I've never been at a healthy weight in my life. Even in photos of me when I was 6 I was already way bigger than every other kid my age. One of the biggest hurdles for me losing weight was that I have never been healthy, so I thought it was impossible for me.
I also have bad motivation in general in life. If I failed at something, it meant I was never going to be good enough and I should stop trying. This meant that when I was a teen and young adult I would try to watch what I ate, but then give up when I saw nothing change because I would say to myself "you haven't lost weight this week, and you will probably never lose weight, just do what you know."
I hate self help books, but my partner was studying counselling at college a few years ago and had a book called Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman for the course. Was bored one day and read it. There is a bunch of stuff about depression and optimism but the relevant part for this story is how I learnt that I was operating with a defeatist attitude that saw everything as permanent. Failure was not a hiccup on the road to success, it was a permanent outcome.
I wish I could say after reading that book everything clicked and I ended up having a successful life, but I've only really started training myself to think in this way in the past year or so. My biggest test is my weight loss.
I figured I would try to train my positive attitude with my weight loss journey. So, for example, when I began doing cico this February, I dropped 6lbs and then very next month put it all back on within a week of over eating. Old thought patterns told me this was proof that I couldn't lose weight, and that it was a complete failure. My new thought pattern was put into play instead: "Whoops, that was a bad thing that just happened. I feel bad, but this is just a bump in the road. At least I proved I could lose some weight, all I need to do now is learn how to keep it off!"
Earlier this week I hit one-derland for the first time in my adult life, and then I went out socialising, drank a bunch of red wine, and put myself back in the terrible twos. Old thought patterns started up, "you idiot, you'll never be under 200, stop fooling yourself." I had to actively talk myself down and say "ha you went overboard with the wine last night, but you know what went wrong. You've lost 25lbs already, so just keep on trucking."
This is going to be a process, the weight loss and the optimistic thinking, but doing them simultaneously is actually helping out. The weight loss is proof that the optimism is helping me commit to something I would have given up months ago because it was "too hard." And the learned optimism is helping me lose weight because it's letting me see "failures" as detours rather than dead ends.
I also know this is something I'm going to have to work on for a while, too. I have lived my whole life fat and my whole life as a pessimist, and now I've decided to try something new. The worst that can happen is it doesn't work, and I've decided that is a miniscule price to pay for trying to make myself the person I always wished I was born as -- happy and healthy.
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