Morbid Fear of Gaining the Weight Back

January 27, 2013

46.4 pounds to go

Ritual (n): A religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order.

In my college philosophy 101 class back in 1998, my professor told a ritual experiment story performed on birds.  The birds were placed in their cages with a food dispensary.  The experimenters released the food at random times to see what behaviors the birds would develop.  These poor creatures would be in the middle of dancing, bathing, or jumping around the cage and by coincidence (a.k.a. random timing) the food would appear. Then the bird would be hungry later and reenact previous coincidental behavior forming a “food dance.”  By the end of it, these guys were performing long complicated rituals which they believed would produce food.

Where's my fucking snack?

While I may not be a dancing bird (today) there is a difference between behaviors that get results versus ingrained behaviors that don’t effect change.  Through my many journeys with weight loss, I’ve developed my own rain dances hoping they would facilitate the solution.  Put in simpler terms: whenever I would start to cross over into healthy or skinny territory I would begin to feel morbidly afraid the weight would come back on.  I would write pages and pages in my diary about the fear, yet never take any action to diffuse it.

So why was I afraid?  Why would I be afraid now?  One word: ignorance.  In the past I was never given any tools for sustainable weight loss.  I was given a crash program that would get me to skinny but never taught me long term healthy behaviors.  Atkins.  Crash diet.  Optifast.  Crash diet.  P90X.  Crash diet.  These kinds of programs get fast results (typically much faster than you should expect) by taking my body to the extreme.  I would get results, but when I was at the finish line I would have no tools to stay there.  All I knew how to do was the extreme version of very little eating and globulous amounts of exercise.  And as we all know, starving yourself while working out to the extreme every day is not sustainable.  You can do it for a few months but not forever.

All these programs always promise to shift you into a ‘maintenance mode’ once you start getting close to your ideal weight.  The problem is, it’s so extreme that most of us never get to this point.  I know I always gave up before these crucial classes.  So again, I’d be at the finish line with no tools.  Hello old habits and weight gain.

Now I’m in a different place.  I have the tools.  I know how many calories I get to eat in a day (1400).  I know how many I get to eat at a maintenance level (1400).  I know what foods to choose because technically I’m not on a diet right now, (Details in other entries) I’m eating the way I will eat for the rest of my life.  I pick the right foods that make me feel full (Bye bye gluten, I miss you).  I have a sustainable amount of exercise in my life (Twice a week).

You know what you did.  Get a job.

So the fear was the fear of the unknown.  Since I wasn’t doing any sort of food tracking, so it’s no wonder the scale was always a big surprise.  You bet your ass I was sending desperate prayers and doing my own rain dances in the bathroom before I got on the scale.  Then there would be a lazy week with exercise and too afraid to get on the scale.  Then another week.  Then the extra food started to slip in.  Six months later I finally would be brave enough to face the scale and it was always bad news.  Even though I knew I was slipping, it always seemed so unfair that the weight came back on.  Lather, rinse and repeat this cycle a dozen times over the past 13 years and you bet your ass the fear starts creeping in once the weight really starts coming off.

Always, I would be brave enough to go on a crash diet, but not patient  enough to take on the work of tracking what’s going into my mouth every.single.day.  It seemed like it was too much work, and it was a mountain I wasn’t ready to face.  Instead I depended on ritual and hope which never takes anyone very far.

Beyond this, there’s also a weird self-negotiation that happens when I crossed over from ignorance to reality with weight loss.  And I’m not talking about the “I’ll promise to exercise tomorrow and I’ll eat the cheesecake tonight” kind of rationalization.  It’s not even the long-term “I’ve been working so hard so I deserve it” line of thinking that always creeps in around the self-sabotage point in a diet.  Granted, I still bargain line-item foods with myself every day.  I’m going to eat this chocolate.  I’m going to have an extra string cheese.  Then I go for a walk.  There’s no room for negotiation with a calorie.  Hard numbers.  Hard facts.  Not a whole lot of wiggle room.  In other words, I can’t strike a deal with the science of my body.  I can’t talk my way out of it.  I can’t even think my way out of it.  Yet, I still behave like I can sometimes.  That’s where the self-negotiation comes in.  I think I can bring something new to the table, and constantly my body comes back with the terms which haven’t changed.  So I resign the contract. Again, and again and again.  I’ve gone back to the mediation table several times in this journey and every time my body wins.

Take it or leave it.  Goddamnit.  I'll take it.

Here’s another way to think about it:  I have had employees in the past who think much more highly of themselves versus what they actually produce.  They constantly ask for a raise.  They constantly ask for a promotion.  Yet they constantly don’t do any work to show they deserve any of the bumps!  You have to stop talking about how awesome you are and do something awesome.  If I expect my body to start dropping pounds more rapidly yet I haven’t changed any of my behaviors, what the fuck did I think was going to happen?  And to even further the point, if I get to the finish line and start incorporating behaviors that would make me gain weight, why should I expect any different even though I don’t want to gain it back?

I think the wanting / thinking versus awareness / doing crosses that fear bridge.  Even though it is still a pain in the ass and a lot of work, I have the tools.  I don’t have to do a rain dance in the bathroom every Saturday because I know what I’m doing.  Sometimes, irrationality still overcomes me and I have flights of “ohmigod what happens if I get fat again?”  But it’s a swell of emotion and sometimes I just have to wait out the storm.  Now it always passes.