The other day I mentioned that one of the differences between reading a weight loss-related entry here versus other blogs is that I understand reality. In other words, some days you just can’t work out because you’re out of the house from 7am until 9pm and when you get home you’re truly exhausted so you fall down onto the couch or bed and go to sleep. I get it. That’s life sometimes. Well, after reading another well-known blogger who writes about how he lost over 140 pounds, I’ve realized another difference between JerseySmarts.com and the rest of the blogs:
I don’t think you are a bad person.
Too often I read these weight loss blogs and the writers suggest that their former, fat selves are people that they don’t even remember. They refer to their fat selves as existing in a previous or past life. They do everything they can to distance who they’ve become from who they were for, sometimes, decades.
It’s disgusting.
How lonely and pathetic must a person’s life be for them to want to distance themselves from… themselves!? And how much internal self-hate must these people harbor for them to despise who they “used to be?” Talk about people who seriously need to see a psychiatrist! For these folks, it’s not about losing pounds – it’s about getting over their own self-loathing and self-hate masked in the rhetoric of weight loss.
Don’t be fooled, people.
Let me talk from experience. After I lost 125 pounds I distinctly remember looking at pictures of my 380+ pound self and thinking, “That’s a fat guy in that picture, but that’s a very, very good guy, too.” I also distinctly remember a feeling of sadness when I looked at those pictures because I remembered all of the times when that 380+ pound guy would get snide looks or overhear exaggerated sighs in the airport and movie theater or have to deal with people look at him from afar. In fact, I remember walking in the store one day and seeing a really big person and thinking, “That poor woman. I bet she’s a saint, but that people judge her without hearing the first word out of her mouth.”
After I lost all of that weight people would ask me about what it’s like to live a new life and shed away my past. I’d immediately think, “New life? What the hell are these people talking about?!” I wasn’t a different person after I lost all of that weight. Not at all! The difference was that the portion of society that wasn’t overweight tried to bring me in to their cabal of divisive comments and unspoken disgust of fat people. It was almost as though they wanted me to say, “Yeah – I couldn’t believe what a worthless piece of trash I used to be!”
That type of drivel will never come out of my mouth because I’m fully aware of my self-worth.
Aside from the religious reasons why I don’t believe that any life is a worthless piece of a trash (least of all my own!), I don’t believe that a person’s weight should determine how society acts towards them. And yet I read people writing on these weight loss blogs about how they’re excited to have a new body and how they hated life before they lost the weight.
That’s not a weight problem, that’s a psychological problem.
The point of this entry is to tell all of you who might be in the midst of battling the bulge that you’re fighting the good fight. And, more importantly, don’t believe the voices of the self-hating people out there who already lost a bunch of weight and are now condemning their former selves. These are people who have a mental issue and are trying to compensate for their long lasting, deep-rooted, self-hatred. Love yourself. God gave you the beautiful body that you have. Treat it as the temple it is expected to be.
Don’t hate yourself – today or tomorrow.
