here’s an even harder lesson to learn: “beautiful” and “slim” are not the same thing, and “healthy” and “slim” are not the same thing. my true “ideal weight” is not the number i got from some government-sponsored BMI table. i ruined my perfectly functional metabolism by buying into all that diet and appearance crap. i was maybe 15 lb over my “ideal weight” then. and with every diet i put a few more pounds on after it failed (and they all failed). guess what? i’d be ecstatic if the never-ending stress of the public fat-shaming would stop. i’d be a whole lot healthier already. and the latest studies show that my slight overweight at the time would have given me a better life expectancy than my “ideal” weight. oh, the irony.
i think in order to achieve the goal of a healthy metabolism we need to let go of a lot of diet behaviour we’ve acquired over the years. we’re looking for rules because that’s what diets have; they all have them, leading to magical thinking — “if i only follow these (often ridiculous) rules to a T, my fat will melt off, and life will be perfect”. and then when the diet fails us, we blame ourselves. yeah, bullshit. i am done with that.
fixing our metabolism isn’t a diet. i’m coming to believe my metabolism is as individual as my personality, and i’d never go to other people to ask for rules to make my personality more mainstream. no, i delight in our differences. we ought to delight in our different body shapes and sizes too. and if it takes 2 years to fix my metabolism, and 60 added lbs, i’m fine with that — it took decades to screw it up, and i gained and lost those several times over. i want off this unmerry-go-round.
it would be nice if matt participated in these discussions, though. i enjoy geeking out.