You’re having a conversation with a close friend. There’s something exciting going on in your life and you’re dying to fill them in. As you talk, you’re brimming with energy and enthusiasm about your venture. When you finish, rather than sharing in your excitement your friend says flatly:
“What’s the point?”
Slightly stunned, you ask them to explain what they mean.
“Well”, they say, “it’s just that you’ll never do it. You’ll never achieve that. You might as well give up”.
How do you feel?
“There is deep wisdom within our very flesh, if only we can come to our senses and feel it”. – Elizabeth A. Behnke
How could someone allow themselves to put on so much weight? Why can’t they just come to their senses? This – and much worse – is often what people who are Not Thin fear others are thinking about them. To be fair, it sometimes is what people think if they’ve never had any kind of overeating issue themselves.
I know from personal experience how easy it is to put on a lot of weight without even knowing. Hard as it might be for some people to believe, it’s not difficult to put on 5 stone or more without really noticing.
“When you do start to eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full after years of being on one scheme or another, you will most likely go down a size or several sizes.
Unless you have been eating drastically less than your body needs for years, your weight should stabilise at its natural set point, which will be lower than what you’ve achieved through dieting and bingeing”.
Susie Orbach, “On Eating”
When clients first seek help for their emotion-driven overeating issues, they often think if they can just lose weight, everything else will be OK.
In this way, therapy can be seen as another weight-loss initiative. There’s sometimes a sense of disappointment that we’re not focusing on weight during sessions and, as a result, some clients assume I’m anti-weight loss.
I remember the day I wanted to give up.
I was at home. It was a warm, bright morning and sunlight was streaming into the study. I was heading towards the door but, as I passed my desk, something stopped me.
A simple thought.
“This is too hard”.
I’d worked so hard to understand my issues with food and myself but, despite my efforts, I couldn’t make enough sense of them to consistently affect my eating behaviour. Although my bingeing had stopped, I was still eating when I knew I wasn’t hungry. It felt like an impossible struggle with no way out.
“What you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe and enthusiastically act upon must inevitably come to pass” – Paul J. Meyer
It’s the adverbs that make this sentence so meaningful.
He could have said “what you imagine, desire, believe and act upon” but that doesn’t have the same power. Instead, Meyer colours in the specifics – we must vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe and enthusiastically act upon.
It’s not enough to hope for the best, plod along, see what happens – we have to want it, believe it and make it happen.
“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen”. – Brené Brown
It’s a lovely idea, isn’t it? We have the choice on a daily basis to be genuinely who we are. It’s often what we yearn for – to have the courage to be ourselves, regardless of what other people think.
But…
What if.
What if people don’t like us?
What if people tell us we’re wrong?
What if we risk being ourselves and we get hurt?
Continue reading “Food for Thought: The Risk of Authenticity”
Julie de Rohan 