Stealth Thin, Stealth Fat and Point A.

I quit blogging here when I vowed to quit dieting forever. I've found that not dieting is in many ways harder than dieting was. The pressure to be thin is abated by the knowledge you are following society's prescribed guidelines for achieving that goal. You can discount the discomfort of being fat by knowing that you are stealth thin because soon, the diet is going to pay off big time.

Stealth-thin is a good way to describe how I've seen myself for many years. Ever since I first squeezed into junior sizes in college, I saw myself as formerly fat. By most standards 169 and 5'5" is still actually fat, but in my mind I'd lost almost 30 pounds and moved to "real" sizes and I was joining the Army so it was only a matter of time before the outside matched the inside. Even when I regained all the weight I lost and then another 60 pounds for good measure, I thought that I wasn't like other people I saw who were fat because I was carrying this stealth thin person around inside of me.

In truth, I think I had it backwards. Even at my lowest weight, I was still fat in the head. I still bought into the idea that I needed to be thinner to be worthwhile. I still reflexively judged other people based on their weight. I still weighed and measured food in my head and I still ate for comfort. You just couldn't see all the midnight trips to Denny's when I was working out for 10 or more hours a week with a teenager's metabolism. I still coveted the shape of other women's bodies. I still believed there was something unfair about how I was shaped as opposed to other people. (Egg cup on stilts has never been in fashion, ever.) No matter how thin I was, I was still planning for the day I could squeeze into a smaller size. I was still dissatisfied when I looked in the mirror and I still blamed my life problems on excess fat.

I don't think a diet can help me because the part of me that needs to lose weight is my brain. It is crammed full of useless, self-defeating ideas and impulses. All this time I've been mad at my body and trying to reign it in with my brain, when really my body has been fabulously supportive given the amount of abuse I've heaped on it. So now I am continuing my weight loss journey, but I will try to share how I am shaping my thinking. We cannot change what we cannot accept about ourselves. Many people have made the analogy that changing something you won't accept is like trying to plan a journey from point B to point C when you are at point A.

Here is point A: I'm fat. I work out 5-6 hours per week and if I miss a day or two of exercise or indulge my impulse for desserts and deep fried food more than once or twice, I gain weight. If I diary my food and mood most days and work out every day, I maintain. I am not restricting my food intake, but trying to make sure that I only eat when I'm hungry and stop before I'm over full. I'm working on the nutrition of what I eat without counting anything.

In order to reach my "ideal" weight, I would need to lose 90-100 pounds. In order to reach a weight I think is healthy, I would need to lose 75-80. In January I set the modest goal of losing 30 pounds in order to get under 200. I've lost -4 pounds since then, meaning I have 7 fewer weeks and 4 more pounds to go. I still think about dieting every day, and I'm still jealous of crash dieters.