no more dieting
Sep. 6th, 2011 03:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravnsdaughterI am never dieting again.
By saying this, I do not mean to say that I am giving up on myself, that I intend to remain this size for the rest of my life, that I don't care. Rather, I am doing this because I DO care. My health is one of my most important cares in the world.
But seriously. Diets, for the most part, don't work. The proportion of people who succeed on a "diet", compared to those who maybe lose some weight for a while but then gain it back, or what have you, is miniscule. I (personally) know only two people who have lost weight on an actual commercial "diet" (that I can think of at the current moment) and kept it off for any length of time. One of these is my father, who did the South Beach diet and lost probably about 100 pounds (I'm guessing here) and has kept it off for a couple years now. You can imagine the harassment I get from him to go on South Beach.
I think I went on my first diet at about age 5 or 6. Yes seriously! I was a chunky baby, and then a slightly pudgy kid. My dad didn't gain any of his weight until he was an adult, and then he spent the time between when I was born (roughly) up until a couple years ago yo-yo-ing up and down repeatedly. We always had copies of the Weight Watchers books in the house. I tried lord knows how many times during my childhood to lose weight, but never did lose any permanently. My parents tried everything. They tried to bribe me - one time I was offered $1 per pound by my parents, and then my aunt and uncle were going to match it. When I was 14, my parents bought tickets for me to see the New Kids on the Block, and then tried to tell me I had to lose 30 pounds before I could go. I didn't lose any - and I still got to go to the concert because it would have been a waste of money otherwise.
Food became the enemy. My mom would cook chicken for dinner - a whole chicken cut apart - and my dad and I would get the breast meat because it was the lowest calorie. This made me happy because I preferred the white meat anyways, but sheesh. Back then, my every move was watched when it came to food. My mom HATED to cook (and still does), so we had relatively boring meals most of the time. Chicken, rice and a veggie. Roast beef, potatoes and a veggie. That sort of thing. If I tried to put more than 1 teaspoon's worth of margarine on my rice or potatoes to give it some flavour? Bad Karla! I wanted ketchup for my roast beef? Bad Karla! (for the record, I STILL like ketchup on my roast beef better than gravy, and there's NOTHING wrong with that). I'm sure there's a million other examples that I'm forgetting, too. My mom never tasted food while she was cooking, because that was "picking". She would put the veggies on the table - plain steamed whatever - and god forbid I try to put anything other than pepper on them. It wasn't until adulthood that I discovered I actually LIKED brussels sprouts, asparagus, peas, spinach, broccoli... because I'd never had any of them lightly steamed before - everything had been cooked to mush. I would volunteer to cook, and on the rare occasion I was allowed to, I would go to taste test something to make sure it tasted fine and I'd get given crap for it and told I was picking and that I shouldn't pick. Once the kitchen was cleaned up after dinner, it was closed for the night. I'd go in there to get a glass of water and my mom would yell from the living room "what are you into?"
It's no freaking WONDER I have such a problem with food these days!
When I hit age 15, I got my first job (that wasn't babysitting or house sitting) at McDonalds. OMG. I had MONEY. Of my own! I also got a 50% discount on all food at work before or after my shift or on my breaks. I also took every damned shift I could. Looking back, I think part of this was just so I wasn't at home too. And I ate at work all the time. I would have a snack before my shift started, a combo on my break, and then often I'd have something to eat before I left after work as well. I gained a significant amount of weight during high school - probably close to 60 or 75 pounds, I'd guess. I know roughly what I was when I finished highschool (275-ish), but I don't have a clue what I was when I started.
Looking back on my growing-up years, I now see that I had significant issues of varying types, including depression, going all the way back to at least puberty (which in my case started around 10-11). A LOT of my memories of my childhood revolve around food, and almost all of these memories are negative. Well, except for the way eating made me feel. It helped me feel better when I was sad, at least until someone found out about it and gave me shit, or I gained weight and then got teased/bitched out/treated horribly for it. But that's how depression works. You end up in a vicious circle of grasping for things to make you feel better in the short term, when they're just going to end up causing more heartaches or headaches in the long term.
