Epiphany at last...

[Guest guest]

I have been in such a funk the past week or so, my food has been entirely off,

I've been out of touch emotionally with IE and - depressed. It was my birthday

last Friday and I was so swamped by feelings of loss that I could barely

function. I took some days of work to celebrate and instead spend most of my

time in front of the tv -eating.

I woke up at 3:00 this morning and was lying there tracing back to figure out

what in the world was wrong with me. It boiled down to two things; a recent

photo from a wonderful group outing where I was clearly miserable and the dinner

party last week. The sum of it is that I feel my life is a complete failure -

because I'm overweight. And while that standard for success has always been the

case, it suddenly struck me as a really useless and crazy measure of my life.

Additionally, lying there in the dark of the night, thinking it all through I

could see that 99% of this misery has been the result of the fragmentation

caused by the diet mentality, dieting and diet backlash.

For decades most of my energy has gone to losing weight, so of course nothing

else would register in my psyche more than the size of my body and my utter

failure to achieve my Number One goal all these years.

When I went to Boston not too many years ago to graduate with my MA, know what

was on my mind? The fact that I'd re-gained the thirty pounds I'd lost a few

years earlier, plus some. There was no joy in the graduation that I'd worked so

hard to achieve, only the self-conscious awareness that I was fat and therefore

a clear failure.

All those diets, all those rules, all that nutritional information, all those

fasts and weigh-ins and all that time unwittingly betraying my body and myself

meal after meal after meal.

Wow.

This revelation has hit me at a whole new level and it took some time to sink

in. Boy, do I feel better to realize what's been eating at me and why I've

responded by eating. I guess and hope this is progress.

Sandarah