[Lovely]

Originally Posted by beautybooty

Sometimes I think I don't need a diet. I just need to eat like a normal person. If I can eat like the people around me who are not obese then I will be fine. I just can't figure out why it is so easy for them to be normal and for me to be obsessed with eating everything.

I had a friend who used to wish that she could just "get" math like a normal person instead of needing tutoring and different lessons. She was by no means unintelligent, she just needed to go about learning a different way.

I've had to let go of the possibility of "not needing a diet". Plain and simple, I need a diet. I need to monitor my food, because there's no other way to get where I want to go.

Maybe some day long down the road I will have built up my habits so that I won't need to be as strict, but I've got to work with reality. I've got to work with what I've got. Wishing it different changes nothing.

[Rana]

Originally Posted by beautybooty

Sometimes I think I don't need a diet. I just need to eat like a normal person. If I can eat like the people around me who are not obese then I will be fine. I just can't figure out why it is so easy for them to be normal and for me to be obsessed with eating everything.

I haven't read what others said, but I wanted to comment on this first because it stuck out to me because that's the SAME thoughts I had for many years.

And during those years, I was super overweight.

The thing I had to come to terms, and I went through a period of mourning my "perfect" self, is that I am NOT "normal" and those "normal" people I knew that ate without thinking? Well, they actually DO think about what they eat and I was the abnormal one thinking that I could eat whatever the **** I wanted and not gain any weight.

My friends, whether or not they've ever had a weight problem are conscious about what they eat. They may be conscious of it because their jeans get tight or they are training for a marathon or they don't like the way that eating out too much affects their health, but they ALL watch what they eat for one reason or another. No one in my circle of friends, acquaintances and coworkers, eat with wild abandon and not gain any weight.

It's the ones that are overweight that eat without thinking.

I didn't know this at first. I wanted to prove that I could eat normally so I told myself to start watching what my friends/acquaintances/coworkers ate. I told myself I would eat the same way.

I started noticing things that I hadn't noticed before because I was so busy ordering my food and eating it all up. I noticed that some of my friends ordered an appetizer and that was their meal. Not because they were cheap, but because an appetizer was more than enough food. I noticed some of them only ordered salads when we had dinners out. Others were exercising every day and eating salads at home during the week so that on the weekends they could splurge. Others never ordered dessert. Ever. Some were on low carb eating plans but I hadn't noticed.

As I gathered all this information up from the people around me, I realized that everyone watches what they eat. Some are crazy in their food plans/beliefs, others eat pretty healthy, but there is no "normal."

Once I was able to reconcile that with my "future" self, then I realized that eating healthy and eating on plan was normal. And that helped tremendously to stay on plan.

[kaplods]

Originally Posted by beautybooty

Sometimes I think I don't need a diet. I just need to eat like a normal person. If I can eat like the people around me who are not obese then I will be fine. I just can't figure out why it is so easy for them to be normal and for me to be obsessed with eating everything.

I used to think this way too - that if I could act "normal" I could be normal. Two facts that I didn't take into account:

1. I can't change who I am by wishing to be something different

and

2. Normal isn't all I made it out to be (and when I learned what normal really was, I realized that I didn't want to be that).


In our culture, being naturally slim, isn't normal. 2/3 of Americans are overweight - that tells me that in the USA, being normal is eating too much and being fat. My problem wasn't being abnormal, it was being normal.


It's entirely "normal" to gain weight in the type of culture we have. Abundant food, and virtually no physical effort needed to obtain it. We've created such an unnatural environment, that "normal" is essentially meaningless.

I may have been born with a defective hunger switch, or I may have destroyed mine with decades of crash dieting. Regardless, mine's almost always turned on, and almost never turned off.

As a result, when thin friend says she only eats when she's hungry - I can't do that. I can't "forget to eat," as some thin people will describe (I found that I can forget to eat on extremely low-carb, but I'm not convinced that is healthy, so I work at moderately low-carb).

The more I've tried to be "normal" the more I realized there really is no such thing. There's an average, but no matter who I try, I can't be average (nor do I probably want to be, since average is overweight).

We all don't want to be average, we want to be the almost mythical "naturally slim" person - the person who can eat what and when he or she wants to, and never gain weight.

There are a few such people, but they are the minority, and there's no evidence that a person can become one just by wanting and trying to be. You're either one, or you're not. I am so not.

I think the obesity epidemic is in part due to too many people, being too normal. Not eating well enough, not moving enough, not getting enough sleep.

We don't need to learn to be ordinary, we need to learn to be extraordinary, and that's a bigger challenge (which is another problem with weight loss. We're taught that it's supposed to be easy, or at least simple - and it isn't always so. Then when we don't succeed by the rate we think is normal 1-2 lbs a week (which isn't normal by the way, it's extremely extraordinary). If we don't meet the extraordinary results, we give up because we think we're failing, not realizing that we're succeeding extraordinarily.

Even 1 lb of weight loss per month is an accomplishment that most people who attempt do not succeed at, and yet most of us would give up after only a few weeks if we couldn't get more rapid results than that, because we wouldn't see it as success.

Almost all of my 94 lbs came off at about 1 lb per month (I've now got it up to about 2 lbs per month). The only reason I haven't quit this time is because my doctor convinced me that my "slow" weight loss wasn't slow at all, because it's something most people who try don't accomplish (again, normal being not at all what any of us want to be. Normal is losing nothing or gaining. Losing anything at all is succeeding).