I've grown fond of telling myself, and others, there's no reason to diet because what do I have to show after 28 years of dieting? An exra 120 pounds, is what.
But it finally, like a bolt of lightning, hit me the other day that I haven't been dieting for 25 years. I've been playing. One dangerous fad diet after another. Every pill and potion you can imagine. Going to WW meetings and being shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that I didn't lose weight when I had followed the plan to the letter all week, when what I actually had done was ignore the plan for the first two days (after all, I had all week to catch up and I deserved a break anyway); then worked the plan strictly for two days, then loosely for two days; and then I starved myself the day before the weigh in. Or, when not on WW, weighing myself on three different scales and recording the lowest one as my "real " weight in my chart. Measuring myself and then writing down smaller numbers in a journal ONLY I WOULD SEE. How sick is that? Planning on going to the gym three nights a week, but not really going and then complaining to friends that I can't lose weight even though I work out regularly. Playing this game: After realizing in tears that I "can't" diet, vowing to start going to the gym on Monday, which is better than dieting. Then Monday comes and instead of going to the gym, I tell myself, if I eat right, I don't need to exercise, so next Monday, I'm starting a new diet; then of course, once I blow that, vowing to start going to the gym and so on and so on ...
And the big revelation: I thought that if I pretended to be a good-eating, excerising, health-conscious woman -- even though I'm not -- then people would believe that I was and think that maybe I was afflicted with some disease or condition that made it impossible to lose weight. So it WASN'T MY FAULT. So there.
Even sicker is that I couldn't even admit the truth to myself. Like if I made the lie so complete, then it would be true. If I never admitted my weight to anyone, never admitted my overeating and slovenly habits, then they would actually see a svelte, 125-pound woman.
I know that good self esteem and a great attitude and good heart make you attractive no matter what. But that's NOT what was going on with me. Instead of feeling good about my total self and being fabulous as a result of that, I was hiding my abysmally low self esteem under a cloak of fake fabulous. The difference -- to the outside world -- is subtle, too subtle for others to notice, perhaps. But inside, it made me feel like a fake, like if anyone could see the congealed mess of weight-related insecurity that was resting underneath the surface, they would run far and fast away from me. My whole life was fake because I was not who I was presenting to the world.
Whoa.... I had a germ of an idea about all of this over the past few days, but it wasn't until I was just writing it that I realized the magnitude of it all. You would think being a writer that I would recognize the power of the written word and the writing process. But I guess it was just another part of the lie. I don't have to journal... I know my own thoughts... it's just as effective to analyze them in my had than on paper. Oh, bull.