Once I hit adulthood, and eventually moved out of my parents' home and to the mainland, you would think I would have figured out how to break the cycle. But old habits die hard, right? I ended up in a relationship that mirrored a lot of the traits of my childhood. Looking back, my Ex#1 and I just weren't a good match, but what 21 year old is going to recognize that? There were a lot of the same abusive behaviours in that relationship that I had going with my family. Constant messages of "you're not good enough". And while Ex#2 was better in some ways, he was worse in others, and that relationship was pretty much just more of the same.
It has taken me until the past year or so to get to the point where I am just totally freaking FED UP. I am fed up with the way my family treats me. I am fed up with feeling like I should be putting my life on hold until I'm an acceptable weight to my family, or to society in general. I am tired of thinking "no, I can't do that, I'm too big". With the exception of a very few things that really do have hard weightlimits (for example, horseback riding), there's no reason that if I decide I really want to do something, I can't find a way to do it. I'm tired of the emotional rollercoaster that dieting has put me on.
So this is it. No more dieting. I am no longer going to let the number on the scale dictate my self worth. Forget it. I may occasionally weigh myself out of curiosity. I may track my food, simply to see how much sodium I'm taking in, or to see if there's a trend in how certain things affect how I feel. I will NOT be doing it solely for the purpose of tracking calories and sticking to a specific number each day.
What I AM going to do is learn to listen to my body. I'm going to learn how to slow down. How to eat food that nourishes both my mind and body. How to love myself, and love my life.
And I'm going to set some goals that revolve around things other than the number on the scale. I want to learn to eat so that my blood sugar is at a healthy level and I don't become diabetic. I want to get my blood pressure back under control without the use of medication. And I want to get my mental health to a much better place than it's in at the moment (that's not to say that I'm not doing well with it lately, because I am, but I can always do better). This last one especially will be helped by giving up dieting.
My first goal? I want to be able to dance most of the night at my wedding. And I'm going to do it, too!
By saying this, I do not mean to say that I am giving up on myself, that I intend to remain this size for the rest of my life, that I don't care. Rather, I am doing this because I DO care. My health is one of my most important cares in the world.
But seriously. Diets, for the most part, don't work. The proportion of people who succeed on a "diet", compared to those who maybe lose some weight for a while but then gain it back, or what have you, is miniscule. I (personally) know only two people who have lost weight on an actual commercial "diet" (that I can think of at the current moment) and kept it off for any length of time. One of these is my father, who did the South Beach diet and lost probably about 100 pounds (I'm guessing here) and has kept it off for a couple years now. You can imagine the harassment I get from him to go on South Beach.
I think I went on my first diet at about age 5 or 6. Yes seriously! I was a chunky baby, and then a slightly pudgy kid. My dad didn't gain any of his weight until he was an adult, and then he spent the time between when I was born (roughly) up until a couple years ago yo-yo-ing up and down repeatedly. We always had copies of the Weight Watchers books in the house. I tried lord knows how many times during my childhood to lose weight, but never did lose any permanently. My parents tried everything. They tried to bribe me - one time I was offered $1 per pound by my parents, and then my aunt and uncle were going to match it. When I was 14, my parents bought tickets for me to see the New Kids on the Block, and then tried to tell me I had to lose 30 pounds before I could go. I didn't lose any - and I still got to go to the concert because it would have been a waste of money otherwise.
