The story of how I lost the weight and why I decided to gain it all back.
It all started with a plate of chicken and refusal to eat chicken skin.
It was 1997, I was eating, well more like picking at my lunch as my family was eating. To everyone's horror I was separating the skin from the chicken. I vaguely remember throwing a fit at the dinner table, stamping off and crying. Mom and dad were flustered and upset because lunch that day was a treat. We had chicken! At first I was happy because the chicken was good, but at the same time I was more mad because the said chicken and the potatoes were floating in fat and I wasn't supposed to eat fat. The maddening thing is that I really wanted to!
1997 was two years after the war ended. We came back in 1996 after being refugees for a year. My dad came back 1st and started rebuilding our mostly burned house. When we joined him the house was not completed yet, and we all had to live in my tiny room, the only room that hadn't burned. I remember that time well for all the canned food we ate. I didn’t eat peas for years afterwards. But in 1997 my mom got a job and so she was able to buy that chicken and treat us. I wish I had picked a different day to start my weight loss attempts.
This was the time we all moved into a renovated school because that also burned down. However, we were kids and we had other worries that didn’t include war or survival or rebuilding. I don’t remember what boys did but the girls at school started talking about who looked good and who didn’t, how bellies are supposed to be flat and our thighs thin enough to encircle them with our hands. I am sure there was a lot more we talked about but these 3 things are the only ones I remember, because they are the reason I concluded that I have to lose some weight.
That's how everything started.
My efforts evolved with years. I've tried eating less and most of the time I was angry that I did not have access to things diet plans listed in the magazines. When I came to the US at 19, that wish finally started to come true, and eventually when I got a job and stopped being a poor student I really put some effort and money into it. And even then dieting was hard, mostly because restricting and counting calories are not fun, especially when you have a lack of understanding and knowledge. And I'm not talking about knowledge of food or diets or exercise, I had absorbed everything that I could about that. The knowledge that I was missing was on mindset. Until in 2019 I finally got that knowledge too.
In 2019 I've lost 20 pounds which is the number I have been saying I wanted to lose since I started. The joke is on me though because since that 1st diet I've actually gained 20 pounds, so in reality I was back where I was - more or less. You know how it goes: we start a diet, we are struggling, we give up and eat only to feel bad about ourselves and start another diet. To be fair, I'm not saying that was my weight in 1997 as I have no clue what my weight was then. It was post war time and we did not have scales, so I did not know until I started going to doctors for physicals how much I weighed which was in college. Regardless, I lost weight, but, back to the mindset.
In 2019 I learned about taught work. I already knew, thanks to Geneen Roth's work, that if I was to eat when hungry and stop when I am full I would lose weight, but this time I knew what to do when I wanted to eat when I was not hungry, I was to manage my mind by examining my thoughts on paper and seeing how they created my feeling, and then I was to feel my feelings instead of eating. Those things were huge, I knew that logically, but that's not why I lost weight at that time. The plan or as in addition to all I already mentioned also included no sugar no flower, and I actually did it for four months. While I was a beginner at managing my mind around eating when I'm not hungry, cutting out major food group did get the weight off.
What happened then was a shock to me.
I thought when I lost weight I would like my body. I believed I would be able to wear anything I want. I imagined I would just have more confidence in life about everything, because until that point, I have blamed my body for everything.
If I did poorly on an interview it was somehow because of my weight, because I would have been more confident and more able to speak openly if my body weighed less.
If I was uncomfortable in my relationship or at events, It's because my body didn't look good. If my body looked better, I would have surely felt more comfortable and confident.
I really hoped that my belly would finally be flat and I would look in the mirror and like what I saw.
But that is not what happened. I looked in the mirror, and the person I saw was me, smaller, but still same shape and same belly. And I kept looking, and people kept complimenting me, and I just could not understand. There was an error somewhere and it was like everything I have sewn together with weight loss thread started ripping. It started ripping so fast that dieting became very hard. Why was I even doing this? I was always going to be me. There's always going to be a belly there because body shape doesn’t change with weight loss. Why am I even doing this?
Luckily for me, at the same time that I had learned about weight loss with thought work, I also ran into Kara who was talking about loving your body as it is, being okay with your body as it is, not being at war with food plus some things about feminism, patriarchy and capitalism that I really didn’t understand much. I was terrified of her. I didn't know most of what she was saying. I heard her words, but they just couldn't land for me. I didn't understand them as if she was speaking foreign language. How can one like their body as it is? And she claimed she liked hers, and I believed her because of the way she spoke about it, I knew she was telling the truth. I Googled her. She looked petite and she was plus size, so it was true, but still, at that I had gone down the lose weight route, because I wanted it so much for so long.
The shock of actually not loving my body after losing weight had brought me back to Kara and to start doing the work of not hating my body and not moralizing food. Truly, letting go of all the rules and just eating whatever the fuck I wanted, whenever I wanted it, I gained all the weight back plus some, but as I was gaining weight, I really worked on changing my body image by changing my thoughts about my body. I worked on standing in front of the mirror and getting to know my body as it was, because I never really did that. I really never knew how I looked from all the angles and what parts of me I liked and what parts of me I didn't and how my body looked when it moved, and how I looked in different things that I avoided because of my size.
I started feeling a little different right away. I felt a little free to not care about the food and to not care about the weight and to not be mean to my body. With time it got better and easier. I no longer think mean stuff about my body and my belly. It's not that I always love myself. I just mostly don't think about myself much. And sometimes I look in the mirror and I'm like, so cute, and other times I look at myself from the side, I'm like, Oh, I’m so wide, but it doesn't sting as much, because I worked through it. I worked through understanding that being wide is not bad, that having a belly is not bad, that eating food is not bad.
I've gained weight and that is fine, because at that point in time when I did all of this, the way people did it was the intuitive eating way. All of us had spent so much time restricting and so much time heating ourselves that our relationship with our body and food was so crappy that the only way it could be restored was to just let it all go and just eat whatever you want. Because eventually we would realize that we don't actually want to eat whatever we want whenever we want. Eating ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner does not really fuel our body. You figure out that you don't actually like all the things you think you like. Eventually you have enough. You get saturated by it, and you don't want it. This way works but it does cause weight gain, but pairing it with body image work was a win for me.
On the other side of this, I have realised that this can be done differently.
My approach is to combine body image work with permitting yourself all the foods when hungry and looking into your mind for an answer to a question “what am I feeding?” when you’re eating and you’re not hungry. What I myself did is great but when I repaired my relationship with food and body I did not repair my relationship with food, so I am doing it now. Of course, there is no wrong way to do this - so do what speaks to you!
If you want to examine your own relationships with your body, food and eating, then go ahead and use this link to download the Take Your Body Back Workbook https://bellylines.com/resources.