Self-esteem and Earrings

Tags

#, appearance, earrings, jewellery, progress, self-image, size acceptance, weight

It turns out that taking pictures of earrings while wearing them is not easy.

I did something I never thought I would in my last skills practice session: I talked about my self-esteem. This is probably me at my most vulnerable, so talking about it was actually quite a surprise to me, let alone anyone else. My listener and observer were the two who are also going for the person-centred course next year and certainly people I feel safe with, even though I’ve barely worked with one of them. I didn’t know this was what I was going to talk about until my mouth opened and out came the words.

Last week, in the same triad, we had talked about earrings. I had bought a pair at the art gallery just visited and was wondering what to talk about so C challenged me to discuss them. So I did and it was more interesting than I thought. C followed me and also talked about earrings with H leaving it until the following week to talk about her thoughts on earrings and appearance.

What is it about earrings? I had mine pierced when I was 12 or 14. I actually have no idea what age, other than my mother was with me and supportive. It took her a few ears before she then had hers pierced as she got envious of the wider choice of jewellery for me. I just liked the look of them on other people and quickly veered towards the long dangly type. For many years I wouldn’t be seen leaving the house without earrings: it was just as much a part of getting dressed as putting on clothes was. But that stopped, and I think it stopped due to the very practical reasons of having babies. If you’ve ever had an earring yanked out of your ear by a very small hand you’ll know the sense of it. I could have moved to studs but they weren’t me and as a mother of small people, I just stopped doing things I didn’t have to and this included self care.

I simply never went back to them. I would sometimes put them on if I was going out somewhere “nice”, but not if I was just going out, and not as part of getting dressed. And yet I was aware, as the year progressed, that I was putting more effort into trying to remember to wear earrings on my college day. There is certainly something about it transferring from being a day at college to a day spent with friends that merited a bit more care. I have increasingly been wearing earrings whenever I go out and since we had this discussion I’ve been wearing them most days, putting them on first thing regardless of whether I’m going anywhere that day or not. So in some almost sad way, they reflect some aspect of my self-esteem.

Going back to my childhood, my mother found it difficult to treat me to things as dad would question her spending. Whether this was the reason or not I don’t know but we bought a lot of earrings. I had found a gallery (no longer as good as it was) full of jewellery stalls and there were always a few pairs worth buying that were cheap and fun. As such they probably passed under my father’s financial radar and he did enjoy seeing us both in them. So they were also an expression of freedom.

So although it seems trivial, earrings are both a reflection of my self-esteem and a reminder of my pre/teenage relationship with my mother.

Having discussed all this in triad the previous week, this week I talked about my self-image. I was, for me, brutally honest. I talked about my history with weight, how I was not fat until I had pregnancies, that I lost weight after each one just as I had put it on until the last ten years when I’d started putting on weight after quitting smoking and it had never come off.

I said that I could wear clothes that I felt good in, a hair style I like that I feel reflects my personality and wear jewellery that makes me feel good. And yet, even with all that, I look in the mirror and I say fat. I struggle to see the confident person who dares to be different in appearance. I say fat; I see fat. I am well aware that this is not the reaction I want. Looking through past blog posts on fat I have actually come a long way in the last few years. I no longer hate the way I look although I do wish I were different. I struggle to see anything but the size but I’m also increasingly aware that I try to set that to one side and think about clothes and appearance without taking size into consideration. I occasionally see myself in a photo and think it isn’t all that bad really. That is an improvement on total hate.

That paragraph feels like a jumble of incoherent thought.

Going out with my friend last week we went to a tourist town fully of independent jewellers, from the cheap to the highly expensive. I bought the most expensive piece of jewellery I have ever bought myself . If this isn’t a symbol of improved self-esteem then I don’t know what is. I admit I thought it was slightly cheaper that it turned out to be but by that point I was well into “fuck it mode” and my friend was highly enjoying watching me spend money. And I didn’t just buy one piece either. Not going there again in a hurry.

I have received comments about nice dresses and where can I buy them, comments about nice hair (having gone from red highlights to all over red last year) and I do feel better about myself. And yet there’s something that needs untangling. My cut in alcohol intake has got a small voice inside my head telling me I might lose weight because of it and I’m trying not to be pleased about it. I want to lose weight but I also want to not care about losing weight.

And yet, and yet I talked about this. I feel that this is me at my most vulnerable, mainly because I still assume that people look at me and see fat as I do. So I’m also amazed that I did, in a positive way.

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Same Shit, Different Year

Tags

festivities, friends, HAES, weight

I can start counting down the days till we go back to school now.

