My Year Being Thin: Judgement

We judge.

I know.  We hear it all of our lives.

"You can't judge."
"You shouldn't judge people."
"Who are you to pass judgement?"

We are all human.  It is in our nature to judge.  No matter what you have been told, our own survival, according to Darwin, is based on choices that help us navigate our way through life.  Those choices are made based on judgements we make.  Our survival, which is based on thousands years of evolution, is predicated on the basic rule that we do not have the time necessary in life to assess every person we meet and make an educated judgement on them.  We do not have time to know their motives, their ethics, or their deepest fears and neurosis.  We have to make our judgements quickly.  In some cases, cases of self preservation, very quickly.  This means we are going to judge people first and foremost by that which is most obvious to us...their appearance.

So we judge.  Now comes the painful part of this.  We are going to BE judged.  That's right.  When we look at others and make those choices about them, they are doing the same thing.

"Why are they judging me?  What did I ever do to them...?", you say.  It gives one perspective doesn't it?

It is a cruel reality that the first judgement a person makes will be on your appearance.  The second judgement will be on your behavior.  The last judgement only occurs after significant exposure to you.  That is the only way someone can get to know the real person inside your shell.  So 90% of the people are going to judge you based on your appearance.  If you are fat, and I know this from experience, that can be uncomfortable.  For some, it can be downright frightening.

Most of you reading this are trying to be thinner.  You are trying to lose weight and the goal for most of you is to look and feel better.  Some of you remember what it felt like to be thinner.  Some of you don't.  Some of you have no idea how it will feel to be thin because you have truly never been there.  Deep down, we all know we are being judged on our looks first.  We learn that at a very early age.

So keep 'judgement' in mind when I tell you one of the big lessons about losing weight that you will experience in year one.

YOU ARE GOING TO BE PERCEIVED DIFFERENTLY BECAUSE YOU ARE A THIN PERSON.

I don't mean they will look and think about you being thin.  They won't.  I mean the perception of who you are as a person, now that you are thin, will be different than it has been in the past.  I also don't mean just a little differently.  I mean a lot differently.  The bigger you were, the more radical the experience will be for you.  I also do not mean to imply that 'different' means they will see you as thin versus fat.  People are not just going to look at you and see a thin, or thinner, person.  They are going to assess you differently, react to you differently, and ultimately make judgements about you that are different than what you have experienced.

Here is something you should know.  Looking and feeling great is an advantage.  It is an advantage socially.  It is an advantage professionally.  It is a success tool that can give you a definite edge.  That part you probably know.  Now, the strange part, and the part you sometimes can only learn by moving back and forth along the appearance continuum, is that looking and feeling better than you look right now is not something everybody wants for you.  That's right.  Not everyone is going to be happy with your new found thinness.

As I said before, we judge.  Life is a competition.  We look at people and judge because we want to know our chances.  We all do it as a natural reaction.

"Can I compete or not?"

Making a dramatic change in your appearance will change the competitive assessment.  If you are a woman and your girlfriends have always seen you as a jolly fat pal, they have not had you on their radar as competition.  Now they do.  Expect that they will first be excited for you about your weight loss, then the catty remarks may begin.  This doesn't always happen...there are good people and friends out there.  But you can expect levels of this within social circles.

If you are a man, and you have a strong presence at the office, expect similar experiences.  If your personality is strong and you are well spoken, but you also are a very large jolly guy, you will find that being thinner suddenly means that the funny remarks that everyone used to laugh at are seen as biting sarcasm.  This happens when you transform from being a jolly colleague to a professional on-the-job competitor.

I mention that first because it is the opposite of what you probably thought would happen.  Everyone should love the new thin you, right?  Welcome to reality.

There are many benefits as well, particularly if you are always meeting new people professionally or socially.  People will assess you differently right from the first meeting.  That first impression will be distinctly different and create different opinions about you, even if the opinions are not valid.  Perception is all too often the reality for people.  I will use myself as an example.  I have changed jobs 3 times since 1997.  I have, however, applied for new positions more than ten times in that same period.  EVERY time I was hired, I was thin.  I NEVER got the job when I was fat.  Don't say it...'that's discrimination.'  Again, welcome to reality.  How you take care of yourself, if you are two small clicks from being obese, typically will tell people about your feelings about yourself, your discipline, your judgement, etc.  They leap from that to the first opinion about you.  They do not make the same excuses for you that you make for yourself.  They don't have time.

So you have it.  Judgement.  Perception.  Your year is going to be very different.  Not all good but certainly more good than when you were a large person.  It is going to be fun if you approach it with an open mind and allow people to react the way they need to.  You can change you, but you will never change them.  Some will support you, some will wish you were 'you' again.

Be happy where you are when you get to thinness.  As Harry Chapin would say, 'it is a better place to be.'

Congratulations.


Next: Your new outlook and coping with everyone else

One Year Later: Goal Achieved

The behavior specialist looked curiously at me and said, "What's your goal?"

