Ending the Tug of War with Ourselves—Part One—10 Steps to Stop Dieting and Lose Weight

It Must Be Nice

One day at work, the other nurses were having a conversation about different diets they have tried. They were, as women often do, bemoaning their struggles and bonding over the mutual and many frustrations related to being the tenant of a lump of flesh and bone. They didn’t include me in the conversation. Later, I spoke with one of them and she said, “It must be nice not to have to struggle with your weight.” 

It must be nice, it must be niiiice (sang Hamilton style). My answer–it’s a looonnng story. 

I was amused that they just assumed it is easy for me. And while I won’t say my 5’2”, pear shaped body sporting a $50 Victoria Secret boob job is what I’ve always dreamed of, I can happily report that I have dropped my end of the rope in the tug of war with myself. I maintain an appropriate body weight and have a healthy relationship with food and eating. It was a life moment of sorts and I was able to say to myself–You’ve come a long way, baby!

During my teen years and early twenties, like many girls and women, obsession over my weight and all my bodily imperfections used to be a constant presence in my head. Often it was front and center–obsessing over what I was eating, swinging between dieting and overeating, maintaining a constant self loathing either way. When it wasn’t front and center, it was still in the background, playing like haunting elevator music, tainting every moment with despair and a yearning for the elusive future moment when my life would be golden and sparkly because I would be thin. 

My childhood had many happy moments, but there was also a hot, large serving of hard with a generous side of pain. My parents loved us, but they divorced when I was 12 years old and, though divorce is never easy,  it was a relief compared to the dysfunction of their marriage. Things after the divorce weren’t easier; it was just a different flavor of hard. Overall, it can be summed up by a 1999 movie title: Girl, Interrupted. It is based on a true story and sums up what happens if you had any sort of trauma as a child (which most of us do—we can also say Boy, Interrupted). Childhood trauma can disrupt your development and if you don’t have a highly evolved adult around to help you process it, you can get stuck. Oftentimes the adults in our lives are not great at helping us process the trauma because either they are causing it or going through it with us and aren’t coping well either. Stuckness can take on many forms–becoming dysfunctional with food, relationships, drugs, alcohol, sex. The list could keep going and the dysfunction can continue for many years (sometimes a lifetime) which then can result in the dysfunctional patterns being passed to the next generation. 

Cloak of Invisibility

Many people use food like other people use drugs or alcohol, as a way to numb feelings or disassociate (detach from their pain). Being overweight can also be a protective mechanism for people who don’t like attention or for people who were abused as children. When I worked in the ICU, I had a patient who was morbidly obese. She was in her thirties, but her body was aging quickly due to her excess weight and she was in the ICU because she had had a stroke. I had to wear a protective gown and gloves to attend to her because she had yeast growing unchecked wherever the folds of her skin nestled together. Simply moving about the room and breathing were a struggle for her. When she was ready to be discharged from the ICU, the doctor tasked me with talking to her about her weight, “educating” her on how her obesity was negatively impacting her health and would undoubtedly lead to more health problems in the future. I was anxious about having this conversation because I don’t like to make my patients feel like I am judging them and I know that shaming people rarely equates to jumpstarting change. But I also felt concerned for her welfare. I sat down, discharge packet in hand, took a deep breath and began to explain the doctor’s concerns.

I don’t suppose it was the first time a medical professional had given her this lecture because she interrupted me and cut to the chase with a well rehearsed explanation. She was very open about it, though it obviously pained her to have to explain. Again. She had been to therapy and analyzed her issues. She understood how her weight was affecting her health and why she had spent her life spinning herself in a chrysalis of adipose tissue. She told me about her childhood and how she had been repeatedly sexually abused, how there was no safe space for her during those very formative and vulnerable years. She told me that being fat makes her feel safe because it transforms her from an object of desire to an object of disdain. Her fat is her very own Harry Potter “cloak of invisibility” and it makes it so she can move through the world, albeit with difficulty, feeling veiled. She told me that she can never, ever take the chance of being vulnerable to the advances of an abuser.

She was consigned to her condition with no desire to change because it is her protection from predators, her armor, her fortress. She is a nation of one and I could see that she is most likely and quite literally going to die on that hill defending her position. I told her that I understood and I cut my lecture short. I told her that I was sorry she had been hurt so deeply. I did not tell her to start eating healthier and exercising. 

And so it goes. Although for some people it is a fairly simple matter of “I love to eat”, more often than not excess weight is a public display of private suffering, a protective mechanism. It is a public service announcement– “Food is my happiest and worst moment of everyday, my best friend and worst enemy, my salvation and my daily, living hell”.

And herein lies the golden nugget. People who struggle with their weight often want to blame all their earthly unhappiness on the weight and if a person is quite overweight, the weight can legitimately make it hard to move through life with ease, so it isn’t an invalid point. But it is a vicious cycle. A person who uses food to numb pain creates more pain by using food to numb their pain.

So, what is a person to do? How do you break the cycle? Is healing a hopeless cause? Isn’t a beautiful butterfly supposed to burst triumphantly from the chrysalis? I say there is always hope, but for some the road to healing is a longer journey and may require professional help. It also means that losing weight is usually more complicated than learning to eat healthier and exercise. It is not often that you meet someone who has consigned themselves like my ICU patient, but many people are frustrated, exhausted by their stuckness. For the past three summers, I have had a monarch sanctuary on my porch. I can tell you, they don’t all make it from egg to butterfly. But I still hope for Every. Single. One.

~Melanie

Continue reading 10 Steps to Stop Dieting and Lose Weight—Ending the Tug of War with Ourselves—Part Two