"Have you heard the saying, "You reap what you sow?" A farmer who works hard to sow a crop will reap the rewards of a good harvest. If he does not work diligently to sow and maintain a good crop, he will not get as good a harvest. The reality for you is that you, too, have reaped what you have sown. Recognizing that family history and genetics have influence as well, your obesity is a result of the choices you have made in your life. You have chosen to take in more calories than your body requires, and you have chosen to engage in more sedentary activities. These were your choices, and now you are reaping what you have sown.
I have heard time and time again from bariatric surgical patients that "I have had to work hard to stay this heavy" "Obesity is what I get for living foolishly" "no one forced me at gunpoint to eat that food I chose to eat it all by myself." " At the end of the day, I chose not to go for a walk; instead I chose to watch television." Choices have consequences. Sooner or later, everyone will reap what they have sown.
I just met with a woman today who admitted, "It was just always easier and more fun to eat." Now, well over 100 pounds overweight, and with increasing and serious medical concerns, she experiences the cost of living in this manner. If she wishes to reap a different crop from what she has sown, she will have to change her mindset, behaviors and really examine what she values in life.
As a culture, we value comfort. We believe that we are entitled to live a comfortable life. We believe we have the right to do things that make us comfortable. After a hard day at work, we believe we deserve to take it easy. We deserve a mixed drink when we are stressed or worried. If we don't feel like cooking, we are entitled to go out to eat. As a very obese society, we have based our lifestyles and behaviors on these perceived rights and entitlements, and consequently we have reaped what we have sown.
My point in not whether you do or do not have these rights. My point is that based on these ideas, your behavior has gotten you into serious health trouble. As long as you rely on these rights and entitlements, you will not overcome your weight problem. You have other rights and entitlements to rely on, however, like the right to a healthy life and a healthy body, being entitled to engage in activities of your own choosing, to eat healthy and nutritious foods, and to make choices because they are good for you, not just popular, easy, or expected. Shift the paradigm!"
"It is a blunt fact that people want to live their lives the way they want to live them. We do not like to be told how to live our lives. How many times over the years have your doctors or loved ones encouraged you to lose weight, to change your eating pattern, or to start exercising? Granted, these changes are difficult, but did you work at it? Were you committed to the point of doing whatever it took to meet your goal? Did you change your thinking, your viewpoints, and your outlook? Maybe, but you certainly didn't make it a permanent change or you wouldn't be reading this book."
Change is not easy, but the fact is that if you continue your current style of living and your weight and health get worse, and your quality of living will decrease further. Ask yourself: "Is my goal to be comfortable now, or healthy later?" Which do you value more? The answer to these questions will ultimately determine whether you should even consider weight loss surgery.
Successful weight management after bariatric surgery requires full commitment and perseverance. It is not easy. If it were everyone would have it done and we wouldn't be writing this book! There is no cure for obesity, but, you can do it if you are serious, admit the problem, take responsibility for solving the problem, and totally commit to creating a permanent solution.
After admitting you have a problem, you must also define the problem. You might be surprised to learn that the problem is not your weight. No, Really!! The excess weight is really a symptom of a deeper problem. Turning toward food for comfort, relaxation, or just something to do is a symptom of underdeveloped coping skills. Stress and emotions influence most people to overeat, and stress and emotions often keep people overeating until they are overweight or worse. So, until a person learns to manage their stress and emotion in a healthy and effective manner, that person will continue to struggle with their weight.
There is no way to just make stress and emotion completely go away. It's just life, and as we all know: life is not fair. Sorry to have to tell you this, but surgery or no surgery, you will continue to experience disappointment, failure, rejection, anger, and many other emotions. Although some of the stressors may be different, the existence of stress will remain. The trick is to learn to cope better (and don't kill the messenger!)
Coping more effectively is about breaking the less effective and often unhealthy patterns, and substituting new and healthier patterns in their place. Take, for example, a situation in which you experience frustration over something that did not work out the way you had planned. In the past, because there was nothing you could do to change the outcome, maybe you delt with the frustration, anger, and disappointment by getting a bowl of ice cream to soothe those prickly feelings and make yourself feel better. This pattern of responding to negative emotions by using food as a salve has not really helped you feel better, only make you feel worse in the long run.
A more healthy and effective method might be first go for a walk, even a quick walk around the parking lot if you are at work, to let off steam. Then once you have cooled off, call a friend or co-worker and vent. Verbalizing problems and venting emotions through words really does help.
You could also just sit down, by yourself, and write out or diagram the problem from a couple of different perspectives. What are your options with that project now that the first run did not turn out as you had hoped? What are the pros and cons of each option? What did you learn from this project? How can you do it differently next time? Write down your plans for attempt number two, and know you've delt with your emotions in a productive, positive, and non-destructive way.
