I can’t remember ever liking my body. I’ve never felt at ease with the way I look, no matter the cut of my jeans or the drape of my shirt. I turn my body sideways in photos to try to look thinner and I delete photos if I think I look fat. When I’ve gained weight, I’m embarrassed to see people who I haven’t seen for a while. Will they judge me?
I’ve never, not even when thin, enjoyed being in a swimsuit in front of others. I’ve only owned one bikini, and at 22 probably looked great in it, and I wore it awkwardly 2-3 times before I buried it in a drawer.
I’ve had body noise like this all my life.
I’ve had food noise all my life also: asking myself whether I really should eat something, feeling guilty for not sticking to a healthy diet, beating myself up for eating too much, planning for when I will eat next, fear of getting hungry and not having food around, fully aware of the brownies in the next room.
It’s so noisy in there.
It’s an incessant and painful noise: it takes away from anything else you might want to be doing or thinking about.
You either understand it or you don’t
I first learned about the concept of food noise from a friend who was trying a GLP1 for weight loss. She said the drug quieted the noise (which she described in the terms I just did) and helped her think less about food. When I read the book Enough, cowritten by Oprah, I learned that obesity is an illness, a disorder, and it can be treated with medicine. People with obesity have food noise; it is a symptom of obesity. Other people (like my husband) just don’t have it and don’t understand why food is such a big deal. He gets frustrated when I voice the noise in my head: it feels normal to me but makes no sense to him at all. My food noise is, to him, inconvenient and nonsensical.
No one would say I’m obese, but I have struggled with the same 25 pounds for the past 25 years. On, off, on, off. I lost it all with Weight Watchers after my pregnancy. I gained it back and then lost it again with a packaged food diet called Optavia (seriously disgusting bars and shakes). I spent $1250 on that diet, eating that cardboard food and being miserable, but I did lose weight.
The Enough book also talks about how we live in an obesogenic culture (generating obesity), so it’s not entirely our fault that we are overweight. Easy, inexpensive processed food is everywhere. Portions are too big. We are too sedentary at our desk jobs. This has caused the ‘enough point’ of many of us to reset to a point that is unhealthy and too high. Overweight people can’t set that enough point back to a normal, healthy point by themselves. (Well, you can white knuckle it, but once you let down your guard your body will go back to your former unhealthy ‘enough’ point). Just like with diabetes or depression, a medicine—a GLP1—will set you at a healthy enough point, and you may need to take it for life so your body doesn’t relapse.
Makes sense but I still feel like shit.
Body positivity is a scam
And now a short rant because I’m soooo mad about this. It’s typical in our culture to talk about food and weight in shameful terms all the time. It’s sneaky. We say to ourselves, “I didn’t work out today so I shouldn’t have that cake” or “I’m too fat to wear that.” We tell our kids, “you don’t need another cookie” and “you shouldn’t wear that” and even “let’s work together on losing a few pounds.” (Ouch, nothing like making a kid feel like they are not ok the way they are.) Of others, we say, “she’d be so pretty if she lost some weight” or “she’s really pretty despite her weight”.
We women make fun of ourselves constantly talking about our spare tires, our back fat, our bingo wings, our big boobs, and our double chins. Thin people don’t have these things and (I think) they don't make fun of their body parts. Maybe we want to laugh about it so we don’t cry. We definitely don’t want to be alone in it; we bond over it.
All that bullshit about body positivity? We really don’t mean it. We don’t.
You can’t ignore what the tests say
On advice from the internet and collective wisdom, I had a bone density scan this past year. It verified what I already knew: I have a BMI of 25 (overweight) and plenty of visceral fat which signals increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, and metabolic problems.
So there’s that, but really, even more than wanting to get rid of that dangerous spare tire, I want to shut off the food and body noise. (Anyone who has all that food noise has probably already tried CBT, reading books about intuitive eating, and replacing the negative self talk...and none of it worked.)
I would love to go on vacation and NOT think about food and my body all the time. I’d love to be in a bathing suit free of worry and embarrassment about how I look. I want hating my body and worrying about food to NOT be a thing as it has been for going on 5 decades.
Now that I’ve learned that being overweight is a matter of an ‘enough point’ that is too high, I am considering a GLP1 seriously.
I just don’t know how else to shut off all that noise.
And maybe I’ll lose some weight too.
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