Pick up almost any book by a fat person about their diet history, it will be almost the same story. Even books like Diary of a Fat Housewife where the author was "victorious over fat" has the same story of the diet cycle. This cycle involved going on a diet, losing weight, feeling "great" and then slowly the diet would fail. The person would regain the weight plus more and feel terrible about themselves. Every time I read these stories, I saw my own. I found I had higher self-esteem the more weight I lost. When the loss would stop, I would become depress and hate myself.
I'm always annoyed that studies showing fatness being worse than Hitler don't include a dieting history. Maybe they might find chronic dieting to be the culprit of many "obesity-related diseases."
My own diet history had almost everything I read in other books, except I never got prescription diet pills or had WLS. Perhaps it was because at the time I was under the glass ceiling of size 16. Size 16 and under meant you should continue dieting, but it's not as serious because you don't have death fat. Death fat is where fat because unacceptable and dangerous, whether it is or not. I was fat but not death fat and doctors didn't push pills on me (instead I used OTC ones). Their treatment was often lectures on going on diets with no real practical advice on getting healthy. The stories I read about fatties with the dreaded death fat were similar to mine but the dieting was often more extreme. For example this woman who had "Death fat." Her story is similar to mine as we both hated our bodies. But she never accepted herself and did anything she could to lose weight including surgery that nearly killed her (Warning it is graphic).
I weigh 165 now, and that's still too much for me. I have become much more comfortable with my personality and just being me, but I only really feel at home behind a computer, where I can hide my body. I don't know if I'll ever feel comfortable in my own skin. I still hate my body, every day. I still have all the internal demons of 28 years of everyone telling me I was wrong for looking the way I looked, and that I was less of a woman, and worthless as a person, because of how I looked.
The sad part is her story it is remarkably similar to one written at least 30 years ago in Shadows on a Tightrope about a woman who got WLS not for her health but because she couldn't live in a fat hating world anymore.
Everyone have a lovely holiday and a Merry Christmas or just a nice day. Remember the best present you can give yourself is loving your body!
Comments