Quote:
Originally Posted by akazee
I guess the sooner I accept it the sooner I can get on with it. THanks for the encouragement! It's just what I needed to heard. Hope I won't need to be reminded every couple of months on the maintenance boards, LOL. Something to look forward to!
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You may need to be reminded - and that's ok too.
It's really hard to not need the reminding, because our culture (especially when it comes to social pressure, and images in the media).
We're constantly bombarded with messages and enticements to live and eat the way "everyone else does," and/or to feel bad about it if we don't.
We go to lunch with friends, family, or coworkers and they make sad, sympathetic faces if they notice that our choices are health conscious. They may even try to persuade us to indulge, telling us that we need to enjoy ourselves and it won't hurt, "just this once" (but it never is just once, is it?)
We're taught to diet in ineffective ways, because "everyone does it," and when "everyone does it," it becomes really hard to convince people (even and sometimes especially ourselves) that the odd way isn't the wrong way.
When everyone else seems to be going in the other direction, it's really hard to stay on our path without thinking we should be (or deserve to be) going along with everyone else.
That's why I think weight loss and weight maintenance support groups are so important, because peer pressure is an incredible force, and the best way to counteract negative peer pressure, is with positive peer pressure.
Most of the time we don't even realize the pressure is there. People usually aren't trying to bully us into being normal (though a few may try), and most try to be supportive, but there's always that knowledge that you're "not like normal people."
Coming here makes us realize that we may not be normal, but we're something better - we're making choices that should be the norm. Maybe (hopefully) one day, we will be recognized as the visionaries and trend-setters. Well, we personally probably won't be recognizsed, but I still very much hope that we're just "ahead of our times," that one day everyone will be conscious of their diet - not just for weight and vanity's sake, but for overall health and well-being.
In some ways, I feel sorry for the folks who don't watch what they eat, because they don't think they have to. We tend to think of those folks as lucky, but many of them are going to die young, from lifestyle diseases we think of as being associated with obesity. Thin folks who eat crap get high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other lifestyle issues, and yet even their doctors may not think to warn them of the risks because they "look healthy."
Even before I had health problems, my doctor warned me that I was at risk for them. If I had looked fit and healthy, I wouldn't have gotten those warnings (or may not have listened to them, because I looked and felt all right).
Change has been hard, even though I listened and took the risks seriously. I wonder how much harder it would have been to change, if I didn't look like I needed to, or if I hadn't had the health problems that made it a life or death choice.
And STILL I have to remind myself of it constantly, or I get swept up into "normal," and normal for me is deadly. "Normal" is my kryptonite.
Normal probably will always be my auto-pilot. I think we're genetically programmed for it, and when we're stressed, "blending in" seems even more important (because genetically that's usually the "safest" thing to do - when in doubt, follow the crowd).
If I stop coming here, stop attending my TOPS group, and stop talking and interacting with other people who are trying to make healthy changes normal, I will drift back into whatever is normal for the group I'm hanging with. For weight loss and health to be my normal, I need to hang out with people for whom it's normal too. It's why I'm so obsessed with this place, because when I'm out in the "real world" I start feeling the pull toward "their" normal.
I want our normal to become THE normal, but that probably won't happen in our lifetime, so spending time here and with other like-minded people is the only way to remind myself that this is the normal I want.