Kathryn Woodall
08-28-2008, 01:03 PM
The following is an excerpt from today's blog (http://www.acomfortablesoul.com/blog/).
I hear people talking about the battle of the bulge, the fight against fat, and the war involved with weight loss and I dislike those terms. Trust me, I fought every day for most of my life to be something other than fat, but even when I was “winning” according to the scales and the tape measures, I was still fighting and the war was never going to end. Put people in a non winnable war and eventually apathy will appear. A few born-warriors will rage on, but others will simply surrender to captivity and the tortures that result…they know it will mean an early death and a less than wonderful life, but they can’t seem to spark themselves back to caring, and at least they don’t have to fight a non winnable war.
Push me into fight, flight, or freeze and my instinct is to fight. So although I have been obese basically all of my life, it was never what it could have been. If I had not fought, it would have been very easy to have reached 500+ pounds instead of staying in the 200’s. So my warrior instinct saved me at least some. The problem with instinct is that it isn’t always logical. I fought the hunger, the fat, and the amount of food I ate. The problem is that the hunger wasn’t my enemy, the fat wasn’t/isn’t my enemy, and even how much I was eating wasn’t the enemy. There wasn’t an enemy at all because there is no battle, there is no fight, and there is no war when it comes to our bodies. All that is there is adaptation. Change the stimulus and you change the reaction. If there is any fight at all it is the fight to make the time to figure out what stimulus is causing the reaction that you don’t want. I’ve said that a million times to patients, seen it be successful repeatedly, and yet I failed to apply it to my own issue. I think that perhaps there was just so much emotion wrapped up in being a fat kid, a fat chic, and a fat doctor that it clouded my logic.
The rest of the article can be found here. (http://www.acomfortablesoul.com/blog/?p=23)
I hear people talking about the battle of the bulge, the fight against fat, and the war involved with weight loss and I dislike those terms. Trust me, I fought every day for most of my life to be something other than fat, but even when I was “winning” according to the scales and the tape measures, I was still fighting and the war was never going to end. Put people in a non winnable war and eventually apathy will appear. A few born-warriors will rage on, but others will simply surrender to captivity and the tortures that result…they know it will mean an early death and a less than wonderful life, but they can’t seem to spark themselves back to caring, and at least they don’t have to fight a non winnable war.
Push me into fight, flight, or freeze and my instinct is to fight. So although I have been obese basically all of my life, it was never what it could have been. If I had not fought, it would have been very easy to have reached 500+ pounds instead of staying in the 200’s. So my warrior instinct saved me at least some. The problem with instinct is that it isn’t always logical. I fought the hunger, the fat, and the amount of food I ate. The problem is that the hunger wasn’t my enemy, the fat wasn’t/isn’t my enemy, and even how much I was eating wasn’t the enemy. There wasn’t an enemy at all because there is no battle, there is no fight, and there is no war when it comes to our bodies. All that is there is adaptation. Change the stimulus and you change the reaction. If there is any fight at all it is the fight to make the time to figure out what stimulus is causing the reaction that you don’t want. I’ve said that a million times to patients, seen it be successful repeatedly, and yet I failed to apply it to my own issue. I think that perhaps there was just so much emotion wrapped up in being a fat kid, a fat chic, and a fat doctor that it clouded my logic.
The rest of the article can be found here. (http://www.acomfortablesoul.com/blog/?p=23)