Those Precious Treats

It's that time of year again, when everyone who wants to lose weight resolves to do so, and then looks for a way to make it happen.  This past week, I heard a couple of coworkers talking about losing weight.  They were describing methods they've used in the past that didn't ultimately work.  (One was a 1,000-calorie-and- four-hours-exercise-a-day plan.) I tried to interject with my weight loss story, but they weren't paying attention.  I find that somewhat disappointing.  I have a method that actually works and works well, but no one wants to know about it.  But I guess I shouldn't be surprised.  People want a fast and easy way to lose weight, and don't want to hear about the long and difficult road to slimness.  They want the benefits of weight loss but don't want to change and give up their destructive eating habits--at least not forever.

Believe me, I understand.  I still have nostalgia for those pint-a-night Ben and Jerry's ice cream fests.  If only such pleasures were consequence-free!  But alas, an addiction's an addiction, no matter how you trick it out to make it look harmless or even wholesome.  Collecting unneeded fat cells on your body is no different from collecting stacks and stacks of unread newspapers, or boxes and boxes of useless trash, or dozens and dozens of cats in your apartment.  It's a type of hoarding, after all, and just as debilitating a condition, in my opinion.  If you look at the symptoms, you'll see similarities, I think.

Here are the symptoms of compulsive hoarding (taken from Wikipedia):

Compulsive hoarding (or pathological collecting) is a pattern of behavior that is characterized by the excessive acquisition and inability or unwillingness to discard large quantities of objects that would seemingly qualify as useless or without value. Compulsive hoarding behavior has been associated with health risks, impaired functioning, economic burden, and adverse effects on friends and family members.

If you substitute the word "objects" with "fat cells" and "hoarding" with "eating," you gain a different perspective on compulsive eating, I think.  Hoarders have excuses for why they must collect and save all these useless items, but they don't really bear scrutiny--any more than do the excuses given by compulsive eaters for why they must buy, prepare and consume thousands of calories that will not be needed to fuel or sustain their bodies at any time in the near future.  Shirley calls such excuses "subterfuges" because they attempt to conceal the true reason for eating--that we can't stop ourselves.  Hoarders must face the same truth: they continue to hoard because they can't stop.

For an obese person to learn what kinds of food are good to eat and what kinds aren't is fine, but it's more or less beside the point.  Even if a compulsive eater didn't know the nutritional value of a big piece of chocolate cake or a serving of french fries (hard to imagine these days), he would not be helped by watching a TV show where a doctor describes in detail (complete with hideous pictures of ruined organs) the many hazards of eating such foods.

Educational remedies are well-intentioned but not very realistic, especially when dealing with addictions.  We can see that's true, I think, when we watch the therapists on Hoarders try to get a hoarder to throw away just one thing.  Though the hoarder agrees that she and her family are being destroyed by her mountain of useless junk, she still resists.  And for those of us watching, the magnitude of the task seems overwhelming, nearly impossible.  We want to opt for the quick and easy solution: Put a match to the place and walk away.  But I think we all know that even if everything the woman hoarded were destroyed, she'd be building another, probably bigger pile of junk as soon as she recovered from the loss of her current one.

So, too, with us fat-cell hoarders.  Giving up even one piece of pie or serving of french fries or box of chocolates--no matter how old, cheap, dried up, badly cooked or tasteless--presents a monumental challenge. We resist, we offer excuses, we lash out at those who would deprive us of our "precious" treats.  And if we get desperate and go for the drastic "put a match to it" solution (with some crash diet/exercise plan), it isn't long before we start over, building a bigger and better mound of fat cells.

Like the hoarders, compulsive eaters can't get over their addiction in one day (or in one half-hour television episode).  Such drastic change takes time and lots of hard work, and the outcome is never certain.  This past week, I went back to my relatively restricted diet and tried to increase my exercise, and I lost .8 pounds, or about what I should be losing.  I'm making very slow progress, but I'm sticking with it, as monumental a task as it seems.  And each week I'm learning more and more not what I should be eating, but how to be thin.

See you next time!