Let go.
In the last few weeks, something has begun shifting for me. It’s been a revelation, because I wasn’t aware how super-secretly I was hanging on this idea. But I get it now.
I’m not going to lose any weight through the power of intuitive eating. I’m just not. And it’s okay.
Because honestly? I’ve still been clinging to a tiny, shredded hope that my weight was going to “settle” lower than it is now. I thought this stop in the high 140s was temporary, just a response to feeding 5.5 years of denied cravings. I was secretly convinced that when things settled, I’d end up in the mid-130s. After all, I’d maintained there for several years with only moderate restrictive eating and fewer than 5 hours of exercise a week.
Yeah, the fact that there had to be “moderate restrictive eating” to keep me there should have clued me in that 135 wasn’t a natural weight for my body, but I’m not always Ms. Self-Aware. Also, I’d stopped taking BCPs before I got into the really disordered dieting and then resumed them the same month I stopped dieting, so I rationally should have expected some new weight as a side effect, huh?
But I didn’t. I still believed that 135 would be my number, and I stubbornly held on to certain clothes and checked my body against them periodically to see if I was back to that size yet. I wasn’t going to do anything to try to get my weight back there; I simply believed it was going to happen.
And then…some part of me (a part that I’m awfully grateful to and probably ought to pay more attention to) began rejecting that. I started looking at myself in the mirror and not comparing this body with the 135-pound body I was waiting on. And more and more, I found myself thinking it was time to get on board with what I’m seeing now because this is what I look like. This is my body. It might be skinnier or fatter or exactly the same in the future, but that doesn’t matter – right now is all that matters.
It wasn’t, like, a big epiphany with a heavenly choir and rays of light shining down or anything, but my body just became real to me. The whole thing felt like my spirit just shrugged and said, “Okay. This is what I look like.”
It’s what made me able to give away those too-small clothes. And it’s made me comfortable wandering around the house in my underwear, because I have nothing to hide (I’d always claimed modesty, but it was really shame). I’m happy to find that I’m not disappointed; this is the first time in my life I have a (mostly) healthy relationship with food and exercise, so this is the first time I’ve ever had a chance to see what healthy looks like on my body.
It looks perfectly okay. And it’s nice not to be waiting anymore.
Whoa. This post called me out. I have been harboring the secret hope that intuitive eating will turn out to not only be sane and happy-making… but that it will undo the damage I’ve done to my body, resulting in the melting away of some of my weight.
Thank you. This is why I love the fatosphere: you keep my honest, even with myself.
Hey, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but WordPress is automatically generating some “possibly related posts” from restricted eating blogs at the bottom of your posts. You can learn how to turn off that feature here:http://viv.id.au/blog/?p=1657 if that’s what you want.
This is something I think people first of all don’t hear enough, but second of all even if they do know it intellectually, they have to come to it in their own time. Lord knows I still have secret “hopes” that my “natural weight” is where I am now, rather than where I was at my highest, so I’m not there yet.
Anyway, congratulations on becoming that much more comfortable in your skin and being able to accept your body as it is now, without reference to the past or the future.
I’m sorry to leave this comment here as it is not on-topic (so feel free to delete at your discretion, of course) but I noticed the automatically generated “possibly related posts” that Kate complained about here are showing up at the bottom of this post. You can turn them off if you want under Design, Extras. I know some folks were really displeased about this new “feature” because they were getting dieting links and such at the end of their posts, without their knowledge.
I love reading posts like this - I just keep thinking “it’s all pretty amazing, isn’t it?”. Because it is. We are.
That was INSANE. I was literally asking myself how I could just “let go” as I was typing the URL to your site. Thank you thank you for this post. I guess I just kind of needed to know that it’s okay to be okay.
hi cheese.
This was exactly the perfect post for me today. I think i am lagging slightly behind you in but I know I’ll get there in the end. I weigh pretty much what you weigh, I secretly thought I’d get to exactly what you thought, but i look at how my weight change has stalled and I realise that ‘this is it’. That was always a thought that terrified me, no more change, no more hope of hope. However when I look back, and realise all that i have gained in tackling my food-based-madness (hope, calm, happiness) I know that continuing to strive for self acceptance is my only option.
