I know it's long, but here is an entry from my blog - i hope you can wade through it! - I wondered if anyone can relate to where i am and maybe we can be there for each other?
I am fat. Admitted freely and with no hesitation. Not ‘bonny’, not chubby, not even as svelte as your average lard-arse. Fat. The type of fat that exists with only the most determined effort.
I have tried every diet under the sun, with varying degrees of (temporary) success. I know the calorific value of every foodstuff known to man (and a few known only to me!). I know all the right and wrong foods. I know exactly what you should eat and how to have a healthy diet.
So. Why don’t I? Why, with a higher level of knowledge than a dozen dieticians do I have the figure of a dozen dieticians in a potato sack?
I went to my GP for help. He told me to walk 3 miles a day and eat carrots (I quote directly). Thank you Doctor. It is all so clear now. THAT is what I have been doing wrong, how kind of you to clear that up for me.
By the way, I can’t walk up a flight of stairs without oxygen and a defibrillator waiting for me at the top and I, amazingly, am very well aware that cream cakes have somewhat more calories than carrots. But thanks for your support. (My new GP - acquired after THAT outstanding display of helpfulness! - referred me to an obesity clinic.)
If it was so simple, I wouldn’t be fat. No-one would. So I ask myself hard questions. Am I a greedy pig? Yes. Do I have a metabolic problem, the cry of fatties everywhere? I doubt it. Am I addicted to eating? Oh my, yes.
I feel empty inside all the time and the closest I can come to describing the feeling is being starving hungry. When I am eating, it fills this void. When I am stuffed uncomfortably full, the emptiness recedes; only to return as inevitably and as painfully as the digesting of 7 big Macs and a family sized cheesecake.
So I am waiting for an operation. To take away my physical ability to eat forever. But. I am too fat for the operation, the risks are too high. I have to loose weight before I can have it. I have lost 3 stone on a starvation (liquid) diet so far, and have more to go. On the liquid diet I coped, because it was easier to eat nothing at all than to eat a little and stop. Now I have had to reintroduce solid food as the liquid programme can only be followed for 12 weeks, I am finding it so hard and have fallen by the wayside more than once. I am scared I will die of a heart attack before I have the chance to experience a normal life.
Why do I eat and want to eat when I know it will kill me? Why can’t I stop myself? Why is binging something I am unable to control when I can see what it has done to me?
I haven’t been intimate with Long-Suffering-One for years. He doesn’t say it, but I know it is because, much as he loves me, he is not physically attracted to me. I don’t blame him.
I can’t run or play with the kids - I can’t go anywhere with them alone because I know I would not be able to catch them if they ran off.
I am embarrassed all the time - last week I went to Morrisons’ cafe for a coffee and couldn’t sit down because they have those stupid fixed seats and I couldn’t squeeze myself in.
WHY can I not change? No amount of counselling has ever helped me and I pin my hopes on surgery. Sometimes I feel like taking a knife and slicing it all out.
If I was addicted to any other substance, I could go ‘cold turkey’ and then avoid it for life (alcohol, heroin, crack etc), but that is not an option with food. I cannot escape my enemy and it is determined to kill me.
I want to wear nice clothes, run in the park, go swimming, have sex! I just hope I don’t die before any of that happens.