What is this blog about? Well ... I am hoping that it will become a place where people feel they can share their experience of obesity. This isn't a dieting blog, because there are plenty out there, and dieting doesn't work, anyway. This blog is about how obesity feels, and about how overcoming obesity is about more than just losing weight.
Why now? Because I feel that the obesity message, almost constantly in the headlines, is shockingly oversimplified. We hear clear and loud the message that eating less, exercising more will help us to achieve a healthy balance. We are reassured that this is supported by rigourous scientific research. Yet despite these well-intentioned messages, obesity is on the rise.
Something is missing from the advice, a key point that makes all our dieting efforts pretty much pointless. It is something that is so obvious I feel it's almost a non-point. Yet often it is ignored, or at best treated as insignificant, by much of the health advice available to us. Anyone who has ever experienced the magical comfort of a steaming bowl of mashed potatoes knows this: our emotions, probably more than our bodies even, make us eat. And until we find a way of managing our emotional relationship to food, of feeling comfortable enough with ourselves to let our real selves be revealed, all of our attempts to overcome obesity will fail.
We, human beings, are about more than just science. Our bodies are only a part of ourselves. Emotions, personality and learned behaviours define us as much - no, more - than the size of our waists. I am not a therapist, a psychologist or a health worker. I am just someone who has experienced - is experiencing - a long and often painful journey of obesity. Relatively recently I escaped severe morbid obesity, having lost 5.5 stones in the last 30 months - and I will need to lose about the same amount again, and maintain that weight loss, if I am completely to overcome my obesity and let my real self loose on the world!
I consider myself to be partially recovered, but I still feel incredibly vulnerable at times and know that my recovery is sometimes rather fragile. Perhaps it will always be like this. The path I have discovered came to me almost serendipitously as a result of help from a number of people along the way. Their advice often seemed insignificant at the time, but helped me find my way at a time when I was hopelessly lost. These chance, sometimes momentary, encounters have been the happy coincidences of my obesity journey.
As a middle-aged woman, I had been suffering from a number of unpleasant minor illnesses for quite some time. The worst of these was depression. Depression was the origin of my obesity, and the more obese I became, the more depressed I became. Though I didn't know it at the time, being diagnosed with depression was the first step in my recovery from obesity. I realised that I had to do something to manage the problem, and didn't want to become reliant on medication, so I took myself to the local gym and joined up on the spot. Although, like many people, I had been naturally fit and active in my childhood into my twenties, I had never consciously made an effort to exercise.
My first efforts in the gym, 10 minutes on the treadmill, 10 minutes on the recumbent bike, were painfully slow, utterly exhausting and squeezed every last drop of sweat out of my system. I went home and slept for the rest of the day, and could manage only twice weekly visits. However, even this level of activity made me feel much less anxious, which was reward enough for me to continue. After I had continued my 2 x 10 minute programme for about three months without making any sign of increasing the effort level, one of the gym staff made me sign up for a proper induction session where an instructor wrote me a personal programme. (When he told me that I would have to walk for twenty minutes without stopping, I almost fainted (literally) and was convinced I would never achieve this amazingly demanding workload.)
Exercise provided me with something that was missing in my largely sedentary lifestyle. I found that for the first time in my adult life I could switch off my over active brain and get some proper rest. After a year of continuing to progress with my exercise programme, I had also lost a stone in weight, but my right knee had become rather painful and was beginning to limit my mobility. As I felt guilty about my obesity and was sure the knee problems were related to it, I didn't want to bother my GP, so made a self-diagnosis (probably arthritis) on the internet. The advice was fairly clear: lose weight, and strengthen your leg muscles to support the joint and take some of the strain away.
Exercise was the only thing that stood between me and depression. I feared that if the knee pain continued, I would have to stop exercising and would drift back into depression. I could see that if this happened, my obesity would take over again and worsen. I feared ending up in a wheelchair, becoming super obese, and losing the relative freedom from anxiety that exercise had given me. I decided that I had to do what I had been resisting all along and find a way of managing my eating so that I could lose at least some of the weight that was making my knee so painful. I didn't really want to, because I had experienced diets before (on one occasion losing as much as seven stones) but had aways ultimately relapsed, and failed to maintain the weight loss. I considered joining a commercial dieting group at the local church, but had done that before and though I felt I could lose a little weight with their help, I doubted I would keep the weight off long term. My GP prescribed me Orlistat, but I was concerned about the impact that this would have on my digestion and my system as a whole, so didn't take it. I thought about gastric banding, but I am too much of a coward to put myself through an operation without its being absolutely necessary. Gastric banding would be an absolutely last resort, when-all-else-fails solution.
I decided to give myself one last chance, and to invest in a personal nutritionist. I did a simple search on Google. The nutritionist I found then is the nutritionist I still work with today. Hers was the first name on the list, and I didn't really bother to look much at any of the other sites - there was just something about her that felt OK, and I decided to give it a try. (And what 'it' has turned out to be, by the way, is a journey, MY journey and the way I am trying to heal myself. There actually is no 'it', if you understand my meaning ... read on?)
My nutritionist is a homeopath. I didn't specify that I wanted a homeopath and I like to think that this choice was made for me almost serendipitously by the Google search engine ;-) As I understand it, the homeopathic world view is that health is holistic and relates not only to the body, but also to the mind and emotions. This makes perfect sense if you just consider, for example, the widely acknowledged role of stress in many illnesses. Homeopathy also fundamentally acknowledges the elephant in the room (if you'll forgive the slightly unfortunate figure of speech) - that obesity is more than a merely physiological condition.
Anyone but the most unfortunate super obese patient can lose weight, but keeping that weight off is almost impossible without appropriate emotional support, because as we lose the weight we are forced to confront the difficult emotions that made us obese in the first place, the emotions that are only heightened and complicated by the experience of obesity. Exploring those emotions involves looking backward and inward as well as forward, is very, very difficult and forms a major part of my obesity journey. I plan to share some of this gradually (weekly or so?) with readers of this blog.
Obesity is a difficult experience that goes beyond the physical. The next time someone tells you there's a simple solution, remember that they can't know what you are going through, because obesity is an intensely personal and individual experience. You are not lazy, weak-willed or stupid because you can't stick to a diet, you are just a human being with feelings. You are also not alone. Far from it.
I really hope that some of you will want to share some of your experiences with me and with other readers of the blog. All your thoughts will be welcome.
