All those weight loss posts: Bathwater or baby?

Anyone who has been reading this blog for more than a few years knows that starting in 2008, I wrote a long series chronicling a number of lifestyle changes:  learning to run and swim, ending some destructive food behaviors, and dealing with the mental and physical fallout of the significant weight loss that followed.  

 

And anyone who has been reading this blog for the past few years knows that I have not been adding to the series very much recently.  Let’s talk a little bit about why.

 

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I have a bit of a compulsive personality, and it’s hard for me to live in the wide, slippery gray area between two extremes:   habitual, mindless grazing, self-soothing with food; and anxious, obsessive dieting, self-soothing with control.  All that writing helped me detach from the emotional content, put it into something that was more cerebral and philosophical, and less fear- and shame-based.  As a Catholic I tried to grapple with the connotations of loaded words like “gluttony,” paring away dehumanizing associations and finding useful definitions that honored the body and its theology.  And I tried to be honest about how my mental health fared (hint: not always well) as I went along.

 

All the writing helped me.  It did.  But as the years went on I have begun to feel less confident about its being good for readers in general.

 

Oh, taken all together, I know it is a good thing.  It is my true story, for one thing, as much as I felt comfortable sharing.  And as a whole, I think it is balanced.  I try out ideas, some of them don’t stick, others do.  My general approach was to perform experiments on myself, keep good records, and report back.  I still think this is a good approach to all kinds of life changes.  What worries me is the taking out of context:  that one post all by itself might encourage extreme behavior, or fat-shaming, or trigger someone who has struggled with serious eating disorders.  I can’t say with confidence (unless I embark on a long project of combing through all the posts, considering them as individual posts, and annotating them) that I haven’t written something problematic. 

 

And I have thought to myself:  Maybe I shouldn’t create any new blog posts about my weight maintenance until I have done that comb-through, and come up with some principles of harm reduction, and perhaps put in content warnings or updates to how my thinking has changed.  This thought has given me pause lately, whenever I have thought about writing anything related to food.

 

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A second obstacle, probably related to the first, has been the nature of the work I have been doing on myself in the past few years.  To put it bluntly, I have been trying to get off the diet train completely, in hopes I might ditch the constant, low-level anxiety and shame that I still carry around.   I still have this idea that if I get rid of the anxiety and shame, I will gain weight again (so far, evidence bears this out), and so I am in a somewhat ridiculously fraught state of mind about it, in which I am not entirely convinced that the anxiety and shame is wholly unhelpful.  So it’s been very difficult to write honestly about, because I can’t quite commit to being ready to let go of all that anxiety, and I am not yet sure that I can’t harness it somehow instead, and channel it into a healthier kind of motivation.   It seems sort of irresponsible to be honest about all this, lest anyone take it as an endorsement of, well, anxiety.

 

At the same time, I have clearly (well, to myself) made some progress on the shame and self-hatred front.  And who knows, it could maybe be good to write more openly about dealing with a very real decision to find the place I want to live, the unsteady compromise where I am choosing behaviors I can feel confident are good for me, and that don’t activate a cycle of destructive thought patterns.  

 

It seems that the destructive thought patterns have been doing much of the maintenance lifting for me, so I have that to work through.  On the other hand, there are some other things that have changed over the same time period; for example, I'm now no longer breastfeeding, a situation that is entirely new to me as a post-lifestyle-changed person.   Surely I'm also adapting to that as well, and other changes that come with the journey through middle age.

 

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So, what brings on today's post?  Well, just before the holiday season really started to take off I received an incredibly kind email.  I'll not quote it directly here because I haven't the author's permission, but she described a yearlong journey of significant transformation informed by much of my writing---not just an improvement in health and fitness, she said, but also in self-image.  It made me feel a little bit better about what I've wrought, at least about the work as a whole.

 

I still suspect that I could improve some of the language in individual posts, and reduce the chances that the material could encourage fat-shaming and general body negativity.  I'd like to do that work now, sooner rather than later.   Maybe I won't toss the baby out with the bathwater after all.

Comments

[Sally]

Your weight loss series of posts was incredibly helpful to me personally. I was never really heavy, but I was consistently 25-30 lbs. heavier than ideal for my height and frame. I tended to oscillate between restrictive fad diets (Atkins! South Beach! Paleo! Keto!) and obsessive over-exercising, then getting fed up and thinking "meh, who cares, I'm just going to eat that muffin and then I may as well eat ALL THE CARBS because I'm not in ketosis" and gain it all back.

Your posts clarified to me that the reason I was always heavier than I wanted to be was not that I was "carb sensitive" or "endomorph" or whatever; I just consistently ate a little more than I needed. And the reason I was so adamant about doing all the silly diets was because I had an irrational fear of being a little hungry; hence I was obsessed with low-carb diets that promised I'd lose weight while still being able to eat AS MUCH AS I WANTED.

Once I realized that while everything is permissible, not all things are beneficial; and that feeling a little hungry for an hour before each meal or snack wasn't that unbearable a burden, the weight came off and I've been able to maintain for five years now.

I won't lie, there was a point where I got a little *too* thin, and a little *too* obsessive about the calories; but that is more due to me having an obsessive kind of personality rather than anything you wrote. If anything, your posts tended to be a reality check for me and clarified that the goal is to NOT be obsessing over food or lack of food, and to eat in moderation and not give eating and weight the central focus in my life.

[Angela]

I’m awfully glad to see you back again. I have read your fitness progress posts and eating posts (and relished your great libations selected while traveling, always thinking “Good for you!”). Refining can’t hurt, but if they can still be read while you’re tinkering, that would be appreciated. I’m feeling ready to make more changes in my life with regards to eating, and you are very grounded on the whole with your posts. (FWIW I’m 45 & have been 30-80 pounds overweight since I was 18. I don’t know what it’s like to be at a healthy weight or an athlete for my own sake, and I have always been I inspired by your own journey for that reason.)