Bit of a rant coming up that has probably regurgitated time and time again, but I need to vent somewhere. Sorry if this is the wrong place, I wasn’t sure where else to do it haha.
I’m so sick of people just assuming weight loss is as simple as removing food from your diet. This is coming from someone who has lost 20kg and did it the traditional way of diet and exercise. It was, however, a complete overhaul of my lifestyle and the way I viewed food.
I gained a lot of weight during my early teens due to a mix of things; I was on steroids due to a medical condition, I was developing an ED, I was depressed, I had other mental illnesses that led to me staying inside most of the time etc. I have a limited diet because of the aforementioned medical condition, but when I was a kid it was fine because I was very active.
The thing was, I knew I was overweight. My parents also knew I was overweight. There were initiatives to help me lose the weight in a gentle way, but I didn’t want those initiatives because I was too depressed to do anything about it. I wasn’t sleeping, so I hadn’t the energy to exercise. My view of food became warped and I subconsciously reached for it for comfort. I was someone who was brought up to eat all the food on their plate, so I did it no matter the portion size. I almost even started to hoard food at some point.
Taking away the food would’ve just done nothing other than probably made it worse. I would’ve been even more depressed because everything else in my life was spiralling out of control and it would’ve been yet another thing that I lost control of. This is something extremely common with EDs. Then you get the shame of not having control over your food intake and then you think “what’s the point” and just spiral deeper.
This doesn’t even touch on the restraints that made it hard for me to exercise. I lived in a rural area, and pavements around my house stopped as soon as you left the centre. My parents were working full time, one was working 8am-6pm, the other working 7pm-7am. Their time was extremely limited, and there were times that money for gas was tight. It was very difficult to be able to fit in some exercise between these two issues. Cooking was almost always homemade, but was carb-heavy and so it didn’t fill us up as well as a protein diet would, therefore we ate more of it. I also had what I now know as gender dysphoria that was developing back then, so being in team sports made me extremely uncomfortable.
People are finally realising that people gain weight for medical reasons but they completely skip over the mental and physical aspects of it. My attitude towards food now compared to 5 years ago is completely different, and it had to be because I needed to change my whole lifestyle in order to do it. Diets are miserable, lifestyle changes aren’t (eventually). Some people’s parents were just lazy, sure, but many more were either just uneducated and/or did not have the time or ability to put a lot of time into fostering these habits. This is written mostly from my POV, but I’m sure a lot of these points resonates with others.
Sorry, this is all over the place, but I needed to vent.
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