Self=image

Self-image is not an easy topic for me to discuss, but it is one that I have been faced with a lot recently. I have been bombarded with news articles about it and faced with it whenever I look in the mirror.

I have always had weight problems. At first, when I was young, I was significantly underweight. I was accused by classmates and teachers of being anorexic, and my parents seemed to feel the same way to some extent. I had no appetite, and the small amount of food that I did eat they tended to encourage. Nevermind the fact that it was terribly bad for me, as long as I was eating, it was fine.

Then, when I hit my teenage years and my appetite started to grow along with my figure, at first it was a relief. The change happened to come at the same time as a change in school, and the feeling was that the weight-gain came from somewhere in between happiness at my new surroundings and just growing up in general. My metabolism was changing, and at first it was seen as a good thing. A great thing in fact! I remember bragging to my sister that I had finally put on weight, and she didn't believe me! And putting on weight was something to brag about at that stage. It meant that I was getting healthy. It meant, in my mind, no more mocking and no more accusations.

What I didn't realise at that point was that the weight gain was not all going to be good. While eating whatever I wanted was fine when I was eating hardly anything at all, the weight gain meant that eating whatever I wanted whenever I wanted should have been off the cards. And yet, I had grown so used to eating whatever I pleased that dieting was not something that formed a part of my vocabulary. I had grown used to eating meals that were not necessarily good for me, and succumbing to any cravings that I had. I would not let my body hold me back from what I wanted, under the impression that I would rather be over-weight and happy than under-weight and unhappy.

And I think this is where the biggest problem came in. I had started associating my weight with my emotions. The times in my life when I had been at my lowest weight were also the times when I was at my lowest emotionally. I wanted to avoid that at all costs, and food became a means of reaching this end.

It is now many years later, and my weight is a rollercoaster. I have hypo-thyroidism, which does not help (and nor does my phobia of needles for getting my thyroid checked regularly), but my diet is still all over the place. I am a stress-eater, and I consider my job to be stressful. I am not a smoker, I am not a huge coffee drinker, and this means that when I stress, I use food to cope, and I eat badly.

I look in the mirror and I often wonder how I got to be this way. I try to lose weight, but as soon as an obstacle comes along, I tend to falter in its path. I think part of the problem is that I have a low self-image. While Grant can look at me and say that I am sexy, I look at myself and do not feel it. And I don't think that is something that is going to be shed with weight-loss. When I was overseas and had lost over 10kg in weight over a matter  of months, I still felt over-weight, I still felt like it was not good enough. And when you have that mindset, no amount of weight is ever going to be good enough. At that point,  you have to take a deeper look at yourself and wonder whether your weight-loss or -gain is the real aim, or is there something else about yourself that needs to change - whether it be  your attitude, your lifestyle or your way of coping with things.

To me, I think that I could do with a change in all aspects. I have a very negative way of looking at the world, I live a lazy lifestyle and I do not cope with stress well (screaming and eating being only two of the signs that I am having a bad day) and those are things that are not going to fix themselves with weight-loss. Those are things that may lead to me being happier as a person and happier with myself, and I think that is a good start on the way to having both a healthy body and a healthy mind.

Breaking the Bad Habits

I hate calorie (or kilojoule) counting. I hate it with a passion. I don't like being around people who do it and whenever I find myself doing it, it feels like I become an annoying, overbearing, obsessive person, and I don't like that feeling. And yet, I have found myself doing a lot of it lately.

I am trying my damndest to be healthy lately. And I could say that it is because my friends and I have a contest going on where the person to lose the most weight by the 20th will be winning a wad of cash. But I don't think that is quite it either. Sure, the contest gave me some incentive to get started, incentive that was definitely needed! But a couple of nights before it was suggested, I was sitting in bed and, inexplicably, I was crying. I just couldn't stop it. The tears were just leaking out of me unprovoked. I'd had a bad day, and it culminated into a bad week, month and year so far with everything that has gone wrong just taking over in my mind. And there have been quite a few things going wrong. Not that things are dreadful, but you know how it happens - you start obsessing about something bad and all of the other bad things come to mind and take over completely until you can't think of anything else. And a big contribution towards that was my weight.

My weight has always been very up and down. It was way down when I was young, and then I hit puberty and it shot up. Around the age of 17, I started getting it back down, and then around 20 it started creeping up again. At age 22, during my year in Korea, I got it back down to where I was fairly comfortable with it (sure, I still wanted to lose some weight, but I was a good 10 kgs lighter than when I had arrived). And then I came back to Grahamstown. And in one year it all came back, bringing its friends along to join in the fun.

I know that weight is not the be-all and end-all of life. I know that being thin does not make you happy. I know that indulging every whim doesn't either. But I also know that exercise releases endorphins, and I know that being comfortable with your body does make you more comfortable in general. I know that I would feel a lot less awkward about going out if I didn't have to try on five different outfits, all of which I feel are completely unflattering.

And so I am one week in. I am dieting, but not crash-dieting. I like to think of it less as dieting in fact and more as changing my eating habits for good. I am trying to cut down on wheat, since I suspect that my thyroid isn't a big fan of it. And speaking of my thyroid, I am trying my best to take my thyroid medication. Everyday. Which I am usually pretty darn bad at. I am also trying to eat breakfast everyday. And I am exercising. I went walking and jogging every day last week and, despite the weather turning bad, I intend to keep at it.

So, there is a new section that you can expect to see in my blog, and that is things that I have been eating. And for the first segment:

Chicken Salad
Italian minestrone and rye bread
Rice cakes with lettuce and tuna
Rice cakes with fat free cottage cheese and lemon chicken
Grilled chicken, salad and baked potato
Portuguese grilled chicken with mixed veg and mint rice
Baked fish with lemon, mixed veg and bakes potato
Turkey and avocado on rye
Fat free vanilla yoghurt
Original rice crackers with fat free cottage cheese
Celery and fat freee cottage cheese
One breakfast rusk with my one cup of coffee in the morning