Hello friends.
When I lost a lot of weight, it wasn’t because of discipline. And it wasn’t to look good either, whatever else motivates. If that were the case, then I’d be going to the gym.
No, the reason I lost weight is because I changed my mind. If you get your mind right, then everything else follows.
See, fat people – speaking as a former one – have it in their head that eating is their source of happiness. They live to have the next meal. Eating is what makes life wonderful: these are the genuine beliefs. How couldn’t you get cheesecake to go?
What fat people fail to understand – not even fat people, just anyone who struggles with food – is that food is a source of misery moreso than happiness. How absurd! But it’s true, at least to me.
See nowadays I couldn’t imagine having a cheesecake, cheeseburger, any steak, whatever. I’d keel over. It would knock me out for the rest of the day. Nauseating.
I genuinely would not want any of those things. Nowadays I find most of it gross honestly. Meat or cheese in general is disgusting now. So are a lot of options out there that used to be staples. Even Chipotle is a non-starter even though it used to get me through cookless nights. What changed?
It’s just making the connection: food makes you feel bad.
For some reason it’s really hard to make this connection when you’re injecting enough into you. There’s an offset between eating the food and the misery soon to follow. And if you eat enough you won’t even know that your average day of sloggish misery isn’t normal. But you get used to the groggy-eyed landscape and wait for the next menu.
Nevertheless, if you could just get it through the skull, and deeply understand: yes, this makes me feel horrible actually. If you really sit down and contemplate how you feel a full 24hrs after each meal, you’d probably start starving yourself too.
Because that’s the trade you make, and when you write it down to read, it really does feel absurd:
You are trading 5-10 minutes of eating for 24 hours of pain. Is it worth it?
Such is this life of alchemy.
Why did I write all of this though? It’s not necessarily to get you on board. It’s just to illustrate a point and also underscore it: It’s really hard to make this connection.
You’ll need to think about it constantly for a good few days with each eating before it starts clicking. I’m not sure why it is this way, but so it is. This is why fat people usually stay fat: why would you try to detract from the one thing that makes life worth living? How dare you try to rob this blip of happiness!
A lot of addictions solve themselves when you make this connection. When you make one – such as when I made it with food – you begin to wonder how many more are hiding in your life. What motivated writing all of this out is that I suspect there’s another one lurking right around. It’s strange how easily hijacked one’s perception is: believing something to nourish you when it instead destroys you.
Hopefully I catch it, before it consumes me.