I think #8 is not about refusing responsibility, it's about acknowledging how darned difficult weight loss often is. Just because you haven't mastered it yet, doesn't mean you're stupid, lazy or horrible. There are a lot of factors that go into weight gain and weight loss and we are not personally in control of every single one. We have control of a small part, and all we can do is take control of the part we can.
"Blaming" myself for my failure at weight loss would be like blaming myself for not becoming a physician. It was no one else's fault that I didn't become a doctor, and I'm the only one that stopped me, and while I might regret not going to medical school, and there might have been alot of good and bad reasons that I didn't, it was still my responsibility to become a doctor, if I had wanted it badly enough. It's only when you see being overweight as evil, do you feel the need to "blame" someone for being fat. I don't blame myself for a lot of things I consider mistakes in my life. Most of my mistakes were made because I was putting more energy into other very good things - like my job, my education, my family, my friends. Which one of those should have been sacrificed, you know sometimes I'm still not sure, but I definitely don't have to blame myself in order to change, just as someone in excellent health doesn't have to assign blame in order to make more ambitious healthy goals and work toward them.
And some of my mistakes in weight loss weren't not trying hard enough, but not knowing enough about what works and what doesn't. In business, they say don't work harder, work smarter, but in weight loss it isn't always easy, because there's still thousands of theories on which is the smartest way. Trial and error to find what works for you can take years, but if you "blame" yourself each time you err, it makes the next trial that much more difficult.
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