Yesterday I celebrated 15 pounds lost and being under 200 pounds. Like a lot of people pursuing sustainable weight loss, I've been reflecting on where the bad habits that made me overweight came from.
This sub is full of horror stories about homes where children learned bad eating habits due to poverty, abuse, neglect, overzealous dietary restrictions, bribery with food, or indiscriminate indulgence. None of these things described my family situation growing up. My lower middle class hippie parents did everything right, actually. They fed me healthy food, but not to the point that it was intensely restrictive or punitive. I didn't have to develop a taste for vegetables or fish as an adult. They took me hiking all the time, too, and taught me how to ride a bike.
I'm convinced school made me fat instead.
In elementary school, I was introduced to strictly enforced six and seven-hour fasts when I wasn't at a developmental age to handle it. These fasts would always be broken with institutional food full of fat and carbs, and also lots and lots and LOTS of milk. They told us explicitly that the best thing we could do for ourselves was pound whole milk, much of it flavored, at every meal. This was before Michelle Obama. It was also the golden age of standardized testing and the preparation for same, so lunch breaks were limited to 20 minutes. I learned that food disappeared if you did not eat it immediately.
In middle school, I was bullied a lot and the lunchroom was one of the places where this occurred. I learned to eat fast so I could go hide somewhere. My parents were astonished by how fast I could eat without choking or throwing up. This made it hard to taste food or know when I was full, and it's been one of the hardest habits to break.
Like many children who didn't play organized sports, I learned to associate exercise with humiliation in the middle grades. If I did poorly it meant I had a disability, and if I did well it meant I was a lesbian (these are polite terms, not the ones that were actually used.) There was no winning in exercise.
In high school, there were more options for what to do for food and PE, but all of them were terrible. There were a lot of vending machines in those days.
All through school, I learned that the human body is an inconvenience. The fact that you need food, bathroom breaks, and exercise is a massive inconvenience to your school, which as an institution needs you to do well on tests or it will be deprived of funding and cease perpetuating itself. Your body exists to embarrass you in front of your peers. The fact that you go through puberty is hilarious and degrading, and outside contractors must be brought in to scare you out of having sex lest you reproduce. Female bodies in particular are a distraction and a crowd control problem. Why would you treat your body kindly if it's nothing but a problem?
In order to unlearn something, you have to realize that you learned it in the first place. Most of what we learn growing up is never formalized in a curriculum - and well-meaning educators would be absolutely horrified if they saw it all written out like that. Michelle Obama got a lot of flak for pointing to schools as one of the culprits in obesity and T2 diabetes, but she was right, even if her reforms were hard to implement at scale in a way that made everyone happy. I wonder how many millennials are significantly heavier than they would have been because of various aspects of the school environment.
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/3zHMlTq
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