I’ve struggled with my weight pretty much my whole life. As a kid, I started putting on weight when I was about 6 and really started putting it on around 9 or 10. I distinctly remember well meaning adults either rationing and forbidding food or making comments trying to get me to eat less. Despite that, I hadn’t consciously changed anything to gain the weight and so I could not lose it no matter what I did. Another thing also happened around the same time: my relationship to food started to change. I no longer simply ate because I wanted to, I started creating an association with food and guilt. I started an internal battle between me and my body: I couldn’t trust it because it wanted food but food was now an enemy.
I clearly remember what it was like before this. When I was but a wee little lad, before I was given the “overweight” label (“husky” according to the kids clothing section, thank you very much) and all the baggage that comes along with that, where I could eat something like a brownie, or an ice-cream cone, or a loaf of bread and simply just enjoy it. I didn’t think about the calories in it, the sugar content, how bad this is for me and how I’m going to have to make sure I compensate for it by eating extra healthy tomorrow. None of that. It was just pure presence and enjoyment. The true essence of zen.
But that is a distant memory. As an adult I have “figured out” how to lose weight many times, usually through some form of restriction: cutting out entire food groups, calorie counting, intermittent fasting, etc. These all work…until they don’t. Mostly just because to keep it off I would have to maintain that lifestyle forever and that was too much work. Thus, my weight has yo-yo’d more times than I can count over the years, going from my lowest of about 162 pounds to 213 pounds at my highest.
Regardless of what I was doing or what the scale said there were always two constants:
- I would look at myself and see myself as overweight
- I thought about food and what I put in my body constantly, literally all the time
At some point I think I just had enough. I wanted to feel that pure joy of eating food just for the experience of it, without my mind jumping in with judgements or justifications. I wanted to feel okay with my body no matter what it looked like or what the scale said. I wanted that zen I had as a little kid back.
This led me down a rabbit hole of self-reflection. First, I had to unpack all my associations with food so that everything I ate stopped having a story and simply became…food. If you’ve struggled with this yourself this is a critically important step. I’ll write about my particular intuitive fasting eating plan in another post, this one is preparation to set you up for success. I know you’ll be tempted to skip this emotional yabber and go straight to the eating plan, but doing the hard work of introspection is key to figuring out why you have the struggles you have and how to go about overcoming them for good. Alright let’s dive in.
How to End The War With Your Body
We want to get to the point where we can eat intuitively, where you can trust that your hunger signals are accurate and that your body will only signal you when it needs nutrients to keep itself going. But in order to do that, we first have to unpack all the baggage we have around food. How can you eat intuitively when your hunger signals are all out of whack? When you don’t know what real hunger even feels like? When the second you feel any discomfort you ‘feel hungry’ for a treat to distract yourself?
I encourage you to seek help here, it really helps to have a therapist to bounce ideas and thoughts off of. The work is done by you at the end of the day but I found therapy to be incredibly helpful for this process.
The first step then is simply to observe yourself, to cultivate awareness, to learn to eat mindfully. Continue to follow whatever eating style you currently have. Allow yourself to eat until satisfied and if you’re restricting yourself in any way try to slowly ease back on that. Reintroduce “forbidden foods” and stop obsessing over the calorie count of the food you eat. Your task now is to simply observe your mind and your body as you eat. Really listen. What is it telling you? What is underneath the gut reaction (bam, food pun) you have to that food? The feelings we have when we eat particular foods were likely established a very long time ago and can follow us forever, so you’ll have to dig deep. One tip that can be a tremendous help in this effort is to journal your reactions and to constantly ask yourself “what’s underneath that thought/feeling?” to begin to peel the layers (bam, another one).
As you do this you’ll start to discover some of the patterns or stories you’re telling yourself. For instance, since I was overweight during very formative years and had to deal with a lot of torment around that from other people, I created the association that fat = bad. Simple enough. But exactly what that meant was nebulous, that’s why I always felt fat regardless of what I actually looked like; I didn’t have a goal to work towards as much as a vague idea to run away from.
Okay great, but then there’s another layer: what I’m really trying to avoid isn’t having fat on my body per se, but the negative thoughts, feelings, and consequences I experienced because of it. In my mind, being fat meant being judged, it meant other people looked down on me and my character, it meant I had an inherent shame around my body, it meant the people I was physically attracted to wouldn’t be attracted to me.
I thought if I focused on my weight that negative feeling would also go away, but it turned out to be the opposite: the negative feeling is a prerequisite for my perceived fatness. By addressing this feeling at the root, you’ll begin to notice what flares up your ’emotional hunger’ and begin to focus on addressing those things instead of using food to ease your pain and self-soothe. You’ll look in the mirror one day and realize that the only person who cares about your weight is you. The people who love you will love you regardless of what you look like. The people you find attractive will only see your weight as a handicap if you do.
And so it goes. What this process looks like will be different for everyone but it always involves looking within yourself and looking at that which you’ve been avoiding. Yeah, you know that thing that just flashed in your mind before you shut it down? Look there to start. Perhaps you’ve been avoiding some trauma, perhaps you’ll realize that you unconsciously see yourself as genetically predisposed to being fat or ‘big boned’, perhaps you’ve had life experiences that make you crave control in your life and food is something predictable that you know you can control, perhaps you’ll see that you’re creating a cocoon of body fat to protect yourself from rejection or from the harshness of the world.
Take your time with this. We’re not trying to find another quick fix, but trying to address the issue at the root so it can finally stop running your life.
Once you begin to heal internally you’ll be able to notice the difference between your true hunger signals and an emotional trigger. You’ll notice that real hunger builds over time but emotional hunger arises instantaneously and usually for a specific thing. You’ll see that eating a brownie from time to time won’t derail your entire life, that what matters is the aggregate and if you make sure to focus on including the nutritionally dense foods that your body craves it’ll be fine. You’ll be able to eat until you’re satisfied and comfortably leave food on your plate, where before maybe you scarfed it all down as if you didn’t know when you’d be able to eat that again.
Ironically, this also means that the day will come when you’ll look in the mirror and realize that you no longer see yourself as you did before. You’re at the ideal weight for your body, regardless of what the number on the scale says. Getting to the point where you accept your body as it is and love it for what it does ironically allows your body to come to an equilibrium.
Conclusion
I’m still not as zen as I was at 4 years old, still not eating happy meals and ice-cream cones for the sheer joy of it. But I’m miles further than I was before doing all this work. I can allow my body to just be without me putting a judgement on it; I have seen that my weight doesn’t have to affect how I conduct my life; I have realized that the stories I carried around about my body when I was 12 aren’t true anymore, and perhaps they never were. I hope some day I’ll get to that childlike state of pure joy. But regardless, all the pain I’ve been through and the effort I’ve put in has been worth it. I can’t control whether I ever get to that 4-year-old zen or not, but with this work I have found my way back towards my body, a way to feel safe and at home again, and I hope you will too.
Thanks for reading!
The JJ Experiment 