did not choose to be fat, but I am responsible

Check out Pastaqueen’s blog entry:  http://www.pastaqueen.com/halfofme/archives/2006/11/do_we_choose_to.html#comm… 

She wrote an essay on this very subject that’s powerful and convincing.

I did not choose to be fat. I did choose to comfort myself through some very difficult times. The only way I knew to comfort myself was food. That became a lifelong habit that I only learned a year or so ago how to change.

I am responsible for my body size.

Think about the 4 stages of ability (I learned this stuff in Manager school but never figured out that it could apply to my eating disorder):

1. Unconscious Competence
2. Conscious Competence
3. Conscious Incompetence
4. Unconscious Incompetence

People are in different stages for different skills. How much of a choice is it if you are at UI and don’t even know there are options? Little to no choice IMO. But becoming aware of your incompetence can lead to choices to improve your abilities. I know that my world turned around when a therapist said to me, “You simply don’t know how to live normally. It’s not that you lack the academic knowledge, it’s just not in your frame of reference as a possibility.” When I learned that, I realized that I could change many things in my life by choice.

I knew the academics of healthy eating, but it never occurred to me I could go there (Unconscious Incompetence). I didn’t know how. Think about the tennis player, although why I choose that sport I have no idea. I don’t play, don’t ever intend to. He can be UI, going out and hitting balls MOL across the net, never making a score, but having a great time. Then someone challenges him to a match, and he learns that he is incompetent. Then he actually has an opportunity to choose to be better, after which he can move through the other stages.

I chose to comfort myself when upset. And I was good at it: brownies, ice cream, you name it. Food even worked when I was upset at being fat, and knew that eating would produce more fat. Talk about a mental block! Humans have an amazing capacity for blocking out things that they don’t want to pay attention to. It works great after you’ve just given birth and want to bond with your child. Doesn’t work so great when you’re trying to stay sober but don’t know anything but drinking to comfort yourself.

I was so good at blocking (also called compartmentalizing) that, in spite of my size,  I could go to work each day, behave like a “normal” sized person, and not think about the issues my weight caused. That’s because I was highly motivated to earn money, having grown up very poor. I was more motivated by that than I was demotivated by my fat. It was only when work was over that I would head to the store to buy my stash of comfort. That scene repeated itself thousands of times in my life. If I so much as looked in a mirror, the gig was up - I’d crash immediately. You cannot imagine how good I was at avoiding reflective surfaces.

The reason diets don’t often work is that the issue of why a person eats too much is not addressed. It’s not that every person eats like I did - there are myriad reasons for doing it. But a diet won’t stick until the mind adapts too. For me, after therapy, I believe myself to have the following skill levels:

• Non-food comforting: Conscious competence
• Dieting/stopping at full:  Conscious incompetence
• Tasting and enjoying my food: Conscious competence
• Exercising for my health: still unconscious incompetence
• Having former trigger foods in the house and not eating them: unconscious competence

And the list goes on. I’m looking forward to moving more of these skills to higher levels.