Your Lifestyle Change is not My Lifestyle Change

Sometimes being friends with two women who've had gastric bypass surgery is a pain in the butt.

One of them understands eating disorders and the other one is ignorant about it.

She who is ignorant is a pain in the butt. I think what's painful about it is that her motivations and thinking on the subject are so shallow. Yet she's thin and happy, as far as I can tell, so who am I to diss her about it?

This is a post that's been brewing for a long time. The way of thinking about weight and my body that I embrace as a member of OA is one that is much more holistic and well-rounded than that which you'd find at the doctor's office.

Most people who want to embrace a 'lifestyle change' are talking about primarily two things, and those two things are eating more healthfully and exercising more. And being hyper vigilant about monitoring your weight, to the point of obsession and guilt.

In OA, the lifestyle change that we are encouraged to seek includes eating more healthfully and exercising more, but not in the way that a diet does.

In OA, we learn to love ourselves through our thoughts, actions, and words. This, then, will lead to recovery from all three facets of our disease: physical, emotional, and spiritual. We will have a spiritual experience that will cause us to see, feel, and do as we never have before. We learn that we do the next right action and we leave the overall outcome to our higher power. That is, we learn that if we keep doing the right things, if we stop letting our disease rule over our lives, then we need not be concerned with the outcome. The outcome will take care of itself.

Many of us who are compulsive overeaters become easily overwhelmed by thinking of the outcome too much. We become so overwhelmed that we lose track of what actually needs to be done. Once we lose track of what we should be doing, then we start feeling crushing guilt. And what do we use to assuage our feelings of crushing guilt? Food, of course…our drug of choice.

We learn that weight is an outcome and we're not in charge of outcomes. We are in charge of following our Higher Power's instructions, and that means that we start listening for and to that little voice inside us that encourages us to not eat in a harmful way, to enjoy the beauty around us by walking more or to love ourselves by doing something good for ourselves. That little voice inside each and every one of us encourages us to do many things that are healthy for us. It discourages us from doing things that are not good for us.

That higher power often comes from within. Call it God, call it Buddha or Allah or call it intuition, a conscience...call it whatever you want. Ascribe it to whatever source you want. It matters not what that voice is or where it hails from…it matters that we distance ourselves from disease and we start listening to that voice. It matters that we start being more gentle with ourselves. It matters that we start doing good things for ourselves out of love, not crushing guilt.

OA is about making a lifestyle change that is sustainable, and one that, in fact, sustains itself. It sustains itself because the lifestyle change is not about deprivation or punishment…it is about love. It is about learning to live differently, in every shade of meaning that the word 'live' entails.

Recovery means so much more than losing weight. It means being nice to yourself -- washing your clothes, brushing your teeth, cooking your food, throwing things out that drive you crazy, that you don’t love, having a home that you love, paying your bills, throwing out clothes that don't fit, creating a simpler life that you can live with and love. It means having friends who care about you, healthy relationships with all the people in your life, getting enough sleep, going out and enjoying the time you have on this earth in healthy ways, learning to love yourself enough not to worry about embarrassment that you might feel because you're fat and you're going down those slides anyway. It means forgetting yourself and letting the world revolve around someone else.

But, while you're on the subject of yourself, it means having realistic expectations of yourself, not having expectations that espouse perfection and guilt. It means realizing that you're always a work in progress, and that that progress may take a while, but then you've got a while to get it done anyway.

Call it a euphemism, call it semantics, whatever. It works. It may take longer than a crash diet or surgery or a regular diet. It may take longer than punishing workouts at the gym. But recovery's effects also last longer than the effects of those temporary fixes that only address the symptom and not the cancer that's eating away inside you.

Sometimes it's hard to remember that it doesn't matter if other people don't understand the full nature of what I'm trying to accomplish in my life through OA. It's hard sometimes to answer their concerned questions about what my weight loss goal is, etc. It's hard to know that they don't understand and to know that no matter what I may try to tell them, it all sounds like an excuse for not going on a diet and trying like crazy to just lose that d*mn weight.

In any case, I'm going to keep on working on my lifestyle change, and I'm not going to worry that some of my friends just don't get it. They will get it when they see the more finished product.