I'm an endangered species (Eating Disorder Awareness Week)

From all my life experiences, observations of those around me, taking in the messages from the media, talking to neighbors and loved ones, I have finally come to this conclusion:


I am a member of an endangered species.

What species you ask? "Fat woman who is not trying to become less fat." And I don't just mean that I'm "between diets" or just not trying to lose weight right NOW. I mean I honestly don't care about losing weight anymore, ever. I don't own a scale. I don't weigh myself. I eat what I like. I exercise and play cause I love it. If I don't like it or it makes me feel icky, I don't do it.

I've spent my time being on the other species, actually several other species. Let me paint a picture of the different species I have been a member of, in chronological order, although this is a VERY truncated version. Believe me, there are millions of women in each of these species. (Please note I'm using the phrase "fat girl" throughout, even though I am a woman, not a girl, but this started when I was a girl. And "fat" is not a value judgment, it is just a trait, like short or tall. I don't use this phrase as an insult, so please don't take it in that way.)


Thriving Species
Average girl who thinks she's fat.
Average girl who eats emotionally and becomes actually fat.
Fat girl who is actually, physically addicted to sugar and comfort eating.
Fat girl who knows that being fat is completely unacceptable.
Fat girl who decides she won't be a fat girl anymore
Fat girl dieting.
Fat girl losing weight.
Fat girl failing.
Fat girl binging.
Fat girl deciding (again) it's not okay to be a fat girl.
Fat girl dieting.
Fat girl losing weight
Fat girl falling off the wagon (again).
Fat girl binging and becoming even more fat than when she started (the "yo-yo-ing up the scale" phenomenon)
Fat girl eating ANYTHING sweet just to get a fix, without knowing if she even likes the food that much.
Fat girl deciding it's not okay to be a fat girl.
Fat girl tired of not being loved, of not being desired, of not being "ok" cause she's fat. Being fat is not okay.
Fat girl giving up sugar entirely.
Fat girl detoxing from sugar.
Fat girl losing a LOT of weight.
Fat girl is now average girl.
Average girl missing out on food with family and friends.
Average girl exhausted from undernourishment and overexercise.
Average girl still not happy
Average girl reaching out to friends and making treats for a party.
Average girl falling off the wagon BIG TIME and eating all the leftover treats from the party.
Average girl gaining weight and continuing a 3-year-long binge "last supper" while still off the wagon. (Cause she knows she'll have to get back on the wagon soon, so she has to eat the stuff she loves NOW while she still can.)
Fat girl sick and tired of this cycle that has been repeated more times than she can count.
Fat girl wishing she was still the "fat girl" of a couple decades ago, when she was actually just average, instead of approaching morbid obesity. Why couldn't she just have been happy with that? She'd kill to be that "fat girl" again now. 

By the way... all that ^^ is not just a "normal" cycle.  It's very disordered.  Dieting is disordered eating, and contributes to actual eating disorders.  I have had an eating disorder for most of my life.  Yes, with an actual diagnosis by actual professionals.  Dieting mentalities contribute to eating disorders.

Here's where we begin to get into an evolutionary tangent that does not have as many women in it, and I have become more and more endangered, as I know precious few people who join me where I'm at.

Endangered Species
Fat girl starting to think: do I really want to count calories for the rest of my life? Do I actually LIKE jogging and doing exercise videos? (The answer is no.) Do I actually want to lose weight so I can appeal to the men and other people who I currently feel are shallow for ignoring me the way I am now? Why would I want to be associated with people that are shallow? Why do I even care about their opinion? Whenever I go to the doctor and get lots of tests and stuff, they always find that I am perfectly healthy, to my surprise since I'm so big. Can someone actually be fat AND fit at the same time? Am I actually okay the way I am? Can I go ahead and accept myself as-is, and stop punishing myself physically and mentally? How much stuff could I get done if I didn't spend so much time obsessing about food, calories in, calories burned, exercise, weight, dating, my looks, etc.? How much more attractive and happy would I actually be, just by becoming confident and content with myself?

This kind of thinking has eventually landed me in my current species:  Fat girl NOT trying to become less fat.

This revolution has taken a couple years. It began with a dedication to STOP dieting, and STOP weighing myself. I've been successful with that and am committed to it. My brain and body are still adjusting. I have gained a little more weight and then come to a stopping point since then. I'm no longer yo-yo-ing my way up the scale, I'm just stable where I am. I still eat a lot of foods I love, cause no food is off-limits.  But I don't eat junk just to get some calories or some sweetness out of desparation, I actually eat things I like.  I no longer hoard and hide food and eat thousands of calories in one sitting, in secret, cause it's so shameful to eat foods you like.  I eat out in the open and no longer try to hide.  I no longer binge.  And I do physical things I actually like- biking, swimming, playing with my kids, hiking.  I even tried snowshoeing recently which was a blast.  I do NOT jog or do exercise videos.

