After several years of legalizing, and perceiving no particular change in self-acceptance or a tendency to go to my natural weight (in other words, still gaining), I decided I would ask a therapist.
My GP recommended one, and I brought to him my basic question: If I’ve succeeded at moving to non-dieting, and I’m successful in life, why am I not thin?
He took this question well, and we started investigating. After briefly exploring my childhood, he concluded that there was no particular trauma that was holding me back. Rather, he proposed, I simply didn’t know how to live a normal life.
This actually made sense to me. A family with compulsions of overeating, gambling and alcoholism left me with no personal hygiene habits, no social skills, no ability to face day-to-day life without a crutch. My crutch was compulsive eating.
So I began working on the internal critic. For every time I told myself I was a failure, I made myself analyze it and rationally examine the situation. This quieted that destructive voice in my head. I began to say goodbye to the failure voice and hello to rational thought. The failure voice was pure black and white. If the situation was good, I told myself that it would go bad very fast. Convinced that I was always a moment away from “being discovered” as the failure I really was, it was essentially a constant torture, and the pain could only be softened by food as Valium. After several months, I could actually judge that I was recovering. This freed up my brain to work on my two goals: ending the overeating and being more active in my own life.
Slowly I started looking at my eating habits. I began to eat less, and lost weight. Belonging to several online groups, I actually told someone I was losing weight without restricting what I was eating. That caused a reactive binge, and I likely regained most of that weight.
Additionally I began to end my couch potato habits. One baby step at a time, but I kept talking to myself, and have been improving my time spent on housework and other chores.
The basic thinking that drives me is rational thought. Stress is tolerable, food is not inherently evil, I am not a failure. Those are the extremes I used to live with. Now I’m in gray area, or as I prefer to call it, the full color life. Stress is hard sometimes, but I can deal with it, and it goes away. Food is food, and it serves both emotional and physical purposes. I am successful by most standards, and I even fail at some things. I am a survivor of black and white thinking.
