How Does A Person Get To Be 100lbs Overweight?

by Seth Simonds

How do people get to be tremendously fat? I don’t mean a little chunky, beefy, or heavyset. I’m talking prodigious, massive, positively huge.

I was one of those people (very recently, in fact).

I believe severe obesity is, for many people, the result of something I call (for lack of a better name) the obesity cycle:

The Obesity Cycle

(and how to escape it)

1. Fear of failure

Sure, packing on pounds is a failure in itself. But a slow, consistent failure is easier to digest than the dramatic failure of giving up in the middle of an extreme diet. No matter how you gained the weight, it only takes a few failed diets before you start to think that perhaps diets aren’t for you and that you’re destined to be obese for life. It gets worse. Many binge dieters don’t just gain back the weight lost during extreme diets. They typically add a few extra pounds for good measure! This creates a situation in which logic dictates that going on diets will lead to even more weight gained.

Escape phrase: “My failings do not make me a failure.”

Escape route: Use tiny triumphs to remind yourself that you can follow through and do what you’ve promised yourself you’d do. Try walking for ten minutes every day for a week. Once you can do that, add more difficult challenges. Don’t feel stupid for being happy that you’ve done something small. YOU DIDN’T FAIL. Revel in it, remember it, and use that thought to push for greater wins. You can do this!

2. Low self-esteem

You don’t have to be fat to feel badly about yourself. You might not have as pretty a face as you’d like. You might not be as smart as you’d like. There are so many reasons to feel poorly about oneself! At least, there are if you decide to dwell on them. If you don’t feel like you are worth taking care of, guess what happens? You stop taking care of yourself. Low self-esteem is a popular way to enter the obesity cycle and it’s one of the most difficult to escape. Why? Because it’s all in your head. There isn’t a person in the world who can truly convince you that you are worth taking care of. You have to choose for yourself.

Escape phrase: “I am deserving of care, love, and forgiveness when I forget to show care and love to myself.”

Escape route: Ask yourself, ”am I unhappy because I’m overweight or am I overweight because I’m unhappy?” Then again, you might be the jolliest fat person in the world… or at least pretend to be. We know you cry yourself to sleep at night under a blanket of potato chip bags and snickers bar packages! I’m not a psychiatrist and I can’t offer you some 35-step plan to emotional nirvana. What I can offer you is the affirmation that you are worth taking care of. You are worth the ups and downs, pain and joy, laughter and tears of this adventure toward recognizing your value as a person.

3. Emotional eating

You eat when you’re happy, sad, alone, in a group, bored, excited… you pretty much eat as your primary physical response to stimuli. This is the part of the cycle that leads to a lot of consistent weight gain because it involves us using food to chase the pain resulting from failures and low self-esteem!

Escape phrase: “I give myself permission to express my emotions and will strive to seek real solutions to my problems and not try to hide my pain with food.”

Escape route: Watch this video and read the included article for a possible solution to your emotional eating. Some cool people left amazing comments that you might find helpful as well!

4. Poor body image

This is the part where a lot of people break into diatribes (angry speeches) about how the media is to blame for the way we view our own bodies. Some of that might be true for the people who need to lose 5lbs in order to look like a Victoria’s Secret model. I daresay none of it applies to the excessively obese among us (myself included). But we act like it does. We look at magazines, watch movies, and browse websites filled with images of people who don’t look like us. We think, “wow, if I looked like Brad Pitt then women like Angelina Jolie would want to date me.” Is it true? In part, yes, and we all know what you do when you’re feeling like crap because Angelina isn’t calling you: You put as many cheeseburgers between you and Brad Pitt as possible. This makes you fatter and gives you more reason to feel like a big fat failure.

Escape phrase: “If I had [insert celebrity name]’s body would I actually take care of it or would I soon be overweight again, eating chips and wishing I looked like [insert celebrity different celebrity name]?”

Escape route: It’s diagram time! Take a piece of paper (or open new document on your computer) and write the name of a celeb or person you wish you looked like. Now write down what you think it would feel like to wake up in the morning (alone) as that person. I think you’ll be surprised by how well you take care of your celebrity body in contrast to the way you treat yourself on a daily basis.

When I’ve asked overweight friends to try this exercise, every single one of them made their celebrity body eat a healthy breakfast and work out in the early morning. Not to get all woo-woo on you but this might just be a situation in which visualizing yourself as the person you want to be can lead to your becoming that person.

5. Isolation

It is a very, very lonely thing to be extremely overweight. When you stop caring about yourself, feel like a failure, look different from others, and you consistently feel like crap… it’s easy to see why you’d feel alone. It’s awkward to eat with others because you imagine they’re all watching you eat and judging you. Everybody is watching and thinking badly of you when you’re very heavy. Well, at least that’s what you’ve convinced yourself of. The more alone you feel, the more you eat to stave off the pain. This, as you well know deep inside, is not going to work in the long run.

Pass phrase: “I will no longer allow my weight challenge to dictate how I interact with my community.” (If you’re 600lbs and want to go rock climbing with your friends… you’ll want to modify this phrase a bit until you’ve dropped some weight.)

Escape route: Choose a non-eating activity that involves other people and participate in it regularly. If you’d like to really set yourself free, pick something that none of your friends do. Perhaps you’ve always wanted to try your hand at comedy? Sign up for a night class and really get into it! This has two benefits. The first is that you’ll be doing something you enjoy that involves human interaction but not eating. The second is that the people who have only known you to be very overweight will be the quickest to notice when you lose weight. Call me crazy but there’s nothing quite so cool as having a new friend remark on your seemingly improved health!

Do you have any questions, thoughts, additional wisdom or a story of your own to add? I’ll look for you in the comments!

Share and Enjoy:
  • StumbleUpon
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Kirtsy