My brain and body are learning to trust the fact that food will always be there. I won't make it forbidden ever again. So there are still cravings there, and I do still believe there is a bit of a physical dependence on sugar (that's a whole different topic for another day if anyone is interested).  But I also LOVE a variety of foods, and nothing is "good" or "bad", it's just food, some of which makes me feel great and some doesn't make me feel that great so I cut back on or avoid those that don't feel good to my body.

This revolution for me though, is really about self-acceptance and changing my paradigm about body image, society, etc.  It's okay to be any size, just like it's okay to be any color.  If you use things like race, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status in place of "fat", it really makes it clear what JERKS we are all being to ourselves and each other.

Fat girl decides it's not okay to be a fat girl.
Black woman decides it's not okay to be a black woman.
Gay man decides it's not okay to be a gay man.
Hispanic teenager decides it's not okay to be a hispanic teenager.


Do you see my point?

I see people all around me in various stages of that Thriving Species list.  Friends, colleagues, loved ones, going to extreme measures.  Exercising 10 times per week, tracking and counting every single bit of food they eat, having nothing but crackers for lunch, eating a total of 800 calories per day, making certain foods that they really love "forbidden", and so forth.  (For an explanation of why low-calorie diets are BAD for your body and your metabolism, you can see this post I did.)

I just wish these great people would realize how detrimental it is to be there, and instead join me here in my species.  Cause it's not just a species of NOT trying to lose weight.  It's the species of loving yourself, no matter what, and appreciating the GIFT that your body is, no matter what.  It's not about being unhealthy, or being fat, or "giving up" on something.  It's about loving yourself.  Respecting yourself.  Taking good care of yourself.

Change your evolutionary trajectory, it's not up to chance, it's your choice.  Choose to love yourself and see your body as a gift.  Use it as a tool to do all the AWESOME you have going on in your life.  Make your body your friend and ally.  To do that you have to stop treating it like the enemy.  Cause we're all friends here.






As my friend Lisa D'Alessio just beautifully said: 

Why I'm Not Making "Resolutions": A Case Against Dieting

I haven't made New Year's Resolutions for a long time, but I do still enjoy making goals for myself.  I do it twice a year, in January and July typically.  I write down goals of stuff I plan to do anyway, not lofty crazy things.  This year I plan to graduate from college!  Let me tell you about why I no longer follow the "New Year's Resolutions" crowd.

The scene may be familiar to you, you may have even done it yourself in the past few days.  You might be gearing up to do it right now!  The thinking goes something like this:

"Okay, self.  This is it.  We've been slovenly and stupid, but THIS is a new year!  This is THE year, this is OUR year, the year we ______[turn 25/ turn 30/ graduate from college/ stop being stupid]_____ and it's going to be the year we transform our body as well!  Let's DO this!"

Feeling all pumped up, you set out to make a goal real by writing it down and planning it out.  The actual goal is unstated and goes something like this: "transform my physical body into something unrecognizable but totally hot, sexy, and above all: acceptable to others."  For me this particular body has never existed since I've always been a fat girl, but I just knew it could exist.

So, time to get writing.  I knew I had to set SMART goals, which included being specific, having time limits, writing it down, etc. Mine were usually about like this: "Okay, I want to lose 100 pounds this year, that's just 2 pounds per week- that's totally healthy and doable!  So, I will completely stop eating all sugar and sweets.  It'll be hard but it's worth it and I can do it.  I will only eat 1200 calories per day and I might even lose weight faster than my goal, and be really looking good by summer!  And of course I will have to exercise, so I will work out 30 minutes, 6 days per week.  I'll swim Mon/Wed/Fri, jog and strength train the other days, and go on a big hike for an hour every Saturday,"  and so on, you get the idea.  I plan every detail and set helps in place, like trying to find workout buddies, getting into online support groups, buying a year gym membership ahead of time so I have no excuse there, maybe buy new running shoes (even though I hate running), throwing out all the sweets in my house, etc.  Environmental control.


These are great goals that I have envisioned a dozen times as the key to "releasing" the real me out of its fat suit prison.  But here was the problem.  They were lofty, they were a stark shift from what I had been used to, they were unsustainable, and in fact they were unhealthy and setting me up for failure.

