|
sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
|
The Demon With The 5% Solution
I wrote about how, at dinner the other night, a few friends had commented on my getting "too thin," or that my weight loss had been "very rapid." I laughed off these careless/caring comments, thinking of the two years of hard work, exercise, eating correctly, practicing mindful diligence and persistence. For those two years, hardly anyone said anything while I learned how to listen to my body when it came to food and exercise. Hardly anyone said anything even after the first hundred pounds were gone. (And, truthfully, I'm glad they didn't, because it was so hard to learn to tune into the inner voice, to learn to tune out all that junk advice you get from magazines and television and diet gurus--all that shit that doesn't work, that never will work in the long term--but works just enough in the short term to keep everyone addicted to dieting, which only makes you fatter in the long term...but I digress.) Anyway, now that I have achieved my goal weight and continue everyday to work with diligence so that I might continue my success, I seem to have become some kind of lightning rod for comments that I'm "too thin." They are comments that make me think about the magazine covers: "Lose Weight NOW!" and "Lose 7 Pounds In 7 Days!" and how we all want to lose weight NOW NOW NOW--so much so that we end up throwing ourselves desperately out of balance by doing things like living on meat and fat or shitty-tasting diet foods or fasting or using laxatives or throwing up meals. We all want the pounds gone yesterday, and so many of us are willing to throw away our long-term health to do it. So, yeah, I focused on a max %1 of my body weight per week, knowing that this kind of loss is the only kind that has been shown to be sustainable. And I slowed myself down by eating more when I started to lose too fast. No, seriously. I actually did this because I know that fewer than 5% of people who take off weight keep it off and that one of the ways that that 5% succeed is by slow, steady weight loss. Now, knowing that, and being committed to succeeding, why would I aim for anything else? So, yeah. They don't ask questions about how I lost the weight, so maybe they all assume that I went about it the way that the 95% who fail--losing it all as lean muscle and water weight, but gaining it back as fat. They don't ask, but they do make comments like: "You're getting too thin." (And I love hearing that, because it smacks of jealousy thinly veneered with concern.) And I smile and laugh. Because they'd do it if they could.
More lies:
|
|||||