I’ve been studying weight management for a weight management certificate to add to my personal training certification. And I’ve been learning some very interesting things that I’d like to pass along to you bit by bit. This is especially for Kylene, Erica, Amy, and Krista, but anyone else that wants can read it.
I’d like to start out by apologizing for raising you (Kylene and Erica) with an unhealthy view of weight management and food in general. Basically I was passing along what I’d learned growing up and I imagine my mom would say the same. But I hope it can stop with this new generation. When I put such a focus on being the correct weight, always being on a diet, never being happy with the way I looked, I was teaching you that your weight is a measure of your worth as a person. And that is wrong. Day by day I modeled behavior that described some foods as bad and others as good, and some eating behavior as bad and other behavior as good. I taught you through my example that eating is not a pleasurable activity, but rather something that had to be planned, controlled, counted, and oftentimes, something to feel guilty about. And I did a great job teaching you, because you seem to be following nicely in my footsteps! (Please don’t take this as an insult – I just see a lot of myself a couple decades ago in you today.)
But look at me now. I’ve spent the past 45 years dieting and I’m heavier than when I started. And that is for one simple, proven reason.
Diets don’t work. They don’t make you thinner. They actually make you fatter. If you don’t believe me, look at the world around you. There are more diet foods and more people on diets than ever before, and yet our population is fatter. The rise in weight has mirrored the rise in dieting behavior.
And the reason is simple. The dieting mentality makes you feel deprived and eventually you will react to that feeling, and often in a huge way, eating way more calories than you skipped eating earlier. And the net result is a gain in weight.
But there is much more to this picture and I’ll write more tomorrow. But for now, I hope I have you thinking…
I think you can rest easy in knowing that I don’t view my weight as part of my self worth. I mean, I don’t look at myself in the mirror and think I’ve failed because I weigh more than 200 pounds. I don’t even think I look badly when I look in the mirror. I don’t like photographs myself, but I think I look good 90% of the time! I have absolutely no feeling at all that my value as a person is tied to being in the right body-fat percentage range.
I also don’t think of eating or cooking as something that’s not enjoyable. I *love* to cook and I pretty obviously also love to eat! I know that my understanding of nutrition isn’t the greatest and my concept of portions sizes, especially, is complete rubbish. I know that the way that I eat isn’t the most healthy (I mean, how would I weight this much, otherwise?) but I certainly DO enjoy myself! 🙂
My frustration with my weight stems more from the fact that I’m not as physically fit as I would like — there are things that I would like to be able to do (e.g. running) that I’m not able to do because of my weight. And because I can’t fit into the clothes that I would like. I *love* knee-high boots but my calves are too big to wear any unless I order them special (i.e. $$$$). There are a lot of fashion styles that I’d like to try, but they wouldn’t look good on me the way that my body is shaped currently. These two things are the biggest reasons why I want to lose weight. The fact that I would also look “prettier” (per our societal norms) is just an additional bonus to those things.
So please don’t feel guilty. You taught me to enjoy running. You did exercises in the living room and showed me that I don’t need to go to a gym to do aerobics (and was it Mary Lou Retton videos?) and have a lot of fun. You showed me how to garden, something that I’m very much hoping to get into so I can grow my own vegetables and eat more healthy foods that way. You exampled nutritious eating on a shoe-string budget.
I am really looking forward to hearing about what you’re learning. But I don’t think you should feel guilty about how you raised us.
I love you, Mom!!
Thank you for saying that – you are such a sweetheart.
Love,
Mom