Quit Dieting

I’m at a great weight now for my body, about 140. You know when I lost weight and stopped gaining it? When I stopped dieting.

First Step: I decided I had to decide to love myself and my body first. As part of that, I bought clothes that flattered my current body, not “goal clothes” for a hypothetical future body that only detracted from my self-esteem. I even shopped around until I figured out a swimming situation I liked.

I went to the beach with some friends and family and looked around at all our different bodies and saw women of different shapes and sizes who were comfortable in bathing suits. I realized I had wasted so many years avoiding swimming and feeling uncomfortable for nothing. How dare I, really, say my body wasn’t good enough? If mine wasn’t, it’s as if I was saying millions of other women at least as big as I should also be ashamed.

Second Step: I stopped having on-diet and off-diet days. How many occasions of fun and socializing and how many friendships had I missed out on because of all the offers I turned down because I “couldn’t” go eat or drink with people because I was on an on-diet day? I knew I might gain some weight initially, but I told myself to have faith that, as my brain and body healed from the insanity of the decade plus of dieting, everything would stabilize, and eventually, if necessary, I could begin to make small, lifestyle adjustments.

Third Step: Ditto for exercising. If I missed a day at the gym, so be it. If I didn’t feel like doing free weights, then I could bike instead. Or take a yoga class, or do yoga at home to Youtube, or dance in my room like nobody was watching (since they weren’t), or take a long walk, or play basketball, etc. I stopped being a slave to rules I had made up for myself.

Fourth Step: This was the biggest one, and it really only happened because I entered a relationship with a sane (about food, anyway) woman. She eats when she’s hungry (without guilt!) and stops when she’s satisfied (even when it’s amazingly delicious food at a restaurant that we might have to waste (though of course I take anything home I can)). Partly it helped just to see her example and, particularly, to spend a lot of evenings with her instead of alone so that I couldn’t just get high and go make a brownie batter ice cream sundae with melted peanut butter and graham crackers and Cookie Butter and.. well you get the point.

But also, I started to realize that a lot of times when I was finishing my plate and I’d noticed that she’d stopped, I wasn’t actually deriving any pleasure from the last several bites of food but was merely shoveling them into my mouth compulsively, only to of course feel shitty about it (psychologically and physically) afterwards. I also thought to myself, Hey, when you take drugs, you always think about how it will affect your evening, what you will and won’t be able to do afterwards (in terms of work, socializing, mobility, etc.), so why wouldn’t you do the same with food? Why would you stuff yourself full to bursting when you’d really like to have a few more beers and stay up talking and laughing with people?

Guess what? Before those steps, I weighed 147 lbs. Now I weigh 140. Or around there. I also stopped weighing myself with any regularity. So add a step to the beginning, now that I think of it: Throw out your scale. If you donate it, some other pitiable woman will wind up with it, so chuck it out (or I supposed you could take it apart for a science project or something so that you don’t waste it).

I eat so well. I eat so much better than I ever did when I binged and dieted. I eat real food, with no thoughts of calories anymore. I never really believed it, but when you eat good food, it’s true that you actually are satisfied longer. But also, I eat a ton of food, who knows how many calories, but it’s when I’m hungry, and then I don’t eat until my body has burned through it and I’m hungry again.

For breakfast, I eat either cereal or a pastry at a coffee shop. For lunch, it’s usually a crazy combinations of leftovers after exercising. And I always have a small to medium dessert. For dinner, my amazing cook girlfriend makes a full home-cooked meal with steak or fish or chicken or bacon with vegetables and a starch or grain. And then, basically every day, we have ice cream with pie or cookies or cheesecake. Seriously. And we go to restaurants all the time and eat whatever we want and order dessert if we have room. Sometimes we eat a big brunch, but then usually that means we won’t be hungry until an early dinner. Whatever, it doesn’t matter, we don’t have to have a plan. We just go with the flow. You know what I never do anymore? Eat until I hate myself and feel like I never want to eat or stand up ever again.

A typical week of exercise looks like this:

Monday/Wed/Fri: 3.5 mile run

Tue/Thur: Yoga or biking or just lots of walking or my Just Dance Hip Hop game on the Kinect

Saturday: Maybe a game of racquetball with my fiance

Sunday: Maybe some walking

But also due to the nature of my life, I walk an average of 5 miles a day just getting to places from bus and t stops and walking the dog. And I climb an average of 10 flights of stairs a day. Point being, I’m active, but I enjoy it all, and if I miss something or get too busy, I don’t go crazy. It’ll just mean I’m less hungry, so I’ll eat less that day.