Do you notice yourself becoming more vindictive towards people with weight loss?
I've lost over 40 lbs so far and I won't say that I am more "mean" to people, but I definitely have more confidence and I'm more likely to stand up for myself now. To the point where I'm "making up" for not standing up for myself in the past and being downright vindictive at times to people who in the past have wronged me in some way.
For example: I have a coworker who hides food in the nursing station & more bizarrely, she hides office supplies such as staples, paper clips, rubber bands, etc. I've known for a year now that she hides these things, but I pretended I had no clue who was hiding food and office supplies, and told her "Someone keeps hiding food and office supplies here. Must have been someone who didn't have enough to eat growing up!" She is overweight and always trying to lose weight... yet she hides food in the nursing station. Things like slim fast, wisconsin cheddar cheese soup in a box and low fat sour cream & onion pringles.
When I first started working at the hospital she took advantage of me and tried to sabotage me. I started working different shifts so I could avoid her and pretty much forgot about her for several months, but now we are working the same shift again and I'm enjoying getting under her skin. What bothers me is not her, but how I'm thinking/behaving myself... I'm always so tempted to say something nasty in an underhanded way to her, but I usually stop myself, I think "Wait what are you doing?" But I have this temptation to just be downright VINDICTIVE to her, and I think I always had this in me, I just didn't have the confidence before to realize it, much less act on it. For example, I once stopped myself from saying "Well I think some people are just meant to be overweight forever." when she told me how frustrated she was with her weight and how she wanted to get lap-band. I know she wronged me in the past but I don't understand how and why this hate/vindictiveness towards her comes from because normally I'm the type of person who lets things go right away, because it takes too much energy to dwell on negativity. But I just can't let it go.
I also feel this vindictiveness and anger towards friends, some who I have now realized used me as their "fat girl friend" to feel better about themselves. Sometimes I think it's just me being paranoid, but the more weight I lose the more I realize that it's not. I also feel this way towards some family members who struggle with their own weight... some of them would rather see me being diseased obese and bed ridden rather than being happy, healthy, thin and successful simply because it makes them feel better about themselves. I also feel resentment and vindictiveness towards men. I also trust people less and less the more I lose weight, and I have become more cynical about people, because I realize how different people treat you, and I realize how two faced most people are.
I don't know, it's all very weird to me! Maybe I've always been a b*tch hiding underneath a fat suit? I have no idea. Most people on 3fatchicks seem so sweet to me, even the people who got to their goal weights. I might turn into a monster when I get to my goal weight. lol
I felt this way a few years ago, and I think some of it was actually anger at MYSELF, rather than at anyone else. I was angry over the time I'd wasted, dithering at making any serious effort at weight loss, hoping the problem would just spontaneously go away, if I ignored it (yeah, right, because that happens), devaluing myself every day because I was fat. So I was angry at facets of myself that I saw in other people, who weren't making any effort to correct these problems, as I had. It was all about me, really, not them; I was using them as a kind of mirror of the unacceptable aspects of myself.
A little bit of my anger was also, I think, healthy, a righteous anger at prejudice in our society. I think that kind of anger is actually a good thing. It can make people go out and try to change things. Okay, so I'm not leading marches on Washington, but I can speak up whenever I hear someone say something nasty about someone who's fat or about fat people in general. I can be compassionate toward people who are like me, in my life and online. I can post on this site talking about my experience, trying to help out when I can. It's a more constructive use of all that anger in me.
Oh and before I forget, I think that sometimes I fed my anger, literally. I stuffed it down with food. Feeling it and expressing it meant I wasn't leaving it seething and bingeing over it. Because nice girls don't get angry. They are perfectly even-tempered all the time, and they forgive everything and see the good in everything and everyone. When I stopped believing all of that -- yeah, on some level, I really did believe that -- I **noticed** my anger more often and called it like it was. That also contributed to my perception that I was angry all the time.
