Weight and failing foresight

My weight has been a point of attention for me for quite some time. I can’t think of a time in my life at which my family has not had something to say about my weight. I have always been a bit heavy, and my family readily pointed this out, either in jokes or in encouragement to work out. This commentary has worn a variety of similarly-tuned lenses: to get a partner, to impress competitors, to compete in sports, to sleep better… anything that less weight could possibly do for me was turned into an incentive to move more and eat less; sometimes it was just as simple as to not be as fat as I was, or fatter than I could be. This mindset hung around me for a long time. I have spent more of my life feeling generally bad about my body than I have feeling generally good, or even ambivalent. A few years ago, I finally got to a point where I was eating more carefully and working out more regularly (and rigorously) than I had at any other time, and I was down quite a few pounds; thinner than ever before, even if it still meant that I was overweight by half a point on the BMI¹ scale. I don’t actually know what motivated this most directly. Being single and alone most of the time outside of work, I think it was a haven for me to feel like I was doing something more productive with my life; by all external accounts, I should have been doing well: fit, financially stable, unburdened with debt or anything of the like. Being fit did not actually help me beyond being something to cling to and leverage for approval.

Fast-forward to present, I have regained any weight I could have lost and then some. I am almost the heaviest I have ever been. I have not been able to throw myself back into the lifestyle patterns that helped me achieve the weight that I was at previously as fully, having now recognized the issues therein. Still, I know there’s no reason I need to remain at my current weight. I’m significantly heavier than any reasonable target weight for me, considering my height, age, build, etc. and I know that other things I truly enjoy (walking, climbing, hiking…) would be improved by losing some of this extra weight. I don’t have the outside motivating factors beyond that really; my family has stopped bothering me about it, I’m not trying to date anyone new, my partner of the past few years is good to me about my body. Still, for my own well-being, for the enjoyment of these activities, and for whatever long-term health benefits I might reap, I find myself in a position of wanting to lose this weight and build a better body composition for myself, along with improved cardiovascular health.

At points, I find myself wishing I was blind to the negative impacts of how I treated food during that time, or the vain motivations that drove me to take it so seriously. I find myself wanting to reimplement the rigorous fasting regimen I had experimented with for some time, despite the fact that it exacerbated other health issues (unbeknownst to me at the time) eventually leading me to the hospital. Instead of doing these, I am in the gym infrequently, I meal plan loosely, and track my macronutrients with less rigor than would be necessary to really drive myself towards the kinds of results I have achieved in the past. I’ve done periods of this before and seen small drops with slow-but-sure returns to the state that drove me to begin it again; these things have not proven sustainable. I feel better than I did a month ago, before I restarted these kinds of things, but (as of this morning) I’m at a net loss of weight that could be accounted for within any given day’s typical fluctuation, or even just from water intake. I’m sixteen hours fasted just because of my caffeine intake today (more than one strong, cold, black coffee) and trying to feel out mentally whether that’s a reaction to seeing the scale as it was or if it’s merely chance that today was the day I went for that again.

I find that, when faced with decisions about doing things that are good for me in these regards, some are much easier based on my framing. For example, it’s quite often very easy for me to recognize that I should do something physically engaging each day; lifting, walking, focused cardio, or even just some light yoga seem to fit smoothly into my life, and I enjoy them. It’s proven difficult, however, to recognize in the moment how my eating habits directly oppose my stated goals when I’m not explicitly structuring my meals to the gram. When I’m presented with food outside of the bounds of what I can track, I fail almost entirely to account for what I would normally consider when building tracked meals. Desserts and snacks seem to fill out my caloric intake whenever I introduce them. Even the conscious thought, “this is pushing me farther from my goals,” while taking those things in hasn’t changed my behaviour in any meaningful fashion, lately. I know that my attitude toward food and movement (traditionally, “diet and exercise”) are both crucial to developing meaningful changes in my life that foster ongoing benefits to my health; how, then, does the framing of good food choices shift to match the framing of movement: being easy to incorporate simply because I know it is good, and feeling good when I incorporate it? As you might guess, I’m still working on that part.