Body Image

When I was 0-22 years old, I never worried about my weight.  I was naturally thin and my parents were always telling me that I ate like a bird. But then something happened when I graduated from college: my clothes no longer fit.

At first I thought, no big deal. I’ll just start exercising, since I never did. But I continued to gain weight. So then I thought, I’ll just exercise every day and watch what I eat. Still gained weight, but more slowly. Finally, I resorted to obsessing about being fat 24-7, exercising every day, and watching what I ate. Again, very slow weight gain plus a lot of suffering.  Maybe my metabolism started slowing down at 23. I did go on birth control around that time. Although going off birth control decades later didn’t seem to make a significant difference in losing weight. Of course, by then I was perimenopausal, which brings up a host of weight gain issues, among other hormonal changes.

Ironically, all of that time that I was gaining weight, I was still pretty thin. Until I reached 40. Now I look like I thought I did all of those years that I obsessed about being fat. I know I’m not fat, but I’ve gained enough weight that my dad told me that I needed to eat less and he mailed me some appetite suppressants. Hence, the blog post Boundaries. Popular enough of a post for me to assume other people get the same negative feedback from parents and family.

I would still like to lose weight, although I’m not as motived as I was when I was younger. 

I specialize in eating disorders so I never do fad diets, starve myself, throw up, or anything else that would make me a poor role model. Plus I love food. So here are the middle-aged strategies I’ve tried for weight loss, based on effectiveness:

Not Effective:

• Buy a gym membership and never use it. I know a lot of people do this, but I obsess about money and I used to go to the gym every day, so I really thought it might work for me.
• Obsess all day about exercising, and when you get home, fall asleep on the couch instead. 
• Try to eat the recommended 1500 calories for weight loss, and then binge at the end of the day because you’re starving.
• Stare at your gut in the mirror every time you go to the bathroom.
• Eat fast food for dinner because you hate grocery shopping and cooking.

Effective:

• Play tennis as many times a week as your body will allow. 
• Use a pedometer and obsess about getting steps.
• Don’t look in the mirror more than necessary.
• Don’t look at any pictures or videos of yourself and only take head shots.
• Look at pictures of other people your age who have gained weight so that you realize that this is just a part of getting older.
• Cut 500 calories out of your 3,000 calorie diet.
• Go on the GERD diet where you have to cut out all of the things you love to eat and avoid eating 3 hours before bedtime and before exercising. 

I am happy to say that I’m slowly losing weight at the rate of about .25 pounds every 2 months. No one is going to use me as a poster child for weight loss, but as I say to my clients, something is better than nothing.

By the way, this picture is my self-portrait from an eating disorder conference. I’m camouflaged by my stresses, but you can see my head in the top right corner. I barely fit on the page, so I’m diagonal, and parts of me are literally hanging off the boundaries of the picture. There is a lot more going outside of me than inside of me. More to say about this later when we analyze this picture in more detail in a future post. Suffice it to say that it seems that stress and cortisol could have something to do with weight gain after I finished college.