When I reached my goal weight in 2008, I desperately wanted
to be an inspiration. In those days, I didn’t have to do very much to be
inspiring; all I had to do was walk in the room. People who hadn’t seen me in a
while would do a visible double-take, wanting to know what had happened while delicately
dodging having to ask me if I had been sick. Many people, friends, family,
co-workers, told me that my success in losing so much weight had motivated them
to try again. It was, I’ve since discovered, the golden age of weight
maintenance when everything seemed bright and shining.
After a while, the excitement died down for those around me,
but not for me. You have to remember that I had been morbidly obese (one of the
more charming things a fat person can be called) for most of my adult life, so
to finally be thin, now that was something! I was size ten, for goodness sake.
I had dreamed of that mythic place – SizeTenLand – for so long, that to actually
arrive there was still a thing of beauty. When I continued to share my
enthusiasm for my new way of life, however, I started to notice something: my compadres
no longer seemed happy to hear what I had to say.
Little did I know, but I had entered the second phase of
weight maintenance, the stage where the newly slender person becomes that
Annoying Convert. No longer was I the poster child for transformation
(you know my thoughts on that); now I had become just another of those obnoxious
born-agains who show up at your front door wanting to share the good news of
their newly embraced religion. My attempts to continue to inspire those around
me went unappreciated at best. Often, people seemed irritated, as if my
thinness was some sort of affront.
Which brings me to the third phase of weight maintenance,
namely the place where I stopped inspiring myself simply because my weight was
lower, and started to fully comprehend that if I wanted to stay this way, I had
to continue my new approach to eating and exercising for the rest of my life. Think about that for a minute. It’s quite
intimidating!
After four and a half years of weight maintenance, I’ve
arrived at a place where inspiration seems beside the point. I’ve learned that
no matter how loudly I shout about the joys of life sans excess pounds, the
siren call of chocolate croissants will probably out-shout me. My sharing may
also piss you off and cause you to think unkind thoughts, like who the hell does
she think she is anyway? There’s an integrity issue for me too, to wax poetic
about my new habits without also telling the bleak truth about how hard this
really is.
In the end, trying to inspire someone else to lose weight is
a futile endeavor. Each person has to come to that decision point on their own,
and many might never get there. That’s their choice. My goal now is to just try
to paint a realistic picture of what to expect, warts and all, for those daring
enough to embark on this adventure.
The good news is that it is possible to lose a large amount of weight and keep it off. The
bad news is that there is no happily-ever-after. But then, I suspect you knew
that already, didn’t you?
Take heart, Sandy. I think you're more of an inspiration than you might realize. It's hard, maybe impossible, to convince people to do a 180 degree turn, but seeing someone simply living the commitment can provide that extra encouragement a person at the edge of a backslide needs to continue the good fight.
ReplyDeleteBen
It's just that I think there is a sneaky little lie tucked into the idea of being inspired. It's the belief that a a person can be inspired in the flash of an instant and that that will carry them through everything to follow. So not true. Finding the inspiration to continue has to be regenerated every day.
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