From skwigg's journal:
It helps me to remember that distant relatives, old school friends, people from work, random strangers, none of them SEE MY ABS. So I'm trying to impress them...in my imagination?
Do I really want to sacrifice quality of life and enjoyment of food, to experience chronic low-grade hunger, to compromise performance, to increase moodiness and fatigue, to flirt with insomnia, so that random people who never actually see my abs might be impressed by them in some nuisance fantasy of mine? Ha! No! All the NO!!!
I want my life right now to be full and fun. I want to feel amazing. I want to perform well and sleep well. I want to be flexible and relaxed around food. Pushing for excessive leanness goes against all of that. I understand that it will not make me happier. It will not solve or change a single thing. The idea that "life will be better when I'm thinner" is a disordered diet-mind trap. I see the illusion for what it is now. We think abs will make us happy, confident, worthy, respected. Those feelings are what we really want but leanness won't give them to us. It's an inside job. We can have it or not have it at any size/weight. Being hungry, cranky, tired, and bitter from undereating tends to provide the opposite of confidence, so that pursuit is a dead end.
I try not to comment on or have an opinion about anyone's size or weight ever. This is HARD with all of society's conditioning to judge and be judged, but it's such a refreshing alternative. All of my recent reading (Health at Every Size, Body Respect, The Obesity Code, Why Diets Make Us Fat) plus the Nutrition Matters podcast, plus abandoning social media, have been really helpful at dismantling what's left of my fear and judgment.
This is a good one! It was such a revelation for me to question why I was so fixated on certain things about my appearance. I think this is one of the cases where the quote “Those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind” holds true. The only people that it’s truly important what they think of me, namely my kids and husband, I know for a fact don’t care or really even notice what I weigh or how lean I am, to the relatively small and still perfectly healthy degree of fluctuation I’ve ever gone through. The majority of friends or random strangers aren’t going to care either, and those who judge or treat me (or anyone) differently because of how I look probably aren’t people I want to be friends with anyway, and it says much more about them than about me. All that’s left is myself, and I know that what I think about my body is something I can change by challenging my thought patterns and beliefs, and is more dependent on how I act and treat myself as my actual measurements. I had a resurgence of negative thoughts about how I look lately, and whenever I start feeling bad about myself, a few months back I noticed that I started reflexively shutting my brain up with more or less a summary of all that, which is “I’m FINE. No one cares.” lol