Oh and before I forget, I think that sometimes I fed my anger, literally. I stuffed it down with food. Feeling it and expressing it meant I wasn't leaving it seething and bingeing over it. Because nice girls don't get angry. They are perfectly even-tempered all the time, and they forgive everything and see the good in everything and everyone. When I stopped believing all of that -- yeah, on some level, I really did believe that -- I **noticed** my anger more often and called it like it was. That also contributed to my perception that I was angry all the time.
OH MY GOSH so true!! I definitely am going through stages of being able to face confrontation more. After finding out that my boyfriend was cheating on me (because I was obese) I totally got into confrontation mode. It's like I'm less afraid to really tell people how I feel. I completely trusted him and now it's like whatever I don't like about him I tell him. It goes the same for my friends now. I used to just let people take advantage of me because I thought it was doing the right thing but now little by little I'm going to tell people about themselves because it's not right. Just yesterday I realized I have a friend who really didn't care to hang out with me, that friend really just wanted a taxi driver. I canceled hanging out because I don't feel like having my time wasted. I guess it's just perspectives on things changing. Just like realizing you can do more with your body, you can do more with your mind and communication for that matter!
I read blancheneige's post and started nodding in agreement.
Those feelings may not be politically correct, but I think they're perfectly natural. It hurts when you realise that people treat you differently once you're no longer overweight, that certain people in your life (I'm talking about myself here) actually resent you for losing weight and getting fit and healthy, and that men treat you very differently.
And as saef points out, maybe some of that anger is anger at ourselves (and again, I'm talking about myself) for not getting off our butts sooner.
But the important thing is that we recognise that anger, and try to channel it in constructive ways - or at the very least, try not to let it sour our lives. How many people do you know who are deeply angry, but refuse to admit it to themselves, and hence never learn to deal with it?
I think I could ramble on and on about this all day but I'll try to keep it short. I have always been the "nice" girl. I've also always been the fat girl. I realized one day that maybe I'm not as nice as people think I am. I think I was always nice because I just figured that the only way people would like the fat girl was if she was super nice.
Now, of course people like the nice person and I think my nature truly is happy and pleasant. I don't really get angry much at all- I do let things go. And I despise confrontation- serious anxiety issues don't help with that.
But I'm working on being less passive-aggressive and realizing that I'd rather be not so nice than to end up lashing out passive-aggressively or eating my way through stress/frustration.
I wish skinny-minnys had any idea of the emotional **** we put ourselves through...
Hang in there, though! The fact that you acknowledge these feelings is a good thing! Just try not to be too evil to your coworker (I struggle with this daily- I supervise a staff of 5 and they are all 30+ years older than me). Remember when you were struggling with the right mindset and information to make weight loss happen for you!
I posted recently on the Support forum area about my problems at work and how I am feeling very angry about the way my boss treats me, now that I'm no longer stuffing my feelings down with food. After posting on here and receiving some very good advice, I decided to be constructive with my anger. First, I wrote everything down, so that I had a record of the things he's said to me. Then I spoke to my union rep, who has confirmed that it 'certainly sounds like bullying'. I am now waiting in him for advice abotu what to do next.
I guess what I'm saying is, try to find something constructive to do with your anger - whatever is right for you. That could be looking for a new job, working towards a promotion or even blowing the whistle on someone who's breaking the rules. If nothing else, channel some of the energy from that anger back into your workouts. It's OK to feel angry, you just need to find something to do with it.
I'm not sure if you feel this is an element in your problems with your co-worker, but when I started to lose weight I noticed a toxic attitude had developed towards friends who were complaining of their weight but not doing much to change it. I think a lot of it was that I was thinking about food, weight, and exercise so much that I couldn't turn it off. I started fixating on others' bad habits. It felt sickeningly good to mentally criticize other peoples' bad choices instead of my own, for a change. It made me feel better to compare myself to people who weren't doing as much as I was to try and lose it. But then I realized no matter how much I criticize what these friends were doing (binges, hiding food), it won't make me lose any more weight. I needed to refocus the attention to myself.
