Facing reality in peace

365 is the number of pounds I weighed when I was in the hospital earlier this year. After spending several years learning about non-dieting, I decided it wasn’t stopping my slow but steady weight gain.

History: The further away from my dysfunctional family I came, the more weight I lost. One day I decided to follow an actual diet program, Physician’s Weight Loss. With this diet, in spite of huge amounts of cheating, I got down to 177 pounds. They are still around, but I don’t recommend them. The office I went to was staffed by loony people, and pregnancy ended my agony. I’m just glad that it was only a thousand or so bucks, and not something like weight loss surgery, which is insanity personified.

After my daughter was born, I faced the fear of being a mother. This is not a natural activity for someone with the family background I had, and I did the only thing I knew: I ate my way through it. Even though I was a compulsive eater, I still gained only about 12 pounds a year. It was really a slow, steady weight gain.

12 pounds a year calculates out to 115 calories too much per day. That’s half a candy bar or two apples. What that tells me is that my metabolism isn’t in particularly bad shape, or I would have gained much more easily.

Several years ago I found out about non-dieting. Geneen Roth and Overcoming Overeating were my first sources of information. I even attended a GR seminar, and began to understand the connection between emotions and food. Both philosophies point out that food is just food, and it helps the emotional life if you legalize. Legalizing really did help me.

But nothing was helping me stop the root cause of my compulsive eating: my poor self-esteem. I would beat myself up for every perceived error I made in life, and believe me, everything was an error. I honestly believed that I was a failure, in spite of a full happy life, with a loving husband, a great job and a wonderful daughter.