"My goal is to get the weight off and, this time, to keep it off."

"No...what is your goal?  How much do you want to lose?"

"I don't care.  Pick a number for me.  YOU tell me what I am supposed to weigh and I will hit it.  My goal is to get the weight off and keep it off."

I wasn't playing around.  I didn't know why she couldn't get my point.  I was not a rookie to weight loss.  I had been a yo-yo dieter since I was 10 years old.  I was now 46.  36 years of this crap had me at 286 lbs.  I wanted to make a change and I wanted it permanently.  I also knew, from experience, that once the weight was lost, the hardest part lie in front of me.

When I finished the diet around November 6th of last year, I weighed 205.  I stepped on the scale yesterday.  200 lbs.  It has been a year and I am 5 lbs lighter.  One year later I have achieved my goal.

It has been a while since I posted to the diet blog.  I am going to celebrate my one year anniversary by addressing the challenges along the way. 

Dieting is hard for almost everyone.  The optifast diet made the dieting part easy for me.  900 calories per day of a rigid eating regimen coupled with 2.6 miles per day of brisk walking to create exertion resulted in about 80-85 lbs lost.  Approached this way, it was a very fast process.  Many people on this diet, however, do not exercise or do not follow the strict eating guidelines.  When they do this, the diet takes a long time.  It puts the optifast dieter into the same category as all other dieters.  It makes you feel like dieting is your life.  That is because, when you lose weight that way, it takes a long time and it IS your life.  That is why so many people fail on diets.  When it becomes your life it hangs over you like a shadow.  You wonder every single day if you will ever be able to wake up in the morning and not think about the diet.

If you think that is hard, I have some bad news for you.  When you finally reach that goal of losing all the weight you wanted to lose, that is precisely how you will live the rest of your life.

I know.  That sounds incredibly demoralizing.  It shouldn't.  The one thing that makes getting thin and staying thin different is being able to see yourself thin (the fruits of your labor) and knowing that you never want to go back to what you were.  When I get on that scale each morning (and I weigh myself EVERY day) and see myself in the mirror, I smile.  When I pull on my pants and see the "Size 36" waist marker (remembering that it was 42 last year), I smile again.  When I sit in my car and see the loose piece of plastic under my seat that broke last year because I was massive, I smile again.  You know, I purposely didn't fix it because it makes me smile when I see it.  Seeing what you have become makes the discipline easier than getting up every morning, looking in the mirror, and sadly thinking you will never get there and that you are suffering.  That is the difference.

If you are still trying to achieve that critical first step of just losing the weight, there is light at the end of the tunnel.  You WILL be able to look at yourself in the mirror and like what you see.  Once you do that, it makes the discipline easier than what you are going through to complete that first step.

Believe it or not, many thin people think about what they eat every day.  It is how they manage to stay thin.  They have, however, become so regular about it that it doesn't seem like they are thinking about it at all.  That is the trick.  That is the trick right there.  People who you know as thin regulate themselves as a normal course of action.  Whether from good eating habits, an active life style or some built in neurosis from strange parenting, they are doing it reflexively.  THAT is one of the tricks to keeping the weight off.  The way you think about your eating has to first become concious and then it has to become unconcious.  Once that happens, you will NOT think about the diet every day.  Your body and its eating habits will be on autopilot.

This is the first trick to keeping the weight off.  You have to find a way to build into your psyche the same thought processes that are in the thin people.  I believe I have successfully done that.  I do not eat reflexively anymore...but I also do not make my eating choices by over-thinking it.  I plan my meals each day and I plan my exercise and I stick to it.  Planning meals sounds hard.  It isn't.  What that means is that I know what I am going to eat everyday.  I know if I go out to lunch that I am going to stick to roughly the same healthy choices.  I have built into my head a rough idea of how many calories I am taking in when I eat and I am keeping a running ticker.  My breakfast is the same every day.  My snacks come to work with me in a bag.  Granola and berries for mid morning.  Nut mix for the afternoon or a protein bar.  If lunch seems to be overdone, I will make sure I lighten the load for dinner.  It has become reflexive.  So much so that when I watch other people eat meals, I do the math and figure they won't need to eat for the next two days.

I also exercise regularly.  Some would say I over-exercise.  When I count the calories, I also know how much I burn when I exercise.  Exercising makes me feel like I can have small indulgences.  Sometimes they are medium to large indulgences.  I now jog/run about 25 miles per week.  At age 47, I ran my first 5K road race last Saturday.  I ran it in 24:08.  For my age bracket of 45-49 years old, that is supposed to be an excellent time.  I surprised a lot of people with the time, I surprised myself.  Pleasantly.

So I am going to blog this week about the challenges of keeping the weight off.  Many things like (a) disruptions to the routine, (b) alcohol, (c) visiting old habits, and (d) finally burning the old BIG clothes.  Glad to be back for a while.  Stay focused and keep the faith, it will work out for you.

Next: Your new life and how people treat you