Skinny on Purpose

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I can’t remember which blog post it was, but a few days ago I alluded to some of the homework I’d done when I was seeing my hookie spooky magic lady, and it prompted me to look back through some of the sessions we did and the reflections she always encouraged me to write down afterwards.  I was fairly self-aware even before I started talking to her, but I genuinely had some real light-bulb moments during the times that we sat and chatted back and forth about…well, stuff.

One of the biggest revelations to me was that skinny people weren’t generally skinny by accident. I mean yes of course you always get the odd smug string bean here and there who takes great delight in telling you that they can eat what they like without putting on a pound…I don’t know about you but I always want to enquire whether they’d like to chew on my fist, that being the case. But generally skinny people are skinny because they choose to be skinny.

Which basically means that if they eat out in a restaurant, they might look at the menu (just like I do), and immediately start salivating over the calorie-tastic menu options (just like I do) but after mentally calculating how many calories are in the dish they most like the look of (I don’t do that) they decide against it in favour of a skinny girl option (I don’t do that either 🙁 ). Up to that point, I hadn’t given much thought to how the mind of a skinny person operated, because even at the points in my life where I qualified as a string bean, I wasn’t there long enough to really settle into the mindset of being a skinny person.

I mean yes, for swathes of my life I’ve been in the sweet spot and almost evangelical about the food choices I made because I was on my way down the sizes, but in terms of it just being something I did naturally, unbidden when I wasn’t actually on a diet…no. It would never have even occurred to me to participate in such madness.

It was a revelation, genuinely a light switching on in my head. It made me accept that I had to be accountable for my choices, be they good or bad you know? Every choice has consequences and being a grown up means understanding and accepting the consequences before you make the choice. I could no longer bemoan the fact that I put weight on easily when all these people *sweeping motion of fat arm* could eat what they liked without getting fat. The light bulb switching on made me realise that the reason they didn’t get fat was because making the choice to be skinny was a constant in their life where it never had been in mine. Who knew!

I’d love to say that following that realisation I immediately started making all the right choices and from there it’s been plain sailing…of course it hasn’t.  I’ve talked a lot over the last few weeks about finding the sweet spot, and if you’re not there, you’re not there. Knowledge doesn’t even come close to equalling power if your head’s not in the right place. Ask any fat girl about the theory of losing weight and they can almost certainly reel off more info than your average skinny string bean expert. Putting it into practise is something entirely different though mm?

But I’m there now. I’m making those choices now. And per my BHAG, when I arrive into skinny town, instead of throwing caution to the wind, I’m going to carry on making grown-up-accept-the-consequences skinny choices, because now I get it. I know have to.

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8 thoughts on “Skinny on Purpose

  1. You are right about that free ride stopping somewhere along the line. I was always a little overweight, not much really, until… midlife came along and then I had to work hard to lose weight and I didn’t even try most of the time. I’ve probably gained and lost the same poundage over my lifetime that you have (well maybe not quite so much) but it’s a constant struggle to WANT to work at it. Rooting for you during this trip and know you have a posse of us at your back. 🙂

    1. Thanks Djan…a couple of days in and I’ve hit my stride…asshole is being persistent in his ‘go on you’re on holiday’ campaign and genuinely knowing I’m accountable to you lot is helping me keep the wheels on. It’s hard though! And re your comment about wanting to…I think you have read my mind ? There’s a post coming up in the next day or two about that very thing!! D x

  2. Exactly. While i bounced up and down the scale like a yoyo for 30 years, it was because i wasn’t ready to stick with the decisions i needed to make to keep my weight off. Once i was, once i really got it, it stuck, and has for 10 years.

    And i don’t know if this helps, but i agree that i used to be very envious of “all those other people who could eat anything they wanted and never gain an ounce,” until i realized that for most of them the free ride ends, usually at around age 40.

  3. “I had to be accountable for my choices, be they good or bad you know? Every choice has consequences and being a grown up means understanding and accepting the consequences before you make the choice.”

    Good stuff!!!! I’ve lost 85 lbs over the last two years. The first seven months, I lost a whopping 15 lbs. I did lose, not gain, so I was happy, but I was the one making bad choices. It was when I finally decided to stop making excuses, accept the consequences and embrace my goals that I made progress. Love this! Light bulb!

  4. You know I think that you have hit the nail on the head as to why I have always failed – because I didn’t want to ‘give up control’ but what it really is, is that I didn’t want to STAY IN CONTROL. I wanted to eat what I wanted when I got where I was heading – of course that just took me right back on the train to my fat clothes.

    Good thoughts – thanks for saying them – plodding on and tracking everything along with you

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