Howdy Striving,

I can’t relate especially with your current situation specifically, however i have struggled with my weight and emotional eating in the past. The key to everything, is not to dwell on what a ‘healthy’ balance is. From what your saying, you seem to eat well. So if you feel good about yourself and feel healthy that’s the main thing.

I am not sure what the connection is between feeling out of control, looking healthy and weight.

Well, it sort of all in sync. Depression is mental, whilst what you eat can be both a support for healthy mental condition and physical. Also, you may have a mental connection to the ‘size’ or ‘shape’ you are and ‘healthy’. For instance, maybe your ideal body type is not a number (lbs/ kgs) but an ‘image’. So if you haven’t achieved this image you don’t consider yourself healthy, irrespective of whether you are or not and as a result this depresses you because you thought you could do it. It becomes a mental association, you start to feel that’s what your eating, when it’s your perception of your own body. To me, what your eating is healthy, so it’s not your relationship with food. It’s your relationship with your image that i think you might be struggling with. BMI’s aren’t the best indicators of healthy size because of the fact they don’t take into account, bone density, water in the body or the proportions of your body. So go on how you feel. i’m a big guy with a large frame. I always felt i was overweight and the scales did too. But I know what i’m eating is nothing like before. I have drastically cut out my sugar and feel better for it. Although it doesn’t look like it. Genetics, right?? !!

I am single with no kids and work in a job that I recently got but took leave to deal with my depression so not feeling very confident nor productive.

Don’t dwell on the have not’s. It’s something i think all humans constantly think about, what we don’t have. Your confidence shouldn’t be based on your ability to have children or be in a relationship. You should be confident in yourself for simply being you. You know yourself better than anyone else. Don’t think about your age either as a value of your self worth. We get wrapped up in being a certain age that means i have to have had x amount of experiences etc etc. But life is different for everyone. Have you any hobbies or interests? Who i am and what i do in my spare time, that makes me confident. I feel confident in myself because i know myself (although i’m still learning). For instance language learning is my hobby. I can speak a second language quite well, and this proves to myself that i can do anything i set my mind to. It reinforces who i am and what i’m capable of. What are you capable of? What do you want to be capable of? So if you have an interest, hobby or something you want to try, now is the time to do it. Think of it as trying to become your own best friend. And give yourself the right to love yourself as you are right now. When you look back on your life don’t single out 30 years of eating problems or that your single. Look at your experiences (no matter how small or big and what you have now (your alive for one ;).

What do you think?

I hope this helps out, tell me what you think 🙂 Because i can only go on what you have written here, and i do like to know if i have missed something or if i’m completely wrong.

Sincerely,
Matty

Dear Striving:

Yes, I can relate to disordered eating and fear. You asked: ” I am not sure what the connection is between feeling out of control, looking healthy and weight.” Your experience has been restrictive eating for thirty years, since you were 15 then. And I understand you have been afraid of gaining weight, of being too heavy.

We want to control what we perceive is danger. So if you consider being overweight to any extent as something dangerous, then you try to control your weight, make sure you are not overweight and take the precaution of seeing to it that you weigh 10 lbs less than what the BMI says is the bottom line of normal, just to make sure you don’t wake up the next day with an … overwhelming extra three pounds that will put you above that bottom line of normal. Does it at all sound familiar?

Or if as a teenager you consider becoming a grown woman dangerous then you try to control that growth by appearing like a young girl, not a woman with breasts and such.

Or if you are a woman that is getting older, and you fear getting older, you control your body weight so that when you look down at your body (and therefore not seeing your face, wrinkles and such) all you see is a thin body in jeans, just like you always were… so you take comfort in the idea that you are still a young girl.

And when you are afraid and you put a whole lot of your time counting calories in and calories out and weighting yourself and researching lowest calorie foods… well you distract yourself from the fear itself with being occupied…

Can you relate to any of this?

anita

anita

Dear Striving:

So you are striving to look thin which you perceive as attractive. You are underweight and you continue to diet, that is to restrict your calorie intake. I am very familiar with eating lots of low calorie foods and am a kind of an expert on that, plus I do go overboard with none caloric sweetener, stevia.

But to striving, you wrote that you were brought up with the message then, that being thin is most important. Did your parent or parents tell you so? Made negative comments about you or people eating too much? Made you feel that you will be rejected if you eat too much and gain weight?

And did you attend psychotherapy or counseling of any kind, self help groups regarding this disordered eating and the fear of abandonment and rejection at the core of it?

anita