat.
And try doing it every 25 minutes.
So in short: take breaks. That’s it, take breaks. And do fun stuff. That’s it!
I’ve decided to be open to that advice, especially since I paid 100 bucks an hour for it, and started doing it. And I shall be damned, I cannot speak of radical results yet, because it’s too early for that. But I have not had any cravings since then. And something happened that has never happened before…I can stop eating when I am not hungry anymore and not when I feel like I have to vomit.
CRAZY!
I am not in any way shape or form saying, that this is the ultimate solution. But maybe we need to consider that the problem lies not in not knowing how, but now knowing what stands in our way.
Anyway…let’s see where this leads, but maybe this is the moment where I start obsessing about other trivial crap that could potentially make me unhappy for many many years to come. There’s always that silver lining.
And now we’ve reached the moral of the story, which is:
Maybe we cannot solve this on a logical level. Every monkey can count calories, but maybe if we want to look snatched, we all need to start fixing our screaming inner child.
Do it for the ‘Gram!
Also, I will publish a YouTube video where I make my own animations to this story. I have been told I am hilarious and a good artist, so in case you want to see proof that I am (or proof that people only tell me to not hurt my feelings), check it out:
