ILLUMINATION BOOK CHAPTERS
The Joy of Eating~The Anti-Diet Solution for Weight Loss and Health
Chapter 1 — My Mom Died and I’m Worried About Being Fat
My mom died suddenly and unexpectedly from a massive stroke 12 years ago. I was devastated. And I was furious with myself and devastated a second time because I was fat.
One of my best friends from childhood came right away to help me with the arrangements. I told her we had to go shopping because I had nothing to wear to the wake and funeral. We went to the crappy mall and I hunted through the plus-sized racks for a couple of black outfits that didn’t make me look like hell.
I said to Sue, “Of course I have to be fat right now when I’m going to see all these people I haven’t seen in years.” Nice perspective. I was devastated, sad — and fat.
But I felt that way. On top of being a wreck because I would never see my mother again, sad beyond measure about losing her, terrified about the thought of my ailing father living alone three hours away, I also felt mortified to see old friends.
I was bigger than I had ever been. When I lived in my hometown of Pittsfield, MA I was pretty consistently thin. I certainly was well into my dieting roller coaster ride by the time I left, but at that time I was more often in a thin cycle than a fat one, and I hadn’t yet dieted myself up to my current weight.
How awful — at this time, when I needed to be grieving my mother and soaking in the warmth and love of old friends who came to support me, I was instead consumed with what they would think of me, as well as with my complete self-loathing. I was sure they would silently judge me for having gained so much weight, and I thought maybe I would have had a boyfriend or husband to stand with me in the surreal receiving line if I wasn’t fat.
I begin with this story because I want you to know what held me back for years from losing my excess weight — our beliefs, thoughts, and words create the reality we see before us, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the law of attraction. Whether we are aware of it or not it is a law, just like the law of gravity, and it is working in our lives all the time. Did you notice the way I was talking and thinking about myself? That negative self-talk wasn’t just because of this extraordinary circumstance of my mom’s death — that was the way I talked about myself all the time.
I have not come across anyone who longs to be overweight! And when we are, a good majority of us believe beating ourselves up about it is a requirement. We think, I will shame myself into losing weight. I will let everyone else know that I know I’m fat — I know I have to get myself back on a diet. I will say it aloud to others because I know they are thinking it.
What a dreadful place to live. Then, when I consider the truth of thoughts create reality, I can see why none of my weight loss efforts were ever successful. Nearly all I thought and talked about was how fat I was and what diet I was on or about to go on.
Ever since I started struggling with weight and diet right out of elementary school, I’ve had a deep longing to find a sustainable solution; a longing to help others who are in a constant battle against their bodies, because I know how consistently heartbreaking it is.
I am truly grateful to have finally found a solution. And it began with stopping dieting and changing my excessively negative thoughts and dialog about food, diet, and my body.
This is the critical piece that is missing when it comes to sustainably losing weight — if you don’t change the way you think about food and yourself, your efforts at weight loss will inevitably be thwarted.
You will continue to attract solutions that don’t work for you, or if you find a solution that seems to be working and makes you feel better, you will talk yourself out of continuing with it.
So if you are struggling and miserable about the way you look and feel, before looking for yet another diet solution stop and really pay attention to your thoughts and words around food, diet, and your body. What are your beliefs around why you gained the weight — do you berate yourself for your lack of willpower, feeling like a bad person for “letting” this happen? What are your beliefs about having to be on a diet — do you believe you have no control over yourself around food? Where is that out-of-control feeling coming from? When you start to look at these negative thoughts and beliefs, you may see that it’s not you who is out of control, but how strict the diet is that’s causing these feelings.
Our thoughts create an endless cycle of angst and weight gain. It’s time to stop — stop torturing and start nourishing ourselves.
There are a lot of things that cause us stress here on planet Earth. But the one thing I see that causes more suffering for more people than almost anything else is their relationship with food and weight.
The diet industry is one of the biggest industries in the world, supported by millions of people unhappy with their bodies and fearful about what to eat. You can’t stand in line at the grocery store without seeing at least one new diet in the magazines that line the checkout. I say “at least” because usually there are several. What are the implications of this?
One implication is that there is something wrong with most of us — that we are not the right shape or size. And what should we do about it? Go on this new miracle diet — it really works!
My story about food and weight is a long one, as is the case for so many people. My foray into the world of dieting and fear of food started just out of elementary school. I had always been a skinny kid, tall and lanky, and I ate whatever I wanted — and I ate a lot! But as I entered junior high I felt awkward, ugly, and like I just didn’t fit in. I figured there must be something wrong with me.
I concluded that what was wrong with me was my body and that I needed to lose some weight. It’s so sad because that was the last thing I needed to do. But I decided that all of these magazines and ads on TV couldn’t be wrong so I found a book called Thin Thighs in Thirty Days.
That book was so full of hope and promise for me. I had found the problem — my big thighs. I thought, How can I possibly fit in with these giant thighs? Who is going to like me when I look like this? My life is really going to take off once I get this thigh situation under control. This is the answer!
I diligently followed the program, speed walking around my neighborhood like a nut. I sweated through the various forms of leg lifts and obediently followed the low-calorie diet, eating as little as I could without alarming my parents. I was starving all the time but I lost weight — yay!
OK, not really yay. The reality was I became too thin, looking almost ill. Eventually, I got to the point where I couldn’t stand the restrictive diet any longer and went back to eating like a normal twelve-year-old. But it was too late — what I had actually done was set myself up for about three decades of dieting and losing weight, only to gain it back plus some each time. When I got into my forties I had dieted myself into obesity — size 22 on a good day. But what is sadder than that is I had constant anxiety and fear about eating food.
As humans, we are endowed with a sense of taste. We also need food to survive. So I am guessing that eating was supposed to be a pleasing sensory experience. Boy have we mucked that up! For so many of us, eating turns into a fear-based and unpleasant experience. We are either “being good” by denying ourselves sustenance, and likely starving a lot of the time, or “being bad” by eating something we enjoy but think will cause us to gain weight. It is a constant battle that we never win and we end up fearing the very thing that sustains us!
Dieting and weight “issues” are so commonplace that they seem normal to us. Food and weight are constantly on so many of our minds. It takes up a lot of time and energy. I never realized how much time and energy until I quit dieting!
It took me a long time to get to that realization though. After my plunge into the dieting world with the Thin Thigh program I tried just about every diet out there. Each magazine with the latest fad offered new hope and the promise of a better life once I got a handle on this weight problem (that I, of course, had created all on my own!). Each time I started anew there was energy behind it, but I now know that energy was driven by fear. And the fear became greater and greater as I ultimately gained more and more weight.
Every day on a diet started with the scale, and the number on the scale would set my mood for the day. There was the fleeting euphoria when the numbers were going down, and then the sheer panic and self-hatred when they were going up. So much of my life revolved around that number.
There was the constant agonizing about food — what I would eat, whether I would let myself eat, and then all the self-judgment around whatever I decided to do. Of course, all this thinking led to me talking about it a lot, which was easy to do because so many people had the same feelings and fears around food, diet, and body image. Even friends who I considered quite thin talked about diets and weight. It didn’t take any effort to get a conversation going, and I never realized how much I talked about it until I stopped talking about it.
Despite all the studying and reading I had done over the last 25 years about how we manifest things into our lives, I just wasn’t getting it that my thoughts, words, and beliefs were the reason I stayed in this perpetual cycle of losing and gaining weight, and living with all the fear that surrounds it. I guess I thought weight was somehow exempt from the law of attraction.
The last time I lost weight (and then gained it back plus) on a diet was after my mom died. I was determined, after feeling the way I had after she passed, that I was going to take the weight off. I still had the mentality that something was wrong with me and that losing weight by following yet another diet would fix it. A friend at work suggested we go to Weight Watchers — we could go at lunchtime.
As usual, I started out with great zeal. Instead of counting calories or fat grams, Weight Watchers assigns a point value to all foods. I was an excellent point counter! I always wanted to save a few points for wine so I was not eating much and what I was eating consisted mostly of frozen Weight Watchers dinners — that way I could be sure about the points. What I was consuming was basically void of nutrients but that fact never even crossed my mind. Once again, I was able to force some of the weight off, and once again I was starving all the time, which left me perpetually on the edge of anger. I remember vowing I will never do this again, meaning gain back the weight and have to go on another diet and feel the way I felt. I started gaining the weight back before I even got to my goal.
The panic I felt as the weight began to creep back up was palpable. I had to buy bigger clothes. Each new size instilled terror in me to the point where I freaked out on the cute, young salesgirl at the Banana Republic outlet. I searched every rack only to find they only carried up to a size 14. I knew the regular Banana carried 16, which at that time was my current bodily manifestation. My friend persuaded me to ask and when she answered, “No, I’m sorry, we don’t carry anything above a 14,” I practically yelled, “That’s discrimination!” She replied in a very kind way, “I know, that’s what my mom says.”
I cannot overstate how strong my feelings of panic were. I was living my life from this place of fear. As I said, what an awful place to live.
Even after my weight started to creep back up it still took me some time to see that what I was doing wasn’t working on so many levels. I continued to gain weight and hate myself for it. Finally, I got to a breaking point. I couldn’t stand feeling this way any longer and having so much judgment towards myself. It was just cruel. If anyone else had said the things to me that I was saying to myself and about myself, I would have been devastated. Something had to change.
The pain of living with all that fear and self-loathing finally became greater than the pain of being overweight. I made the decision to quit dieting — for GOOD. I had tried a couple of times before but I got too frightened because my belief in having to be on a diet to lose weight was so strong. Finally, I could no longer deny the fact that dieting made me ultimately gain more weight.
I quit all diet foods. I didn’t count anything — points, calories, or fat grams. I ate when I was hungry and stopped when I was full. But more important than all of that, I stopped saying mean things to myself and about myself. I did not engage in any type of diet talk. And I began to make peace with food.
It was one of the best things I have ever done in my life! First of all, I realized how much time and energy I spent thinking and worrying about food and my weight. It was exhausting! And I realized that I rarely enjoyed eating, even when eating my favorite foods, because I had so much guilt around eating them. When I was on a diet I was happy when I got to eat and convinced myself that I liked the processed frozen foods I was eating, but I wasn’t by any means nourishing myself. The feeling of being almost constantly hungry, sometimes feeling starved, really wore me down, physically and emotionally. I was barely getting my needs met on a most basic level.
Allowing myself to eat what I wanted when I was hungry was such an amazing and liberating thing. It sounds so weird to say, “Allowing myself to eat.” I am incredibly fortunate to live in a part of the world where food is abundant and I am also very fortunate to have the means to buy good quality food. Yet, despite that, I had for years been making the choice to go hungry much of the time.
My guilt around eating didn’t go away immediately, but as my weight stabilized I began to calm down. It was such a pleasure to be open to all the possible food choices, decide what I was in the mood for, and then eat it! It was so empowering to stop eating when I felt full, to no longer have anxiety that I couldn’t eat a certain food again. I “trained” myself to stop eating when I was full by continually assuring myself that, even if one minute after I put what remained of my meal in the refrigerator I felt like I was still hungry or wanted more, I could pull it back out and continue eating. Even if I only had a couple of bites left of whatever I was eating I still wrapped it up and put it in the fridge.
My coworker used to laugh at what she found in the refrigerator, but it was a successful strategy nonetheless. Now I am at the point where if there are only a couple of bites left I can throw it out. Sometimes I will let it sit on the counter for a little while before throwing it out if I am not absolutely sure I am done. All of this may sound silly or weird, but it was so important during this learning process.
And that is what this was — the process of learning a new habit. The power of habit energy is amazing. My habit was dieting. It came about from my belief that I didn’t fit in and that belief was strengthened with each weight loss and subsequent gain. Even though the cycle kept repeating itself and always ended poorly (in fact worse each time) I kept looking to the same “solution”. I couldn’t seem to look outside of the box because I believed in the box so much.
Once, while still deep in this habit energy, I went to a bookstore with a good friend who was pregnant and wanted to pick up a couple of books on what to expect. She was excited as this was her first child. Instead of sharing in her joy, I, in full weight gain mode, broke off from her and went straight to the diet section. I remember the visceral feeling of panic as I combed through the books for something new, something I hadn’t seen before. The answer HAD to be there. I HAD to find it. I felt completely desperate. That day there was nothing new on the shelves, nothing I hadn’t already tried. But that knowledge didn’t shake me up enough to break the habit energy and shift the way I behaved. Unsuccessful at finding a new book, I just went back to one of the many diets I had already tried, thinking it would finally work. I must not have tried hard enough last time.
As painful as all those years of dieting were, there was also something comforting about it — dieting was familiar. The cycle was known and the process was wired into my brain. To quit dieting sounds so simple and like something everyone would want to do. No one I have ever talked to likes being on a diet. But the fear around not being on a diet, which fuels this familiar habit, is so great for so many people that they can’t get back to seeing food as something that nourishes and sustains them.
So, quitting dieting was indeed a learning process and something I had to literally train myself to do. Science now shows that in order to break a habit and form a new one, you have to form new neuro pathways in your brain. It takes time and consistency to make a new way of being feel familiar and comfortable. It amazes me as I look back on my own shift that a lot of the things that feel comfortable to us cause us so much pain. I am grateful beyond words that I was finally able to push through all the fear I had about giving up this habit to get to the place I am in today.
There I was, bucking the diet system. Initially it was really uncomfortable. My weight stabilized but it stabilized at the highest it had ever been. That was the next piece — I had to accept it. I had to accept my body exactly the way it was and continue on with what I was doing. I had to accept what other people might think of me — an obese person eating non-diet, full-fat food. I had to learn to be OK with the fact that I was moving away from a belief in dieting that so many people clung to so tightly. I had to change my own belief amidst the collective belief.
This was an interesting process — accepting myself even though I wasn’t generally accepted by society. There were occasional comments (not aimed directly toward me) about “fat people”. Regardless, I stayed the course. I didn’t cave and go back to my comfort zone — dieting and engaging in all things diet related. I stuck with it long enough to start blazing some new neuro pathways in my brain.
I cannot express how freeing it was to just eat. Just eat. Eat what I wanted when I wanted. Eat without guilt. Eat real food. Just eat. I cannot express how good it felt to have so much time and energy freed up. Thinking about food, worrying about food, feeling guilty about food, beating myself up about food — that takes a lot of time and energy. And it doesn’t feel good!
This is how my journey of getting back to myself and my naturally thin size began and how it HAD to begin. If I hadn’t changed my thoughts and beliefs about food, diet, and body image, and accepted myself exactly the way I was, no matter what I did with regard to diet, exercise, or nutrition it never would have worked.
I spent many years in this space of acceptance and peace around food. I still had the desire to lose my excess weight, but instead of feeling desperate what seemed to me a miracle occurred. I developed a strong feeling deep inside me that the weight would somehow come off organically, without a struggle.
Through a series of seemingly random events, the organic solution I knew would show up fell right into my lap! Seemingly random. I found a healthy eating style that made me feel great, that was totally satisfying, and with no struggle at all the weight started to take care of itself.
What empowered me to be able to find my own healthy way of eating was to make peace with food and accept where I was minute to minute. If you struggle with fear around food, diet, and body image, and subsequently with your weight and health, my hope is to help you find the joy of eating, to make peace with food, and find a way of eating that you love that gets you back to health and your naturally thin self. And in the midst of this process I think you will find that peace will spill into other areas of your life. Eat good food; feel good about what you eat. That is my wish for you.
Find The Joy of Eating~The Anti-Diet Solution for Weight Loss and Health here.
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