Now I'm not saying you should let the crappy treatment you receive go or anything... I think that's a separate issue. I'm just wondering if maybe some of the vindictiveness is stemming from a kind of skewed pride in your weight loss like it was for me. The best thing is that you've acknowledged it and can now take steps to manage it.
Just out of curiosity, how was your co-worker 'hiding' food? Was she not supposed to have it at the Nurse Station? Do you all keep your food in one place? I have no idea about nursing, but to my untrained eye it looks like she's just keeping snacks or her lunch nearby. I work in an office and we have a shared refrigerator and sometimes food goes 'missing' so I definitely would bring a mini cooler and 'hide' my chilled goodies under my desk, but I guess it wouldn't be hiding because it's not against the rules for us to do that (I'm eating lunch at my desk right now as I type this!). Same thing with office supplies, especially if I buy them, I stuff them into a locked drawer at the end of the day so people don't walk by and say 'hmm, I'm going to borrow this' and never bring it back.
I can't say that I feel the same way in general about people that I know personally. I'd never make the assumption that my friends kept me around because I was 'the fat one.' But then again, I've made all new friends since graduating high school--I've kept in touch with my old friends but they've all moved cross country after graduating from college. I know in my heart that they appreciated me as a person...if I felt like they were just 'keeping me around' and didn't do kind things for me like celebrate my birthday, invite me over, confide in me, then maybe I'd have suspicions that I was nothing more than a piece of furniture to them. I'm sorry you had such fake friends in your younger years, it must have been lonely :[
My sophomore year of college I started losing weight along with my roommate. We would tell each other how we were doing and go to the gym together. Eventually, I started doing a lot better than her because I started at a lower weight and she would drink a lot on the weekends while I wouldn't. She started getting snarky with me and told me to stop talking to her about weight loss because she thought of it as a competition. Until that point, I hadn't thought of it like that but once she started being mean to me and stopped going to dinner with me, I would definitely start dropping comments about how I was a size 6 while I knew she was still a 12 - not my best moment. Granted, there were other things she was doing that weren't so nice that weren't weight loss related so she wasn't exactly a peach but I definitely could have stayed on a higher road and can relate how the claws can come out.
I think maybe, before you say something or do something, you should ask yourself if you would want someone saying or doing that to you. If not, then you should probably not do or say it to someone else. Just my two cents.
I started to get a bit upfront with my parents about their attitudes to weight loss. They're both obese, maybe not morbidly obese but definitely obese. And they always start working out or cutting back on food only to collapse and succumb to it all again.
The worse example is my Mum, ever since I can remember she's always wanted to be thin. She buys all these books and magazines, records all the weight loss programmes, but she just doesn't put her knowledge of weight loss to her own lifestyle and it drives me nuts. If you're going to complain, then at least do something about it!! She also thinks she knows everything about dieting/exercising because she's been doing it for 20+ years, but she's still obese so it's obviously not working. Sometimes she starves herself, or eats salads for dinner only to come home and eat sandwiches. Her wine drinking is the worse thing, she'll be good all week - exercise, cut back on food - then drink bottles of wine to herself over the weekend.
I was vocal about it to them, because I do care and I don't want to see my parents die young, but I've said enough so the rest is up to them. I'm exercising almost every day, I'm losing weight every week - I'm hoping that's enough of a "Hey guys, you CAN do this!" message that they'll do it too.
I'm a bit of a b!tch if people are mean to me, if you hit me I'll hit you back twice as hard kind of thing. I don't tolerate bullsh!t, and I won't be aggressive or try and hurt someone but if they start talking sh!t then I'll pick holes in what they said to make them think. I'm not going to pretend that I like someone when I clearly don't, I can't lie about things like that.
Do you notice yourself becoming more vindictive towards people with weight loss?
