OnePhatMan

Week one yields a start with 1.5 pounds gone.

It’s funny. Though I’m only going to weigh myself officially once a week, I’ve been weighing every day just to see how things would be during this first week. After last junk food Friday, I jumped up 4 pounds on Saturday, down 3 on Sunday, and down 2 more on Monday, taking me to 214. In other words, a one pound drop. Tuesday yielded no difference.

But Wednesday it got weird. It jumped up 1.5 pounds, to 215.5.

Which, of course, gives me an opportunity to make a point: don’t obsess over the scale. I knew beyond the shadow of any doubt that I didn’t really gain 1.5 pounds between Tuesday and Wednesday. I knew that it had to be water or, well, poop or something. But not fat, because your body simply can’t manufacture that much in a day.

So don’t freak out over a blip. Watch the trend, not the incident.

Thursday morning, .5 had gone, leaving me where I started at 215. While I wasn’t freaked out about the number, because I knew that I’d actually worked off some of the “real” weight, I’ll admit to being a little disappointed at the thought of having to post a 0 here today. The phat man wanted to come back with a bang, and was irked that a burp in water or poop weight was going to coincide with the official weigh-in.

Then I got up this morning and weighed 213.5.

See? Even I can get a little caught up on the number sometimes. Don’t. Get. Caught. Up. On. A. Blip.

Because blips are nothing, and life is everything.

I’m considering moving my mailing list to Google Groups. If you get an email indicating that you’ve been added to “OnePhatMan”, it’s just me. The mailing list is killing our server.

Site additions for today: recommended books on nutrition and the beginnings of a recipes section. Right now, the few recipes that are here are just things we regularly eat. If you have a recipe you’d like to share, by all means send it to me and I’ll try to get it added.

Two caveats:

1. Please don’t send me a copyrighted recipe
2. Please don’t send me any Weight Watchers abominations involving canned pumpkin or fat free / sugar free pudding

When you talk to your pets (oh, quit denying it), how do you speak to them? What about your children? How do you speak to them? Your spouse? If you’re like most people—and I’m willing to bet that you are—you speak to your loved ones with love and adoration. You speak this way because you love them, and because you respect and cherish them.

Now let’s look at someone else in your life.

How do you speak to yourself when you’re looking in the mirror? Are you always critical, finding and judging every little flaw in your body? Do you beat yourself up because of your size or your weight? Do you spend your days putting yourself down, speaking harshly and even hatefully about yourself?

What about when you’re around other people? What do you say about yourself in front of them? Do you still speak critically, or are you a little more subtle with the putdowns, maybe working your own fat jokes in from time to time? I think we all know that no one can make a fat joke like a fat person.

Your loved ones know you’re not really joking.

If you do any of these things, don’t feel bad. I suspect you’re in the majority, along with the rest of us who are or were fat. I have some good news, though: You’re only doing it because you’ve agreed to do it. Sometime in your past, someone said something hateful about you, based on their own worldview, and you decided to believe them. You agreed (in your head) that it was true, whatever it was, and you started building your view of yourself as a “pig,” or a “fatass,” or a “cow,” or as a “food addict,” or as any number of negative and disrespectful things.

With the good news that your beliefs are just agreements, there’s even better news: You can change your beliefs, your view of yourself, simply by agreeing—by deciding—to. Start by being mindful of what you say about yourself. Quit calling yourself names, because all those names do is reinforce the negative belief you’ve held. If you catch yourself referring to yourself as something disrepectful (”I’m such a pig!”), stop where you are and forgive yourself. Let it go, and resolve not to do it again.

You have to learn to respect yourself and to value yourself as an individual before you can start to love yourself.

Is it instant? Of course not. Changing a lifetime of negative self-talk takes time. Even after more than five years of working at it, I still have moments when I think of myself as the fat worthless guy, especially when I’m in a new situation with lots of people I don’t know. I feel their eyes on me, feel their judgment of me because of my weight, despite the fact that I know logically that (a) they’re not, and (b) I’m not fat any more.

Maybe it’s just my good looks they can’t get over now.

I have to stop and have a little self-talk when it happens. I have to remind myself that all they see is the perfectly normal (albeit large-headed) schlub that I am, not the Jabba the Hutt I still sometimes feel like. Changing takes time, but it happens, and each day it gets a little bit easier to either quash those thoughts or to not have them at all.

When you begin to respect yourself, to understand and acknowledge that you have value, you can begin to love yourself.

When you begin to love yourself, your transformation into the person you want to be becomes so much easier because you’re making changes because of you, not because of something someone said or because you think someone else wants you to.

And really, aren’t you the reason you should be doing this?

fitness, self+love, motivation, health+and+wellness