Dealing with emotions in an effective and positive way is extremely important to the success of your weight management program, whether or not you ever choose to have surgery. If you do choose to have surgery, then developing good coping skills will help you head off problems relating emotion to food in the future. You'll have to make the drastic change of exchanging excessive eating for life participation and emotional confrontation, and all the stressors and emotions that entails. You have to eat right, eat less, and get moving. Well, you know what you need to do, so what keeps you from doing it? This is the $64,000 question! As you are able to identify the obstacles that interfere with what you know you should be doing, you are getting closer to the root of the problem."
"What are your expectations for life after bariatric surgery? If you are hoping for the "extreme makeover" and "Happily ever after", you will be sorely disappointed. If you get nothing else out of this book, understand that you will probably just end up looking like an average size person. And that is okay! You do not need to have anymore drastic changes than bariatric surgery will already bring you in your physical appearance and your inner confidence and self-esteem. You do not need to completely become something you are not, nor should you become something that you're not! After surgery, you should essentially remain the same person on the inside that you were before surgery.
You will bring all of the same attitudes, perceptions, and hurts that you have now in to your life after surgery. Do not expect the surgery to change anything but decrease your weight. You can generally expect life to be pretty average, although easier and probably a little more happy."
"IF your next course of action is bariatric surgery, then you will enjoy remarkable change with your weight and appearance, however, these external changes will not compare with the degree of change you will experience on the inside. It is in the shadows of our inner thoughts, feelings, and memories where fear, and self defeating thoughts hide.
The emotional world can be shadowy. Looking into the shadows can be intimidating, frightening, and overwhelming. It's hard to see anything clearly. Fear hides in the shadows. Pain hides in the shadows. This is the domain of unresolved feelings and emotions. All that hides in the shadows can rise up against you when lest expected. Knowing this engenders fear and reticence. Part of your journey to weight loss success is about getting rid of the fear.
It is also important, however, to be truthful with yourself. Self-righteousness, entitlement, justification, and denial,are at the opposite ends of the spectrum from truth. To the degree we make excuses, or justify, or minimize why we continue our unhealthy patterns, we are in denial, and denial is the opposite of truth. But, just because we deny a problem, or deny the importance or significance of the problem, does not mean there is no problem on which to work.
We all have tendencies toward denial. We want to think well of ourselves and for others to think well of us also. We don't like to admit that we over-ate just because we wanted to, or that we didn't walk today just because we indulged our laziness. Admitting this doesn't make us feel good about ourselves, and we fear others will judge and not accept or like us. It is a lot more comfortable for us to blame it on how we were parented or our busy shedules than it is to admit weakness in ourselves.
Inwardly, these types of rationalizations provide relief. They take the pressure off and help us save face, even with ourselves. This is an indication of faulty thinking and/ or denial of what we are doing to ourselves. At a deeper level, there are value statements. We make time for what we value. This is true whether what you value is self-defeating or self-affirming. The evidence speaks for itself.
You may have heard that you can tell the values of a person by looking at their checkbook. People spend money on what they value most. the same is true with our time, especially when the patterns are evident. Some people value comfort, so they choose to do their time doing comfortable things. Some like to work on antique cars, or any number of other hobbies, so they spend their discretionary time on those endeavors. When we want to spend more time on indulgences we do, and then leave less time for other responsibilities such as exercise, sleep and relationships.
Our self-defeating values truly are difficult tendencies to confess to ourselves, let alone others. Honesty, venerability, authenticity, and understanding your self are vital to resolving the underlying issues that currently influence you toward unhealthy behavior. Facing the truth about yourself will result in healing from painful memories and emotions, followed by improved self-esteem. Further, as you address these unresolved emotional issues and begin to heal from them, your thoughts and feelings about yourself will improve, and your behaviors will follow suit.
Dealing with these raw emotions and hurtful memories is very difficult, I grant you. Making these changes is sometimes intimidating and overwhelming. So, why is it necessary to dig up these painful emotions? This is a good question. Unresolved issues like these can make us uncomfortable at best, and tormented at worst. We don't like thinking about them because they are too painful. There is often a degree of hopelessness because you cannot change the past, so what good would it do to think about these painful emotions?
We try to avoid these memories as best we can by staying bust, anything to stay busy. Getting involved, perhaps too involved, in relationships is a very effective means of keeping the past in the past. Our efforts to anesthetize our painful emotions can propel us toward food. Eating is also very effective in helping you to "swallow" your pain and tears.
