Weigh in # 3 – I gained half a pound. Great. Could have something to do with the Mexican fiesta I had last Monday, or perhaps the enormous Filipino barbeque I attended on Saturday. Or the bag of extra buttery microwave popcorn. Yes, all that in a week, no wonder I find myself here. My Jenny Craig person had me do an interesting exercise to try to help me figure out why I sabotaged myself. On a piece of paper create 2 columns; on the first column ask yourself questions writing with your dominant hand (righty in my case), and answer writing with your non-dominant hand, allowing your “inner” voice to reply. I found it a very cool exercise, I had to ask questions like “how old are you, are you planning to bring me down again?” etc. I might even continue the exercise at home, since the questions provoked some rather sensitive and buried issues for me.
I feel like there is an overemotional 12 year old inside my head telling me I should eat what I want when I want, because I CAN. After giving it some thought I realized that’s the age where I began to develop emotional overeating behavior patterns. It was an awkward age for me, boys didn’t like me at all yet, although I was crazy about them (not much has changed but at least they reciprocate now!), and the rejection was a constant sting. Add that to my parents’ constant fighting and ensuing divorce, and my decline from “popular” to rumored lesbian goth weirdo and we have ourselves an emotional eater folks. Ironically my metabolism was so good during my teenage years that I ate whatever I wanted and remained at a healthy and attractive weight. It wasn’t until I hit my freshman year of college that I packed on all these pounds. Once I hit the college dining hall, my metabolism decided to basically stop. That’s oversimplifying it but my point is that the behavior was already well in place and had never had negative consequences before. Trying to lose the weight it’s so much harder than I ever thought it could be to break the pattern of emotional eating. I haven’t been in the best mental frame of mind lately – I’m having trouble adjusting to living with my mom, my friends and boyfriend are upstate and becoming more distant than they should, and I’m anxious as hell about going back to school in just over a week. And I’m supposed to DIET during all this?! It seems crazy in a way, but my weight is a big part of what’s holding me back emotionally from living a full life, so I think it’s important to address it now rather than later.
I didn’t think a JC consult could provoke so much deep emotion. But it makes sense since weight loss is much more mentally based than I initially realized. Until that rejected 12 year old girl feels better, this road is going to be really tough. I need to start figuring out how food can go back to being just food, not my personal version of heroin.
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