“Bones, what have I done?
“What you had to, what you always do; turn death into a fighting chance to live.”
-Star Trek III
Where did I get the audacity to decide that I was one of the 5% who keep the weight off? (I can’t technically claim it, but in case I do, I have some thoughts.) The thought I had this morning is that I’ve done my time in the 95%, and it a strange way my past failure works for me, not against me.
I’ve spent most of my time in the category of people who wash out in the first two weeks. I did have one bout of weight loss where I lost 13% of my bodyweight, but I fell off the wagon because it wasn’t sustainable. A lifestyle change is required, but it needs to take your life into account. It is one of the paradoxes. In that instance, I didn’t understand that a healthy lifestyle isn’t just losing weight forever.
But because I had that experience, I had some idea of what I needed to look for. I knew I needed something sustainable. I knew that I had to find the mindset shift from diet to lifestyle. I needed to find out how people who keep the weight off think.
The 5% figure is gathered from surveys of studies in which people lost weight in a scientific experiment. People are put on a particular program to measure the results of a specific episode of weight loss that has been imposed on a subject. It is all about the program, not about the person, and who is going to find a lifestyle change that way?
Personal responsibility for obesity is another paradox. In one sense, we can’t fix something if we don’t accept that it is within our realm of control. At the same time, if guilt trips or “the power of positive thinking” worked, we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic. In western society we love to analyze and look for the first cause of things. We try to explain why we are overweight by blaming biology, stress, psychological traumas, conspiracies of multinational corporations etc. But analysis only gets one halfway to wisdom. Synthesis is how we apply these various causes to our own situation to find context. In analysis we are victims of external forces, in synthesis we can become an agent for change.
At some point I stopped asking about how to lose weight and looked at why. The trick is that “why” can also collapse into analysis. The shape of it, for me, is to stop looking for the parts of a thing and instead look at what the thing is part of. Whether my obesity was biological, psychological, or cultural in cause, its meaning was that I wasn’t taking care of myself. So any part of my solution involved providing care for myself in some way. This was not necessarily clear to me at the outset. I haven’t really put it into words until now, a year and a half after I began (I have articulated the meaning of my obesity before). So I don’t think you need to distill “why” before you can start. I spent a lot of my year of weight loss worrying that my motivation might evaporate since I couldn’t identify where it was coming from.
Some people are confronted with their mortality, like with serious medical diagnoses. Some see others succeeding and come to believe they can change. Or we pass a milestone in age or weight. But the decision comes about that we will stop running away from life and embrace it.
Endure to the Middle 