Christmas was fine: we got through without any real problems and 1son had bought so many presents that the others weren’t really bothered by how few I had. Since then they are all taking it in turns to stay up all night and I’ve just given up on trying, other than to shout at them for making noise when I want to to go to sleep.

I’ve hardly gone out of the house. I’m not in the mood for happy festive people so I’ve avoided all social activities, rather than making the best use of the holidays and lack of an alarm clock. I have watched so much film and television, none of it live, and I have turned into a couch potato. This combined with half a ton of cheese means I’ve put weight on.

I went to the doctor regarding my blood pressure medication to discover I had a temporary high reading, despite taking the medicine. Hopefully it was a once off but I’ll have to keep to keep taking my blood pressure. She asked me if I was in the right headspace to consider regular exercise and weight loss. I didn’t have the strength to discuss a HAES approach but said I wasn’t in the mood. We discussed that briefly but without it really going anywhere. I like the fact that she asked and then didn’t put any extra pressure trying to guilt trip me into saying I would try, when I know full well I won’t. This just feels so different from last year when I was a lot happier.

On a more positive note I had a great New Year’s Eve.  I would normally either go to the pub or just stay at home and ignore it but I went to a friend’s. Just the two of us and we just talked and talked for hours which was lovely. Her deepening friendship is one of the highlights of 2014.

Term starts on Monday, with my driving test in ten days. I have taken the fortnight off work, going several days at a time without even turning on my laptop. When I have I’ve just read through emails rather than actually doing any work.

I feel as if I’ve spent the last ten days just feeling sorry for myself. This is not where I want be, but it is where I am for now.

A Breath of Fresh Air

Tags

diabetes, doctor, TED, weight

This was posted by a member of the HAES UK forum and in it a doctor describes how he started to consider that maybe obesity was not the cause, but the symptom.

#14 Banish “Have You Lost Weight” From Your Vocabulary

Tags

beautiful you, diet talk, weight

This is something else that I have done. When I first started reading Intuitive Eating and thinking about how much dietary talk takes over conversations, especially between women, I stopped participating.

I do remember listening to a male conversation talking about eating healthily but still piling on the weight and doctor couldn’t help and realising how exactly similar this sounded to women talking. I get funny looks if I say that diets don’t work; people tend to look at me as if I’m mad rather than ask me what I mean, so deeply is diet talk entrenched in our vocabulary.

One of my neighbours congratulated me as I walked down the street a few years ago. I looked at her blankly and said “what for?”. She hesitated, said “well you’re …. oh” and walked off. No, I wasn’t pregnant, merely putting on weight but I know how the remark made me feel. It’s fine when people ask you whether you’ve lost weight if you have, but if you haven’t it hurts and you also wonder what you’re doing that makes you look as if you’ve lost weight.

Better still to just skip that conversation.

Beautiful You by Rosie Molinary

Beautiful You, by Rosie Molinary is available at Amazon (click on the picture) and her website is Rosie Molinary

You Fat Cow

Tags

counselling, decisions, fat, mefirst, self-image, weight

This afternoon I took 3son and 4son to CAMHS for family therapy. As 2son doesn’t come to these sessions, we recorded our conversation so we had a DVD to show 2son. We just filmed ourselves chatting and then played it back.

As we watched it, rather than listening to what we’d said, I just stared at myself and though “you fat cow, how ugly are you? What a tub of lard.”

And I think then, for possibly the first time, I came to realise how little self-worth I really have. I’ve always said that I’ve lacked self confidence, that I didn’t like the way I looked once I started putting on weight. I’m aware of how much I hate seeing photos of myself except for the very occasional one. But I’ve always shied away from truly acknowledging how much self-hate I have.

This is not that I used to like myself, but now I’ve got fatter I don’t any more. It’s more that I never had self-confidence or felt sure of my place, and now I’ve stopped pretending. With that has come weight gain.

I’m in a vicious circle at the moment, where I’ve been steadily putting on weight over the last five years and the more I put on the more unhappy I feel about myself and the more I put on. I can never seem to get to a place where I feel strong enough to put myself first.

This moment combined with what Rosie Molinary (@rosiemolinary) said to me yesterday on twitter:

1st step is deciding you’ve had enough of self-hate then you can start moving towards acceptance (with tools)

And it really hit me, as I watched my flab wobble, that if I hated myself so much, I have got no chance of following Intuitive Eating, HAES, #mefirst or any other of these programmes designed to help me, whether on weight or general happiness.