Perhaps you haven't thought about your painful or difficult memories in a long time, and you are not conscious of them presently, but they are contributing to your deeper feelings of discontent, low self-worth, and consequential eating patterns. You may not be able to put your finger on it, but for some reason you need comfort, and food is a most convenient and readily available source. The fact that food is a comfort for you implies that their must be something in your life making you feel uncomfortable. Generally speaking, if there is no current source of discomfort in your life, then the source must be in the past or future.
If the source is in the past, you may be experiencing a degree of depression. If the source is something in the future, you may be experiencing a degree of anxiety. In either case, you will need to address this source of depression or anxiety to successfully manage your tendencies toward emotional eating and maintaining the bond between food and external issues.
To the degree that you turn to food for reasons other than physiological, you are putting food into your mouth for more subtle reasons such as cultural, emotional, or environmental. You may eat to give you something to do when you are bored, for companionship when you are lonely, relaxation when you are stressed and overwhelmed, comfort when you are angry, relief when you are hurting or experiencing guilt, or as a pick-me-up when tired, discouraged, or depressed.
Sit down with a pencil and paper and ask yourself, "Why do I often feel discontent?" "Why do I need to be comforted?" or "What do need to be comforted from?" This is an interesting exercise to help you start looking into the shadows at the things that help to keep you overweight.
It is important, however, to shine some light into these shadows. Although you think you have buried or wiped away all that hurt, pain, loneliness, and grief associated with abuse, disappointment, shame, guilt, and fear of your life as an overweight individual, you haven't.
You can ignore it, you can pretend it isn't there, but it is there, and it will continue to adversely affect your decisions and patterns of behavior until you explore it and resolve it for good. Memories and feeling don't go away, but dealing with them effectively changes the links to current emotions, and changes the locus of control these memories and feelings have over your current situation. In the subconscious mind they have control. When brought to the conscious mind they can be controlled.
In discovering who you've grown into being, you should first identify all the parts of you that haven't changed. These are generally things like your morals, your core life values, your principles, who you love, and how much you love them. This will help to ground you, and then you can begin to explore what other things about you have grown, have emerged, or have been freed through this process.
Learning to understand more about your traits, wants, desires, and feelings will help you to become more accepting of yourself. Accepting yourself, with all your faults and strengths, is the key to maintaining your commitment to your new lifestyle and newly found health. Learning to understand your "precious pain" and not giving into it is also extremely important.
"Precious Pain" is a term used by therapists and counselors to describe the conditions in our lives that we won't leave behind, even though they are painful and destructive, because at least they're familiar, predictable, and less scary than finding out about the alternatives. We see this principle at work when people stay in abusive relationships. They stay not because they like the abuse, but because at least it's a known quantity. The alternative, finding out hoe to fabricate a whole new and different life, is so scary and overwhelming that it is just easier to stay in the abuse.
Sadly, there are a number of persons who have suffered significant trauma, or physical or sexual abuse in their earlier years. A very common source of comfort and control available to children and adolescents is food. As children and adolescents, many traumatized people turned to food to help cope with painful experiences. As long as the cognitive and emotional wounds are not addressed and healed, these wounds remain in the shadows, sometimes very quietly, but all the while subtly influencing your self-esteem, self-confidence, emotions, and relationships.
These unresolved emotional wounds can have a strong influence on how you use your free time, as well as your degree and type of social activity. If you want to change your behavior, it is imperative that you look at the thoughts and feelings that influence that behavior. Do you fear releasing the precious pain, whether from trauma, physical or sexual abuse, or from the verbal and societal abuse heaped on people who commit the transgression of carrying too much weight.
This last type of precious pain is something the vast majority of overweight people live with every day. The weight, and the circumstances and conditions that surround it and its attendant issues, permate all aspects of their lives. Thinking about loosing the weight and having to find out how to cope will all new situations that don't involve being rejected, being stereotyped, being ridiculed, and assumptions being made about intellect, strength, and character can be a pretty daunting and intimidating task. Patients tell me, "I just don't know how to be thin" Maybe it is just easier to stay fat? Maybe that's at least safer? No! It's not!
Surround yourself with people and professionals who will fill in the gaps for you when your coping skills are stretched a little thin. Be prepared to let them help you. Let humanity back in to fill the spots formerly held by food. Fill your life with people and experiences, and see food only as a means to keeping you alive and healthy. Mostly you should remember to negatively associated food with your old life and living the precious pain. Food kept you anchored there, so cut the line and leave it behind. Accept your new life and know that you are normal , you're good enough for anything and anybody, and you are worthy of a good and healthy life."Buy your copy HERE!
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