Sexual Violence Issues and Staying Fat

Some form of sexual violence, or at the very least sexual pressure or intrusiveness, happens to every woman in our culture.  I can’t speak to the male experience, but I would feel safe in saying that a great many of them have been affected by unwelcome and invasive sexual attention as well.

What do I mean by sexual violence?  For the context of this discussion about weight, I mean any of the following:

Pick the Right Weight Loss Plan for You

Different plans address different problems.  If you’re a junk food junkie, South Beach might be great, because it forces you to cook a bunch of fresh foods.  If you’re a carb addict, Atkins would force you to let that go for a while.  If you’re too busy to prepare food, a meal replacement plan could be your friend.  If you’re any sort of an emotional/stress/compulsive/bored eater, Medifast is great because everything is limited, even celery—there is nothing whatsoever that you’re allowed to binge on.

There are countless diets available.  I got lucky when I chose Medifast.  My selection process went like this:  I’ve done South Beach and loved it, but I’m too busy to cook that much. What else is out there?  Oh, I have a friend who’s lost about a hundred pounds, ask her what she did.  Medifast?  Oh look, packets!  Neat.  Sign me up.

Handling the Weight-Loss Sabotaging Partner

Your partner (or parents, housemates, siblings, children, friends) says they love you.  Most of the time, you even believe those words when they come out of their mouth.  But then you go on a diet.  You’re working harder than you’ve ever worked on anything in your life.  You’re committed.  You are making changes happen.

They bring home donuts and fried chicken.

You come home and your favorite junk foods are laid out to tempt you.  Or they order a pizza to “celebrate your diet success.”  Really?  To celebrate my staying on my diet you want to make me walk the plank into a giant tub of full-fat ice cream?  Awww, thanks for thinking of me, I love you too!

Kill Your Taste Buds - Eating Clean

The American diet is a disaster, right?  Fast food, take-out, frozen dinners, processed processed processed.  Many people feel they’re virtuously eating healthy when they eat a microwaved frozen vegetable that comes in its own “cheese” sauce.

This is not healthy and you know it.  MSG, artificial flavors, salt, fat, sugar, corn syrup, artificial sweeteners—they’ve all done a number on your taste buds.  Your taste buds are desensitized, overwhelmed, and overstimulated.  It’s like a porn addiction—the longer you sit in your basement watching porn and avoiding human beings, the more hardcore and intense of stimulation you need, and the less attractive the kind, wholesome girl with a crush on you becomes.  Plain steamed broccoli has a crush on you, and you’re ignoring her.

Junk food is a gateway drug.  To more junk food.

Hiding is Okay in Moderation

The rest of this chapter is going to be about showing yourself off, so let’s pause a moment and talk about the opposite.  Yes, it’s okay to hide sometimes.

The process of losing weight is crazy.  It radically changes your life in many ways.  Some of the time we are simply not ready for the feeling of naked exposure that comes from getting smaller.

As we lose weight, people start commenting.  Suddenly every conversation we have seems to center around or at least start with how we’re shrinking away.  That’s a lot of focus on the body of someone who has been trying to hide the state of their body for a long time.  It’s like a cat who’s been trying to cover up their poop on the linoleum (by blousing out our shirt to hide our belly), who is suddenly given a litter box, and then everyone is constantly going “yay kitty, good for you, pooping in the box.”  Well, yes, we are now pooping in the box, but by you saying that over and over and over you’re also saying we were really damn fat before.

Weight Loss Role Models

There really are people who have done it.  They have lost 50 or 150 pounds and have kept it off.  They have radically changed their lives.  Best of all, they know how they did it.

They can tell you:

– The diet they used and why it worked for them.

– The diets they tried that didn’t work for them.

– What changed in them between being unsuccessful and successful.

– What pitfalls to watch out for.

– When you’re talking like an addict and need to have some sense beat into your head.

Having Fun—It’s Okay. Really.

For many of us, being fat is a gigantic cluster of things that are not fun.  We don’t feel good, we don’t have a lot of energy, we don’t feel sexy, we want to hide our fatness from others, we’re not comfortable standing/walking/sitting in small chairs/etc.  Our reasons for being fat are also not fun: addiction, abuse, fear, self-loathing, depression, poverty, etc.  All of this combines in our brains to convince us we’re not really that into fun.

