WHO AM I without the food/weight/body obsession? It’s been a top priority, full-time job, occupying every waking moment for decades. If you do manage to turn it off, or even dial it down a bit, THEN WHAT?! I really struggled with that. At times it seemed easier to stay stuck in a futile restriction spiral than to risk change. Obsessing about my food and body seemed familiar and reliable even if everything was burning down around me. There is an animated gif of a dog with the room on fire around him and he’s drinking his coffee saying. “This is fine. I’m ok with everything unfolding currently.” If it’s all you know, you don’t even realize that the roof is caving in and your face is melting. I could be in the midst of no-joke life crisis and my primary thoughts would be about whether I needed to buy smaller apples. Maybe the apples are too big, allowing me to put too much peanut butter on each wedge, and that’s why I’m gaining. Maybe I need to weigh the apples or measure the peanut butter. Like solving that riddle was going to keep my mom from dying, but it’s how my brain worked. Obsessing about food and weight was a seemingly reliable coping mechanism, even if it actively hurt my body and health.
Which brings us to the part about how hormones aren’t hurting your dieting results, dieting is hurting your hormones. That one deserves a round of applause! I believed I had to carefully control my food because my body was “broken,” but carefully controlling my food is what broke it in the first place. More restriction wasn’t suddenly going to fix the situation. To get completely different results I had to do something completely different, like eating when I was hungry and resting when I was tired. It seemed so reckless and outlandish!