Thanks. really.
love h.x
Wow! This really hit home as you and I have similar stories and I’m guessing we’re the same height and size.
Looking back on it, I, too, have had to moderately restrict to maintain 135.
IE was tough for me b/c I frequented an IE board where everyone was trying to lose weight and we’re patting each other on the back for eating 2 bites and nothing else for hours-then going to the gym and working out.
They also kept labeling food as “junk” and saying things like “if you’re really doing IE you don’t want junk food anymore”. Well, I was eating a piece of chocolate here and there and when I craved cookies I baked them. So that drove me nuts.
IE drove me just as crazy b/c, like you, I thought I would settle and lose weight. I kept getting the msg from various IE “gurus” that if you’re really doing IE you’ll lose weight. Now coming from severe undereating and being waaaay to thin to the point my health suffer–that’s not what I needed to be around.
Long story short, I wish I had found your blog sooner. It’s been a real help.
I love your blog, I have read it from “cover to cover” so to speak since discovering it a few months ago.
I am at the very beginning stages of IE. I bought the book and read it. Unlike you, however, I am starting at a very heavy weight, much over my “ideal” weight by any measure, and am just giving up on my most bitter diet defeat ever.
I cannot give up the hope that IE will be “the thing that works”– i.e. I will actually lose weight. Which is of course the exact wrong mindset, but I cannot seem to shake it.
Thanks for you posts, all of them, and your candor.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I too have been a lurker for a month or two, and this has been one of my secret hopes as well. I don’t know if I actually recognized it (or more likely, was in denial), but reading your thoughts and all the other stuff covered in this blog has been incredibly helpful to my own ED recovery and journey into HAES. Thank you so much.
SCG, thanks for the tip on removing those annoying “related posts.” It probably would have taken me weeks to figure out how to get rid of them.
margo, to someone at the very beginning stages of learning how to eat in response to your body, I can’t recommend strongly enough “When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies” by Jane Hirschman and Carol Munter. It’s the book that enabled to me even *consider* giving up my diet. Basically, they’re incredible at driving home the point that the only “thing that works” is learning to care for ourselves regardless of our body weight. We can’t decide whether or not we’re at our ideal weight; we have to just honor our hunger and move our bodies compassionately, and trust our bodies know where we need to be.
Yeah, it’s a huge leap of faith. And there’s something almost viscerally painful about giving up the hope of being thinner, you know? But as long as we continue to approach ourselves as needing to be changed to be acceptable, we’re causing ourselves harm.
We deserve better than that! *You* deserve better than that, margo!
Thanks to everyone for their comments. And I really think each of you need to start blogging so I can cheer your along on your journeys.
Yeah, I was doing okay with this, and then I came up to trial and was eating very little due to a combination of adrenaline and nerves and no exercise, so I’m about five to eight pounds under where I was, and it’s proving to be really hard to go back to eating normally. I want to stay at this weight; I know I can’t do it while eating healthily, but…I want to. (sigh)
Thank you, gwc. I ordered that book and am starting a new blog. Your words mean a lot to me right now.
ilookgoodblog = margo, by the way.
Like so many others, I have totally reached this point also. For so long I thought that if I could just stop being “messed up” about food, my weight would magically lower. And now I realize that the reason I was so messed up was partially because I couldn’t accept my weight! Thanks for your honesty, and I agree with the book recommendation. Lots of intuitive eating books have major flaws and focus on weight as a measure of “success”, go with those authors, or check out “Its Not About Food” by Normandi and Roark.
I have read your entire blog and the connection I feel is amazing. I too started ‘not dieting’ at the age of 29 for the first time in my life. Secretly I thought this would work for me as long as I didn’t weigh more than 135. I even tried to convince myself that I could lose weight while not restricting my choices. Instead I happily weigh 150ish and just bought all now spring clothes in sizes that fit. Gone are my days of longing at photos and just waiting to get there. Like you said it feels good not to be waiting.
Thank you for your candidness and for your bravery and for being real. Know that there are many of us right by your side.