We pretend we prefer the life we’re living.  We pretend we’re just the “stay at home and read a book” type.  We pretend that the sofa and TV is how we like to spend our evenings.  And the big bowl of ice cream or Doritos does take the edge off the pain, so it’s really not that bad.

Or so we try to convince ourselves.

When People Won't Shut Up

If you lose a lot of weight, there will be a prolonged period of time where every conversation you have with anyone starts with a discussion of your body.

Let that sink in for a minute.  Every conversation.  Your body. 

If you’ve got any urge to hide, inner shyness, shame about your weight, or sense of privacy, this is going to suck pretty quickly.  Yes, compliments are great.  Yes, some of us really adore them.  But even for the attention whores among us, it can get old in time.  (Right before it starts to taper off and you miss it like a junkie in withdrawal.)

What Clothes to Buy While Losing

You are going to need a totally different shopping strategy for the losing process than how you shop when at a stable weight.  Basically, when you’re on the way down, clothes are disposable, temporary friends.  They’re only going to be with you for a short while, so don’t invest and don’t get attached.  You can view the local Goodwill as a lending library if that helps.

The first thing you need to learn is that you no longer have to buy something just because it fits. This becomes more and more true the smaller you get (up to a point, of course—if you go down to a size zero you’re going to have trouble finding things that fit you again.)

Seriously.  Sit with this for a moment.  You no longer have to buy something just because it fits.

Why Are You Fat?

In order to lose weight and keep it off, you’re going to need to know why you’re fat.  Imagine you’re hooked on pain pills.  You decide you want to get off the pills.  You stop taking them, the pain starts to come back, and you sit there, gripping the edge of your chair with white knuckles, moaning because of the pain, unable to function or enjoy your life.

How long are you going to last?

Do you think this scenario might have a better outcome if you look around, realize you have been taking the pain pills because of the hammer that’s hitting you in the head every five minutes, and stop the hammer?

Special Occasions—Make it About the Friends, Not the Food

Imagine it’s your birthday, and you’re having a party.  Someone has brought a lovely cake.  One of your friends is allergic to wheat and you know she won’t be able to eat the cake.  What do you do?  Do you tell your friend to stay home because eating cake is the most important part of the day?

No.  You most certainly do not.  You tell your friend to come and eat what she can and celebrate the day with you.  The cake is there as a pleasurable indulgence for those who choose to partake of it, not as a gauntlet that must be run by every person at the party to prove their love for you.

Why Do You Hate Being Fat?

There are a lot of reasons to hate being fat, but it’s important to be crystal-clear about what yours are.  You need to make a list.  It’s your own, personal, custom-tailored inventory of misery.  If you’re obese, you have a list.  Get honest and write it down.

And no, I don’t care how “fat positive” you are.  Being obese carries with it physical, lifestyle, and social tolls that are unavoidable no matter how supportive your community is of your freedom of expression or natural body type (or whatever they want to call condoning your overeating).  Get honest, and write it down.

Here’s my list I wrote five days before I started my new eating plan:

Your Jiggly Floppy Body is Funny—Laughter Helps

So you’ve wrecked your body.  You’re never going to look like Angelina Jolie naked.  So what?

Seriously, so what?  You were never going to be as smart as Stephen Hawking, as athletic as Lance Armstrong, as famous as Neil Armstrong, or as kind as Mother Teresa, either.  You managed to let all that go somehow.

It’s time to let go of the dream of the perfect body.  Our media is very intensely bent on the idea that you should hate your imperfect body and keep spending lots of money to try to be less flawed.  Allowing our media to control your self-image is not going to serve you well, though.

Just One Bite—Destruction Testing

“One bite won’t hurt.”  Well maybe, maybe not.  The problem is, you can’t know if it will hurt until it has already hurt you.

You’re on your plan, you’re through the worst of the withdrawal, and you’ve lost some weight.  You’re starting to feel like you’ve got your legs under you again and you can do this.  Then there’s that food.  That delicious food.  One bite—what could that matter?  It’s hardly worth putting in your food log it’s so insignificant.  You eat it, and it’s delicious.

What happens after that?  For a small percentage of people, you say “yay, that was good, now back to my food plan.”  I won’t say there aren’t people who can handle one bite like it didn’t matter at all.  But are you one of them?

