New Here... anyone have people act threatened by your IE choice?

[Guest guest]

I've been doing IE for a while now (October 2007), and I've noticed a trend.

People who are actively dieting will get very defensive when I bring up my

*personal* choice to STOP dieting. I always sprinkle my stories with " this was

my choice " and " this was best for me " and " everyone needs to find their own

answers. " Yet it doesn't seem to matter.

It recently cost me a friend on facebook. I was so stunned. She wasn't someone I

knew that well, but she mentioned having gone to the gym to join and be

measured. She talked about how humiliated she felt with the measuring. I simply

stated that I stopped getting weighed or measured several years back and it's

been a lot healthier for me emotionally.

She replied with comments about how I must not need to lose weight (which is not

even slightly true if you're using BMI type standards... or anyone else's,

frankly - except my own). She told me she wasn't dieting, but doing Weight

Watchers (which made me groan because, for me, WW was the single worst DIET I

did). She loved herself, but needed to be healthier. I said it sounded like she

had a great mindset and tried to leave it at that... then she unfriended me and

I was stunned.

It's not the first " friend " I've lost. I switched from being a diet blogger to

being an IE blogger (I don't have time for it anymore) and lost a LOT of

followers. It's like they're threatened, somehow, by the fact that I've decided

to accept my body as is, judge it as little as possible and eat whatever I

decide I want or need in a given moment.

The result for me hasn't been weight loss. However, it has been weight

stability. I doubt my weight has fluctuated more than 15 pounds since I began

IE. Since before I was yo-yo dieting, regularly losing 25 - 30 pounds and then

gaining that plus 25 back, this is huge progress for me.

I would love to be what I consider thin. It's not that I wouldn't. Shopping

would be easier, I wouldn't worry about booths at diners... etc. etc. But the

bottom line is, I dieting for over 20 years. It did nothing except - in the long

run - make me fatter. It also totally destroyed my metabolism. Things got even

worse because I have Hashimoto's Thyroid Disease now, and that makes losing

weight damn near impossible. Last summer, my gallbladder had to come out in

emergency surgery. For a full month, I ate very little. When I began eating

again, it was extremely low fat for weeks. If I lost even 8 pounds, I'd be

stunned. That may seem like a lot, but in my earliest years on Weight Watchers

I'd often lose between 11 - 13 pounds my first WEEK. And often up to 8 the

second. So, 8 pounds in 6 weeks is not much at all... comparatively speaking.

The point being... dieting is just a vicious circle for me. It's down, up, down,

up, down... you get the point. It got harder and harder to accomplish any

" down. " I felt horrible about myself.

You may wonder why WW was the worst diet for me. They spend SO much time

preaching about how it's NOT a diet. It's a lifestyle, it's easy, it's the light

at the end of the tunnel. Well, when I was " good " on WW and didn't lose weight?

Or worse, gained? I felt like the world's biggest failure. If I couldn't lose

weight doing that, I might as well run out and have my stomach stapled. WW was

so easy and so simple, that failure felt like... 100 times worse. Atkins is

hard. South Beach is hard. THey're way more restrictive. But WW... you can " eat

anything and lose weight. " But I got to a point where that was proving less and

less true.

I knew I couldn't diet anymore. I just didn't know that not dieting was an

option that anyone, least of all an eating disorder therapist, would consider

acceptable.

Now, I know... and it sucks to have people find this intimidating or

threatening.