S for ‘scary’

Starting on the intuitive eating path was the scariest thing I have ever done. Every day, for a few months, I had to make the conscious decision not to diet. Practically every moment, and certainly every time I ate, I had to decide to give up dieting and to start a new way of life, no matter what the consequences would be. Every day, I had to choose between weighing the cereals in my breakfast bowl and trusting my judgement; between counting my points (the Weight Watchers system, as I’m sure you all know) and eating to my heart’s content; between eating only three times a day and eating as often as was needed; between eating my sensible salad and devouring what I really felt like eating – whether it be a bowl of chips or a banoffee pie.

Every day, I had this intense fear of weight gain. It was unbearable sometimes. I had to stop and think and remind myself what would happen if I did diet – ultimately, I would be even fatter and my problem would be even worse. I had to believe that. After a few weeks, I just knew that and didn’t have to force myself into believing it – it had become second nature. My brain just knew. My brain had stopped ignoring the past. The lessons of the past were obvious – diets don’t work, diets make people fat, diets make things worse and all the harder the next time around. Diets are not the answer. But the fear of putting on more and more weight and not knowing when it would stop was there, every day, minute after minute.

I bought myself a pair of jeans that was so big I knew they would not feel tight for a while, and that helped. It reassured me and it freed me from thinking about my body so much and worrying about weight gain. Feeling tight clothes on you is the worst thing for a dieter, but also for an ex-dieter. It makes you want to go on a diet right now and for ever, to keep the weight off. Yet the new, more sensible self reminds the old self that the ultimate result is only more weight gain, so there is no point. Indeed, you MUST NOT go on a diet.

Of course, the inevitable happened: the pounds piled on, until I reached 75 kilos. It was about 6-7 kilos more than my weight just before the decision. I quickly realised and accepted that it was a small sacrifice if the feeling of freedom was guaranteed. And freedom definitely was my priority. I had just had enough of being obsessed with food and my body shape and hunger.

But of course, this feeling of freedom is not a given – it is something we attain on our own accord. If we don’t allow it in, it just won’t happen. Sometimes you have to force yourself to stop thinking about food and body shape, and that’s when freedom comes in. Yet it is also a natural consequence of not dieting – the freedom of choice, of being different and accepting it, of weighing a little bit more than before and a bit more than we would want to, while knowing at the same time that at least it won’t ever go up like that again, or at least that it won’t go up for ever.

At that point it felt like I had ‘got it out of my system’. I had eaten everything I fancied every time I fancied it. However, another year passed and it felt like I had been at a standstill for 12 months. Nothing much was happening to my weight, but nothing much was happening inside myself. No breakthrough, no BIG REALISATION, no progress in the IE department, despite having first encountered and started applying the principles in December 1999 when reading Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.

I realised that I hadn’t got it out of my system at all, and probably because I hadn’t ‘done it properly’. I was still putting the brakes on when it came to eating, I was never letting myself go completely, I was still scared of that ‘Evil Weight Gain’ and what people (especially my parents, my family) would say. I’ll admit it: I still didn’t trust the system completely.

Yet the more I thought about it, the more I understood and accepted that there really was no other way. I just had to be patient, and take it one day at a time. I decided I also absolutely needed to ‘do it right’ from A to Z. I realised I had never done it properly in the sense that I had never surrounded myself with forbidden food for any length of time: I did it for a week, but then I always got scared and finished my supplies and never replenished them. Out of all the principles, it was the only one I hadn’t followed, and yet it was pivotal to the success of the method, if I were to believe the authors of Intuitive Eating and those of Overcoming Overeating, Jane Hirschmann and Carol Munter.

And so I filled my cupboards and freezer with my favourite foods, freely and unashamedly, telling myself this was going to be for good, ‘I’m going to do it properly this time, there’s no going back, I’m doing it no matter what, it is the ONLY WAY’: white chocolate, milk and hazelnut chocolate, Digestive biscuits and Ben & Jerry Cookie Dough ice cream. And I ate. Loads. As often as I (thought I) was hungry. And even when I wasn’t (that was the bad part, but I still went along with it, because I knew I had to).

Then one day I weighed myself and was shocked at seeing more than 80 kilos on the scales. I hadn’t seen it coming. Well I had, my jeans were getting tighter, but I had ignored that bit.

It stopped me right in my tracks, as it were. I became very scared. I was getting married two months later, and I had never weighed so much in my entire life. It was time to stop. It was time to reason myself. And that’s when I reread Geneen Roth’s Breaking Free from Emotional Eating and came across a paragraph that reminded me that no matter how many biscuits or how much ice cream I ate, I would never make up for all the years of deprivation, of not allowing myself these particular foods.

These lines really meant something to me that day, and from then on, I stopped eating for England and for the past. I started focusing on the present, asking myself how many biscuits I truly needed right now. It turned out it was never a lot. It certainly was never five or ten! It was just one or two. I also became ‘reasonable’: I told myself ‘Come on, that’s enough now, you’ve already had two, you don’t need any more, and you know it’. It worked for me because I wasn’t rebellious any more – I knew there was no need to be, since I could still eat anything I wanted.

Yes, despite the weight gain and the fear of putting even more on, I still didn’t go on a diet (I simply couldn’t; I tried for two days and failed miserably), I still told myself that I could eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. But I also reminded myself that just a little was enough. I didn’t need to eat that much. And of course, I had to fit in that dress... It was a good incentive, yes...

Since the wedding, my weight has been going down slowly. Some days I’ll eat what I consider ‘crap food’, some days I’ll eat really good, healthy food. Most days now, I eat well and respect my body. It doesn’t want to eat loads, it doesn’t want to eat bad foods, it doesn’t want to eat things it can’t cope with. We’re partners now. And I try not to think about the weight loss too much. It only stops me from focusing on the real, better goal: the one of having a healthy relationship with food and with my body.