Side effects 2

Being overweight long term while making varies efforts to fix it can be very discouraging. It reminds me of attempting to pay off school loans. Which may be the most heartbreaking thing life has given me thus far in my adult life. Anyway it works like this with student loans, you take out a large amount, but something that seems manageable, then you graduated and don’t think about them until that first bill shows up, and oh crap, it’s a lot bigger than you remember it being (think stepping on a scale for the first time in 4 years) but it seems manageable. So you start working on it, paying it off little by little, a year passes and you look at the totals and realize you have made almost no dent at all in the total (think dieting). Well crap. Then something happens and you can’t pay for a few months, so you either let it go, or put them in deferment and when you start paying again, they are even bigger than when you started. That is a bad day for sure. You work and work but what sucks is that you don’t get back to that number you first saw that when you got the first bill, not to mention the number you barrowed initial. It is soul crushing if you think about it to much.

The reason I think it translates so well to weight loss is because it’s the same way I felt when I decided to deal with the problem years ago. I had gotten into the low 200’s but it wasn’t so bad, I would just not eat so much and I’d be fine, besides I didn’t look bad anyway. Then I weighed myself a few months later and had put on 20 or so pounds, well crap, I guess I better start running to, that’ll fix it. So when I check again I was just above the original problem weight, I had lost quite a bit, but it felt empty because I wasn’t even back to what I considered being overweight.

Vicious circle is an apt description. I would gain enough weight to make me look at myself hard in the mirror and start to do something about it, but the high side would get a little higher, and the amount of weight I lost would always be just a bit higher than the last time. It is one of the worst feelings in the world to know you lost 20 pounds, and you are still 10 pounds heavier than that first time you decided you needed to lose some weight.

Over time, much like interest, the effect of this compounds, forcing the stretches in-between the time you work up the nerve to fix to grow longer and the amount of weight you lose when you do to shrink with a sense of futility. Eventually you get big enough that it starts to seem pointless, and then you start on one program or another and work at it for 3 or 4 weeks cut back a little on the eating, and you don’t lose a pound, or worse you lose one or two and it feels pointless, when of course leads to binge eating, and the program you started eventually results in weight gain, making you feel more worthless, and the whole thing more pointless.

This cycle is a nightmare to break, it hurts like crazy physically, you are always hungry, your body is always sore and it doesn’t do a thing to keep you from feeling like it is all pointless. If you are willing to dive in all the way, not so much change habits, or work on making better choices, but kill that old person who thinks it’s ok to eat what you want just because you run a mile, it can work. I am in constant danger of getting out of the pool and just going right back to the old me, I have to have the same conversations with myself every stupid day, but I will not be the old me, it doesn’t matter if I lose 1 pound a week as lose as I as that number is going down. I refuse to be that person again.