How will your body react if your norm is to eat around 2,500 calories per day, and only a little walking as your physical activity, and you suddenly cut your food intake by HALF and jump up to a "perfect" workout regimen?  My body reacted like this, as would most:  "Holy crud!!  What the hell is going on?!!  We must be starving, and running to try to find food! What apocalypse is going on out there?  Oh man, this is it, this is the end.  Emergency!  Emergency!  Going to code red- crisis management mode!"  My body senses a sudden catastrophic world event on many January 1st's.

Now time for the science nerd in me to come out.  What happens physiologically while on a low-calorie diet that your body is not used to, is that all food coming in as much as possible will be stored as fat for later in case the emergency gets even worse, and muscle gets broken down to be used for quick energy.  Cause if you're in a crisis, keeping your brain well-fed, and planning for the worst is top priority.  Your brain is not able to use energy from fat, and if you are starving your brain by eating a severely low-calorie diet, muscle is the quickest way to get energy to your brain.  Your body doesn't really have a way to tell how much fat it already has stored so that it can "cap" it at a certain amount, which is why you can get very morbidly obese people.  Your body will just keep making more fat when it is in these crises even though you already have a lot, or when there is a plain old excess of energy coming in.  Losing that muscle lowers my energy and makes sustaining this plan much more difficult.

(That was the cliff-notes version.  If you would like more details on why your brain doesn't use up your fat and a basic run-down on how energy is metabolized in your body, I got you covered.  But I'll put it on my science blog so as not to bog this post down.  Click here for that.  Bio Geo Nerd: Your Metabolism Doesn't Know It's the New Year )

Think of it like a budget crisis.  You're going along with a good job, everything is good, then you lose your job.  You have no money.  You pare down your budget and only pay for the ABSOLUTE necessities, taking more and more out of the budget that you possibly can.  First you get rid of perks like entertainment, start getting things at thrift stores, eventually you might even have to sell your car and take the bus, or even lose your home.  Occassionally you get some money as a gift, and you stick all of it in your savings to help get through this crisis since you have no idea how long it will last, and you continue to live on the bare minimum and leave your savings alone.  This is crisis mode.  
 
And the worst part, is that doing this screws up my metabolism.  So when the diet fails cause I can't sustain starvation (duh), my body has now gotten VERY good at making fat.  And it keeps using that talent, especially now that I'm back up to my normal 2,500 calories per day average.  Going on that diet just doomed me to being BETTER at storing energy (fat).  Just like our budget analogy, if you were able to get through the crisis by being miserly with your money, you will continue those habits and can build wealth while living on almost nothing.  That's great if I'm going to end up walking hundreds of miles in search of resources that have disappeared due to some catastrophic natural disaster, but for me living in the 21st century and wanting to get fit and also be attractive to others, it's not good news.

And guess what?  I've done this to myself dozens and dozens of times!  I've been helping my body hone those skills to be metabolically conservative, and been getting fatter and fatter.  My metabolism is in a bad state for the world I live in.  And I did it to myself.  By dieting.  I have "yo-yo dieted" my way UP the scale for the past 2+ decades, and now here I am.

Food and my body have been the enemy. My mental state of being completely obsessed about food, weight, dieting, my body have caused an eating disorder of the mind.  Through much counseling and introduction to the book "Intuitive Eating", I realized I had to quit dieting for good, and also learning about the Physiology and Biochemistry of it clenched that.

So, I don't diet.  I don't make weight-related New Year's Resolutions.  There may be some people who have not screwed up their body as badly as I have. I hope you haven't restricted yourself to the point that your body and brain are starving, and your body has to develop the talent of living on a shoe-string calorie budget.  It does a good job of scrimping, saving, putting away every calorie it possibly can, like a true miser.  I can just imagine my metabolism as an Ebeneezer Scrooge- never putting coal on the fire, but instead, hoarding all the gold into the money bins of my fat cells.
So instead, I choose to live an abundant life.  Enjoy food, really enjoy it.  When I eat what I want and actually pay attention to how great it is, and when I don't make any certain foods "the enemy", I can enjoy the pleasure of eating without overeating, and without guilting myself into wanting those forbidden foods more.  When I deprive myself I end up eating a lot of stuff I don't even like just to get a sugar "hit" or try to satisfy cravings with low-cal junk that makes me more hungry.  I'm letting my body know I'm there to take care of it.  I'm not going to jerk it around anymore with deprivation-abundance cycles.  I'm regaining my body's trust, however long it takes. I'm just going to take care and enjoy life, and my body and I are going to be on the same side.

Me last October, RIDICULOUSLY excited to be out riding with my kids.

Have a blessed 2015!