Food became the enemy. My mom would cook chicken for dinner - a whole chicken cut apart - and my dad and I would get the breast meat because it was the lowest calorie. This made me happy because I preferred the white meat anyways, but sheesh. Back then, my every move was watched when it came to food. My mom HATED to cook (and still does), so we had relatively boring meals most of the time. Chicken, rice and a veggie. Roast beef, potatoes and a veggie. That sort of thing. If I tried to put more than 1 teaspoon's worth of margarine on my rice or potatoes to give it some flavour? Bad Karla! I wanted ketchup for my roast beef? Bad Karla! (for the record, I STILL like ketchup on my roast beef better than gravy, and there's NOTHING wrong with that). I'm sure there's a million other examples that I'm forgetting, too. My mom never tasted food while she was cooking, because that was "picking". She would put the veggies on the table - plain steamed whatever - and god forbid I try to put anything other than pepper on them. It wasn't until adulthood that I discovered I actually LIKED brussels sprouts, asparagus, peas, spinach, broccoli... because I'd never had any of them lightly steamed before - everything had been cooked to mush. I would volunteer to cook, and on the rare occasion I was allowed to, I would go to taste test something to make sure it tasted fine and I'd get given crap for it and told I was picking and that I shouldn't pick. Once the kitchen was cleaned up after dinner, it was closed for the night. I'd go in there to get a glass of water and my mom would yell from the living room "what are you into?"
It's no freaking WONDER I have such a problem with food these days!
When I hit age 15, I got my first job (that wasn't babysitting or house sitting) at McDonalds. OMG. I had MONEY. Of my own! I also got a 50% discount on all food at work before or after my shift or on my breaks. I also took every damned shift I could. Looking back, I think part of this was just so I wasn't at home too. And I ate at work all the time. I would have a snack before my shift started, a combo on my break, and then often I'd have something to eat before I left after work as well. I gained a significant amount of weight during high school - probably close to 60 or 75 pounds, I'd guess. I know roughly what I was when I finished highschool (275-ish), but I don't have a clue what I was when I started.
Looking back on my growing-up years, I now see that I had significant issues of varying types, including depression, going all the way back to at least puberty (which in my case started around 10-11). A LOT of my memories of my childhood revolve around food, and almost all of these memories are negative. Well, except for the way eating made me feel. It helped me feel better when I was sad, at least until someone found out about it and gave me shit, or I gained weight and then got teased/bitched out/treated horribly for it. But that's how depression works. You end up in a vicious circle of grasping for things to make you feel better in the short term, when they're just going to end up causing more heartaches or headaches in the long term.
Once I hit adulthood, and eventually moved out of my parents' home and to the mainland, you would think I would have figured out how to break the cycle. But old habits die hard, right? I ended up in a relationship that mirrored a lot of the traits of my childhood. Looking back, my Ex#1 and I just weren't a good match, but what 21 year old is going to recognize that? There were a lot of the same abusive behaviours in that relationship that I had going with my family. Constant messages of "you're not good enough". And while Ex#2 was better in some ways, he was worse in others, and that relationship was pretty much just more of the same.
It has taken me until the past year or so to get to the point where I am just totally freaking FED UP. I am fed up with the way my family treats me. I am fed up with feeling like I should be putting my life on hold until I'm an acceptable weight to my family, or to society in general. I am tired of thinking "no, I can't do that, I'm too big". With the exception of a very few things that really do have hard weightlimits (for example, horseback riding), there's no reason that if I decide I really want to do something, I can't find a way to do it. I'm tired of the emotional rollercoaster that dieting has put me on.
So this is it. No more dieting. I am no longer going to let the number on the scale dictate my self worth. Forget it. I may occasionally weigh myself out of curiosity. I may track my food, simply to see how much sodium I'm taking in, or to see if there's a trend in how certain things affect how I feel. I will NOT be doing it solely for the purpose of tracking calories and sticking to a specific number each day.
What I AM going to do is learn to listen to my body. I'm going to learn how to slow down. How to eat food that nourishes both my mind and body. How to love myself, and love my life.
And I'm going to set some goals that revolve around things other than the number on the scale. I want to learn to eat so that my blood sugar is at a healthy level and I don't become diabetic. I want to get my blood pressure back under control without the use of medication. And I want to get my mental health to a much better place than it's in at the moment (that's not to say that I'm not doing well with it lately, because I am, but I can always do better). This last one especially will be helped by giving up dieting.
My first goal? I want to be able to dance most of the night at my wedding. And I'm going to do it, too!