Sabotage/Flabotage

Summer over at Mommy Needs Coffee wrote a great post about how we sabotage ourselves in our weight loss journey. I started to reply in her comments, but I then I thought it would be a good subject to blog about myself.

I have sabotaged myself so many times. In 1994 I lost a hundred pounds. I didn't see any difference in the mirror for the longest time. It took seeing pictures of myself that were unrecognizable to realize how far I had come. My best friend at the time took one look at a picture of me on a field trip with my class and blurted out, "Wow, you look normal!" And she was right, I did. Even though I was still over a hundred pounds from goal, I looked really good. I managed to lose a bit more weight before my first Cruise to Lose in 1995, but once that was over, I slowly began to gain the weight back. By the time I went on my next cruise in 1996 I had gained about 30 pounds back. It seems that whenever people start complimenting me and paying attention to my weight loss, I sabotage myself. I lost between 80 and 100 pounds several more times, only to shoot myself down again.

There is definitely some kind of fear there...but fear of what? Why am I afraid of losing weight and being healthy? Is part of it fear of disappointing people who believe in me? I do think that part of it is that when I was very young, like 12 to 14 years old, I looked older than I was (and I was quite thin at the time) and I received a lot of confusing, scary, and inappropriate attention from men.

My mom was a fat kid who got teased a lot, and she was determined that I not be fat. She had me on diets from the time I was seven. When I look back at the pictures I wasn't a fat kid. She will say this is because she controlled what I ate. I don't blame her anymore. She was doing what she thought was best for me. Although I do think that in the past a lot of my eating was rebellious, I can't blame it on that any more. In one of Geneen Roth's books, she says, in essence, "I will never have a happy childhood." It's time to get over that and get on with my life. I was beaten as a kid, but I long ago forgave my father for that, and he has been gone for almost 18 years, so there's no need for fear there.

But yet, still the fear persists. I wonder if I will ever understand the fear or if I will just have to combat it for the rest of my life.

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After what happened at work on Thursday, I feel my days there are numbered. I need to prepare myself for finding another job, and one of the first parts of that, for me, is getting some weight off so I feel more comfortable and more confident about meeting new people. I know they will keep me around at least until June, because that is when our audit will be, so I have a couple of months to get a good start on making the lifestyle changes I need to make.