The General Content Notice is in effect, with a bonus notice for talk about, well, the temptation to diet, and some discussion about disordered eating practices. Reader discretion is advised.
I sometimes wonder if I’m alone in the temptation to start dieting again. Because I’m only Technically Fat (which means that I don’t “look fat” but the Second Cousin of All Irrelevancies, the BMI, says I am), the temptation is, well, huge.
Especially since the line I get, all the time, is “If you lose X amount of pounds, you’d look better/feel better/be normal“. If I really tried. If I really wanted to. It’s all about willpower (and not giving in to the desire to throw something at the person who threw that line my way isn’t a show of willpower?), it’s all about calories in/calories out, it’s all about (insert random line here).
But it would be easy to just give in. It would be super-easy to just start dieting so that I get harassed less by family members and doctors to “do something” for myself. It would be easy to diet myself down to a smaller, more acceptable size (only to gain it all back later, plus some, because the odds are good that exactly that will happen). It would be super-easy to buy whichever diet kit is “in” and live primarily on rice cakes and guilt. Not that rice cakes are evil, turning rice cakes into “good” food is, if not evil, then at least Just Plain Wrong on several levels. I even like rice cakes and yogurt and salads and some other foods deemed “dieter food” (except cottage cheese; the texture of the low-fat stuff is just so very off). I just hate the idea that these things are “better” than donuts or cake or cheeseburgers. But the big food rant will come later.
But, anyway, it’d be easy to get back to the vicious, ugly cycle of brief victory followed by crushing defeat and doing it all again. That would be easy. Choosing to walk away from the carousel with its flashing lights and colorful “after” images, though the results on TV and on the website aren’t typical (of course not), and familiar tune of “this can be you, this can be you if you try this diet”…that is not easy. It might be simple for some as it was for me, but it’s still not as easy as it would be to buy a ticket and get on the carousel, riding it as it spins ever faster, and once I get off, the world seems distorted to me, although the world itself has not changed.
That is what dieting was like to me. It distorted my view of food, the world, and myself, so that I could not see clearly. And while it is easier to go back to that world, I choose not to. It is the hardest decision I have ever made, but one that is worth it. So I don’t understand how not dieting is “easier”. It might seem easier to the outsider looking in, or on the surface, but considering that I live in a world where people would rather be hit by a speeding car than look like me, the decision to not diet was pretty damn simple for me, but not easy by any stretch of the imagination. It still is not easy, but I have never felt more free.
Because the temptation is always there, lurking at the periphery. It takes a whole hell of a lot more willpower to refuse the ticket than it does to get back on the carousel.
(The BGM should be “Sick Cycle Carousel” by Lifehouse, since it’s so fitting.)
