I am puzzled that I do not seem to be losing weight. I am not eating enough to maintain my weight. At my weight, you have to eat quite a lot to avoid losing ass. I am not currently eating enough for maintenance, so why do I feel like I'm not losing any weight? Boyfriend says to be more patient, that it takes time to lose weight. If I buy a scale, I'll just become more obsessed, so that's not an option.
Boyfriend also seemed dismayed when I told him about the food plan that my sponsor wants me to do (3 meals, 2 snacks) and, at his stricken expression, informed him that OA is not a weight loss club. It is not a diet. It is learning to stop using food like an anesthetic. He immediately jumped to the conclusion that I am being encouraged to think like the following: "I'm ok, even if I weigh 800 pounds. It's ok, because I love me." He said that if that's the case, he wants me to stop going. I felt more than a little indignant at the idea that he has any say in the matter of whether I go to OA or not. It's irritating to think that he'd believe he has any standing to decide whether this is good for me; what paternalistic bullshit.
I am constantly surprised by Boyfriend's lack of emotional IQ, or perhaps it's his lack of compassion/sympathy for the pain and feelings of others that he can't identify with. I don't know. He is so smart when it comes to people's behavior, he's so smart when it comes to logic and reason, but he has a hard time discerning when logic and reason aren't everything.
What Boyfriend fails to understand is that one can only continue to gain weight like that by serious overeating. It's got to be an eating disorder in order to gain that much weight, whether it's 800 pounds or if you weigh 300 pounds. I don't refer to the occasional too much at dinner, or the occasional dessert, the occasional serving of chips, or any of that. I am talking about an enduring effort. This would be an enduring effort where there is no doubt that one is using food like an anesthetic. This would be acting insanely - bingeing, doing anything to get food, eating out of the trash, etc.
Normal people do not eat like that. And in OA, it is not considered ok to eat like that. How could it be? OA is a place where you learn to love yourself. If you love yourself, you try to take care of yourself. If you're trying to take care of yourself, then you want to be healthy. If you want to be healthy out of love for yourself, then you eat more healthfully. And finally, you are more honest with yourself. If you're eating yourself to death, you are not being honest with yourself and you are not taking care of yourself.
To me, this seems like it should be obvious. A big fat duh. I mean, does he like me better now with me hating myself, not because of weight, but because of everything else under the sun? Did he like it better when I was working out but didn't feel like bathing? Perhaps he found it more tolerable when I refused to do laundry, not out of laziness, but out of shame and self-hatred. This weekend was funny. I did laundry while he slept. I came home and put it away and he looked around and goes, "Where's the laundry that was in those baskets?" "I did the laundry, came home, and put it away." He seemed a little nonplussed. That was not me just 3 short weeks ago. Maybe he liked it better when I was bingeing left and right. He didn't seem to like that when he found all those Ben n Jerry's pint containers stowed here and there. I'm not bingeing now, thanks to OA.
Doesn't he see the improvements in me? Yes, I was deeply sad and upset this weekend. But so what? What did he expect? That I would stop using food to stuff down my emotions and I would suddenly be gifted by God with the ability to gracefully handle my feelings? The same feelings that I couldn't handle before OA and used to food to avoid?
I think more, even if he doesn't see it. I consider things more, even if I still reach the wrong decisions at time. At the very least, I am examining my motivations for things. This is a definite improvement.
At the same time, who cares if he notices? I'm doing this for me, right? Well, yes, I am. But everyone on the planet has the need for approval. I would like to hear more positive things out of him about how I've changed, but he is so tired of the way that I behaved before, it must be awfully hard to see past the smoke of the wrecks that I caused while I was still completely in the food and the disease. This is like an alcoholic getting sober and expecting his family to start trusting him again overnight; not gonna happen. A newly sober person is not expected to stay that way. Maybe he's just waiting for me to relapse.
Sometimes, I feel like I would get far more sympathy out of him if I were an alcoholic. He will sit there and tell me how I wouldn't berate a cancer patient for having cancer, would I? But he plainly does not look at this disease the same way that he does alcoholism. It irritates me sometimes that he looks at this the same way that everyone else who's never had an eating disorder looks at it; just another fat person looking for an excuse to make things ok. At first he seemed so sympathetic. He even went to my first meeting that night. He has never made fun of anyone there, of course. That's not him. But he doesn't seem to want to hear about my recovery; I grow tired of him subtly putting it down.
Boyfriend is not a jerk. He is just like most people in this regard; he doesn't personally know what this is like. How he can be so smart and so stupid about it at the same time baffles me, but then I am sure he is baffled by many of the things that I think and do, so touche.
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