Is your mind fit enough weight loss?

I saw a thread about depression and motivation for weight loss and it made me think about my progress so far.

It is said that exercising has positive effects on mental health, and I won’t deny that since the best high I ever got was after a good exercise. But offering an easy answer for a complicated problem such as depression and other mental illnesses (which may sometimes present themselves simultaneously) isn’t a fix. I was fooled into falling for easy fixes for a decade but on the other hand trying and failing helped me to learn more about myself and which principles apply on my personal weight loss progress.

That’s the most essential thing about weight loss, personalization. Diets and exercise programs are nothing but tools, but the machine to put all that into work is the mind which should first undergo weight loss before anything.

For example; I don’t know how the gym classes are in other countries, but where I come from the gym classes were just humiliating competitions for those who weren’t as good at sports in general. Lucky for me, I was a bit over average and I thrived especially in team sports, so I never disliked exercising. Maybe I just had bad teachers, because only yesterday I learned the proper breathing technique for running or this is just common knowledge which I missed for 30 years.

Imagine being one of these kids who weren’t taught anything relevant so exercising would be more pleasant, getting rather anxious because of all those bad memories and discomfort caused by it. Not to mention if you were a fat kid and got discouraged by assholes who made fun of your attempts to get in better shape.

Now, combine all that with an apathetic feeling, a little voice inside your head telling everything you do is pointless, nothing will bring you happiness and the world would be better off without you. Hitting the bottom where you don’t even bother showering or eating and you’re fatigued constantly even though you’re not exactly doing anything.

How is it exactly going to help having someone telling you to go out and exercise because surely you’ll feel better after that? You might accept the challenge just to prove them wrong. And it’s very likely that you will prove them wrong, because for someone who’s been depressed for a long time, you’d lack the energy and strength to enjoy the exercise, especially if it’s tied to unpleasant memories of it.

I read a book about binge eating couple of years ago and even though I can’t say it helped me with my issue, it did give some food for thought, an insight for the underlying cause of my overeating. I was an emotional eater and it was always a vicious cycle of seeking for comfort through stuffing my face with food which resulted in guilt and shame, which gave a head start for the new round. The book gave me perhaps the best advice yet in order to solve this problem, I had to learn a way to cope with my emotional distress in another way.

After I went through a series of psychological tests, a psychoanalysis and got diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), my psychiatrist recommended Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). I never thought CBT as a solution for emotional eating since I prioritized other issues over that, but after awhile I felt less anxious and right now I don’t remember when was the last time I was as depressed as I was years ago. As a side effect I developed a healthier relationship with food.

So far in a half year I’ve lost over 30 kg and regained mobility to enjoy pushing my limits through exercising. There were no special tricks to it, just sticking with the healthier habits I had hard time keeping up before and not getting discouraged by “slip ups”, in fact I even allow myself giving into cravings around the time I’m PMSing (I discovered this late, that PMS could cause cravings). But most importantly, taking care of my mind through healthier ways of dealing with the rollercoaster that is my emotional life.

Just food for thought, think carefully how you want to encourage someone who deals with complex problems, offering easy answers for them could be just counterproductive.

submitted by /u/fatfitterfit
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