Handling Restaurants Like an Entitled Princess

“OMG what am I going to order at this restaurant there’s nothing on plan on their menu??!”

We can try to avoid restaurants, or only go to restaurants of our choosing, but eventually we will fail.  There will be a work function, or fat relatives in from out of town who reject your healthy eateries, or a first date who picks the restaurant and you don’t want to act like a freak about food.  What do you do then?

Don’t panic.  Bring a towel.

Just kidding about the towel.  But don’t panic.  The mental shift you need to make is this: a menu is never a list of dishes to choose from.  It is always a list of ingredients they have in their kitchen.

Know Thy Enemy—Understand the Science of the Plan You’re On

All weight loss plans are not created equal.  All of them that get any popular traction work, at least for some people who go on them.  But why do they work?

Low carb plans get ketosis working for you.  When you keep your daily carbs below a certain level, you enter a fat-burning state that speeds the process along.  If you’re on a low-carb diet, eating a lovely “healthy” piece of fruit can throw you off for 3 days, but eating some bacon would barely cause a blip.  Carbs are the enemy.

Calorie-restricted plans work a little differently.  The basic equation is: when (calories in) < (calories burned), you lose weight.  Calories are the enemy.  But you have to stay within certain parameters.  I could eat 900 calories a day on Medifast because it was nutritionally enhanced and kept me in ketosis.  But if someone ate a different 900 calories a day, it would shut their metabolism down into starvation mode and they wouldn’t lose weight at all.  There’s a calorie and nutrition threshold you have to stay above on a straight calorie-restricted plan.

Do Whatever it Takes to Get Whole

Yes, there is something broken inside us.  We don’t get to where our fat is making us crippled and miserable without having something broken inside.  There are a whole range of things it could be – external, internal, spiritual, emotional, mental, past or present.

It doesn’t matter what it is.  No matter what it is, you can find a way to heal.

I just read an article about a journalist who used very violent sex to heal her PTSD.  Does that make sense?  Maybe not.  Would her therapist have recommended it?  Almost certainly no.  Did it work for her?  Yes.

I’m not saying you need to get that extreme.  What I am advocating is an extreme commitment to fixing yourself.

Shaking Fat Person Syndrome - Taking Up Space

A lot of heavy people have what I call “Fat Person Syndrome.”  It’s that belief that they’re not worthy that makes them slouch through life trying to be invisible and not take up any space.  Many fat people even buy tiny cars – have you noticed this?

Let me assure you of two things: 1) slouching and trying to hide does not make you any less fat, and 2) being fat does not make you any less lovable, no matter what our culture tells you.

This is a problem that has to be attacked on two fronts.  Taking off some of the weight can definitely help you feel better about yourself.  When we’re thinner, we naturally want to show off for the camera, go out more, ride on amusement park rides, and insist on a decent table at a restaurant.

Choose Your Transfer Addictions Wisely

On a lighter note, yes, many of us have been addicted to food in one way or another.  Food has taken up a lot of our time: thinking about it, planning what to eat next, shopping, cooking, restaurants, savoring the meal.

Suddenly it’s taking up less of our time.  It’s not being the focus of our attention.  Worse, it’s not performing its old function anymore, as a cure for boredom, loneliness, anger, grief, etc.  Now what do we do with ourselves?

We need to find transfer addictions.  Have you ever noticed how many people at AA meetings smoke?  They’ve transferred one addiction to another.  Yes, of course, we should endeavor to cure ourselves of having addictive personalities at all.  But not only does that sound like hard and boring work, it may also be completely futile.  So whether you call them “hobbies” or “transfer addictions,” you need to stay on top of the selection process.

It's Not a Sin, It's a Food Choice

Somewhere along the way we ended up with all this moral context around our food choices.  A Ding Dong isn’t just a stupidly sweet petroleum product we occasionally opt to eat.  Instead, it’s wickedly delicious, a sinful treat.  What exactly is “sinful” about it? 

It's not really “good” or “bad” to eat a certain food, right? It's just a food choice. Different foods have different effects on our bodies. Some fuels are healthy for our engines, like gasoline, and some are not, like shampoo. It's smarter to run our cars on gasoline and avoid shampoo, but not “good.”