I am still working hard with my health practitioner to lose at least some of the 197 pounds (89 kg) I carry on my 5’2″ (157.5 cm) skeleton. Over five years she has corrected my hormonal levels, reduced inflammation, eliminated parasites and infections, improved the functioning of my organs and systems and recently brought my resting metabolism up to normal level. In the past several months I increased exercise, corrected candida levels, and cut out all foods that contain wheat flour in any way. Ten days ago I finally submitted to cutting out all sugar except fruit. My hunger is slightly diminished.
My body just doesn’t want to give up its excess fat.
But it doesn’t really matter because the self-disgust I feel isn’t really based on how fat I am. I learned self-hatred from my mother who didn’t like herself. She criticized her body, called herself stupid and carried a simmering anger that exploded unexpectedly. She told me I didn’t know how to think, had no common sense, that other kids could do things better than I could and criticized me for always having my nose in a book. Her focus on how she looked and how I looked set me up for lifetime of thinking my stomach was too big and I should be thinner than I was, even when I weighed 125 pounds (57 kg).
I’ve always believed I have book smarts, but I’ve never believed I have any other kind of smarts.
I hoped as I got older my self-esteem would improve, but it hasn’t worked out that way. I expected to become more comfortable with my character, values and life choices. Instead I’ve stayed about the same amount of comfortable with my values and choices, and while I am more accepting of my personality and behaviors, I’ve become less accepting of my physical appearance. It turns out — big surprise — that it’s easier for me to criticize and reject my body as I get puffier and saggier.
What it comes down to is that however we feel about ourselves, circumstances don’t change the fundamentals. Studies have shown that people who were happy in their marriages pre-pandemic are still happy, and people who were unhappy in their marriages pre-pandemic are still unhappy. Likewise I suspect people with fundamentally strong self-esteem who liked themselves in their 20s, have strong self-esteem and like themselves in their 60s.
And I suspect people who didn’t like themselves in their 20s — even at our fittest, firmest and prettiest — don’t naturally like ourselves any better in middle and old age. Why would we? While it might be true that many things improve with age and many older people stop worrying so much about physical appearance, low self-esteem is a brutal thing to live with. It never lets up and it grabs onto the smallest of disappointments and turns them into evidence that we really do suck. There it is, see? There’s the proof that I’m no good at all and my life is never going to be any better than this.
People try to help when they see how low I feel about myself. They give advice or point out my accomplishments or they tell me how much they admire me. They remind me of really cool things I’ve done and compare me to others who aren’t as smart or funny or brave. And for the moment it might make me feel better and get me to stop kicking myself, but afterwards the self-disappointment and self-loathing roll back.
They never stop and I don’t know how to change that, especially after three decades of trying to fix it with things like talk therapy, journalling, meditation, affirmations, positive thinking, yoga, exercise, hypnotherapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing treatment, Emotional Freedom Technique, MasterMind technique, neurolinguistic programming, spiritual healing, shaman work, this self-help book, that self-help workshop, and endless self-care. There’s simply a bedrock of self-hatred underneath everything I do and am and at the age of 54 and a half, I’ve run out of ways to address it.
So being obese really isn’t the problem. Becoming obese just gave me a way to externalize what I’ve been saying all my life: I’m not good. When I was a normal size and I believed I was fat, people told me “You’re not fat.” After I put on enough weight, they stopped saying that. The world finally agreed with me that I am fat. Maybe the self-esteem problem will continue until the world agrees with me that I suck.
What I resonated with – “Becoming obese just gave me a way to externalize what I’ve been saying all my life: I’m not good.” But I’m wondering if there’s something worldwide going on about obesity – and thus about our self-esteems, too??
https://aeon.co/essays/blaming-individuals-for-obesity-may-be-altogether-wrong
Thank you for that Aeon article, Andria. VERY interesting! I like the matter-of-fact belief that it can’t just be individual choices that make us fat and the discussion of global reasons for obesity. But your comment introduces another element: self-esteem. I’m intrigued by the idea that humans are externalizing a species-wide self-loathing and fatness is simply the easiest way to do that right now. Or did you mean it’s the other way around: obesity has caused us, globally, to hate ourselves?