I really think that one of the keys of my current unprecedented success (I've never lost this much weight and have never maintained successful weight loss for this long a period of time - even though my rate of weight loss is much slower) is that I've come to strongly believe that
Quote:
Originally Posted by saef
... my actions are an individual's sane protest against the normalizing of unhealthy behavior?
Although I tend to think that our culture's unhealthy behaviors aren't so much inherently unhealthy as healthy instinct run amok. In a natural world, it actually makes sense to be as lazy as possible and to eat as many calories as possible.
Food resources were scarce, so burning as few calories as possible, while eating as much as possible is what often kept you alive - but it was also impossible to be immobile because you had to move in order to get your food (and avoid being some other critter's food) and even if you ate as much as you could, you probably wouldn't get fat, because in a natural world overpopulation tends to occur long before widespread obesity (and obesity is self-limiting, because if you get too fat to hunt/gather or too fat to avoid predators, you were removed from the gene pool).
It's important for me to remember that my desire to eat and to avoid moving is normal and even healthy (in the right environment), but I don't live in the right environment, so I either have to change my environment or my response to it (and ideally both).
Knowing these things makes it much easier to fight the battles. When I just thought I was defective for not adapting better to the environment, I thought I was just lazy, crazy, or stupid (which is how our culture tends to view people who are unacceptably fat).
When I realized it was our culture and not me that was broken, I found the problem easier to address (because my attempts to fix myself hadn't worked).
I used to berate myself for not being normal, and then I realized being normal isn't all it's cracked up to be. I have to learn to be abnormal and be darned proud of it.
I'm a freak, and that's ok. In fact, it's pretty fantabulous.