One of my favorite weight loss blogs is Escape from Obesity. Lyn is an incredible writer who is prolific in both the quantity and quality of her posts. She always seems to hit the nail on the head for me. I’ve been reading her for some time through RSS but for some reason had not mentioned her before or added her to my blogroll. I fixed both of those things today. Go give her a read if you haven’t already.
Yesterday Lyn wrote a really inspired post called The Deep Issues Behind the Fat in which she characterized two different kinds of people trying to lose weight:
The more time I spend working out my own escape from obesity, the more I am convinced that there are (at least) two kinds of people trying to lose weight. There’s people who don’t really understand or are not focused on the principles of good nutrition… who just plain eat the wrong kinds of food in the wrong amounts because they taste good. One day they wake up and say, “I really want to lose weight!” They figure out how to change their eating and start moving, and they pretty much just DO it. They start eating chicken and broccoli and apples, they get on the treadmill an hour a day, an after months of work they have lost the weight. Period. Then there are the people who, even after they *know* how and what to do, they stumble and straggle and suffer along, maybe losing weight, maybe not… regaining, losing, struggling, and wondering, “WHY can’t I lose weight and keep it off?” They see the people in the first category, who report that they just “decided” to lose weight and were “determined” to do it, and they think, what is wrong with me, that I cannot do what they did? And they usually stay fat or, if they do lose weight, regain it all within a few years.
Like Lyn, I find myself in the second category. I’ll tell myself (and my readers!) that I know what it takes to lose the weight but that I am struggling with willpower or dedication or a myriad of other issues. But ultimately I wonder if it isn’t about engagement. Am I truly engaged with the concept of living a better life?
Lyn opines that the issue is one of being “checked out” where we seek food unconsciously in response to something that is bothering us, similarly to how an alchoholic or a drug addict uses their vices. The idea that we overeat as an addicition isn’t new, but to me the concept of thinking about this is a means of “checking out” is. I can relate to the idea of “checking out” and can invision what it’s counterpart, being “checked in” is like. Again, I see it is being engaged in the process and having a radar focus on what you are trying to achieve, and not letting life just happen to you which I think is what happens when you are “checked out”
Take a look at what she wrote and see if you see any of yourself in there. Could your problem be that you need to check in to life?
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