I understand intellectually about not judging people by their size, or even by how healthy they look. I understand the difference. I recognise the pressure on us all to conform to a rigid image, pressure that starts off at birth and never stops. I read what the amazing Ragen says on Dances with Fat and agree, more or less, with every word.

But I am not worthy.

And until I can truly consider myself deserving of being loved by me, then I’m not going to be happy, I’m not going to accept myself and I’m not going to let anyone else in close. I’m not going to learn to eat in a healthy fashion and I’m not going to enjoy exercise and feeling fitter.

I need to go back into counselling and have made the appropriate phone calls. Rosie has also very kindly put her new book Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance into the post for me. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Fat Is My Prison

Tags

cooking, diet, emotions, ex, fat, father, food, mother, self-loathing, weight

Fat is my prison and only I can set myself free.

I wrote that a few months ago but couldn’t face actually writing about it. And judging by the speed at which I’m not moving through my 3 books on the subject, it’s something I find difficult to think about altogether.

I hate, loathe and despise the way I look.

I’m putting that in bold, because despite trying to persuade myself that I don’t hate my body, I do. I’m fat. And I’m getting fatter. I’m not quite obese but I’m getting there.

From a historic point of view it’s tied up in a lot of things: my mother was constantly on/off diets, ballooned and lost weight until sticking at a fat level not too dissimilar from mine. My father has always been thin and doesn’t understand the complexity. Being fat is complicated and due to emotions and feelings he hasn’t discovered.

But it’s not just that. My parents celebrated with food, constantly talked about it, and still do, and seem to value the food more than the company. They also criticised it a lot, discussing how it could be improved, by altering the recipe or cooking method. They went on about it a lot.

I was never overweight as a teenager and never really worried about it. I put on weight with each pregnancy and lost it after, for the most part. I only really piled it on after I stopped smoking. I tried dieting after I’d got used to not smoking but it never really came off and since then has slowly crept on.

I’m not attributing it to not smoking however. I stopped smoking because I’d finally got rid of my ex and was, for the first time, in charge of my own life without the control of another adult. I relaxed. The last time I had lost weight I think it was the only thing in my life I could control and I was very stressed.

I have over the past two or three years made various attempts at regular exercise of differing varieties, regulating food, diet and now Intuitive Eating. I thought I didn’t eat that badly because I don’t stuff myself with cream cakes and puddings (just like my parents). I can however overdose on bacon and in terms of overeating there’s probably not much difference. I spent years eating bigger and bigger salads because I like them and they’re ‘free’ without thinking of the larger mountain I was eating and what that meant. Most of the time I am not aware of stuffing myself. I’ll have a bowl of muesli or two slices of toast for breakfast followed by two meals in the day. I don’t snack much although if I eat dinner early with the kids I tend to have something else late at night, which I try not to, but sometimes I’m just plain hungry.

I’ve lost all love of cooking, which really doesn’t help. Although my children do not have eating problems, in that they’re all a ‘normal’ size, they are all faddy eaters and are all faddy in different ways. So I feel no reward in cooking for them at all, which means I cook less and less and their circle of food also diminishes. So although they haven’t a problem in quantity they do lack quality.

Because I’ve lost the joy in cooking I end up cooking very simply for myself, usually steak and salad or stews in the winter. Endless variety in those and my salads are wonderful, but if it takes more than 5 minutes, or needs me to plan in advance, I can’t be bothered. Which makes life very difficult. I know how to cook, and what constitutes a balance meal or diet but those aren’t the issues. I’m just not interested.

And that goes for exercise too. My parents would drag us out the house at the weekend for a “nice” walk, which could take several hours. They often ended up having a pint afterwards and since for the most part children weren’t allowed in we children huddled outside sharing a packet of crisps. Not going was not an option and as my sisters got older it was increasingly just me. My father didn’t slow down for little legs so I both learned to walk fast and to not try and keep up, but get lost in my thoughts. No other form of exercise was ever undertaken by my parents, although my mother did occasionally take me swimming (I ended up teaching myself to swim which is why I have no technique whatsoever). So I hated going for walks and never developed an interest in any other sport because they weren’t value by my parents either.

I tried going to classes of varying types locally, but found it takes up too much time and I don’t want to. So I tried a cross trainer at home, thinking that took out the travel time and I could do it in the evening when I wasn’t going to do anything intelligent anyway. Also I could watch television whilst doing it which meant I didn’t feel I was wasting time. That too is gathering dust although I’ve resisted getting rid of it. And onto the Wii, bought two years ago. It was and still is a good idea. I’ve gone in and out of the habit of using it, trying various different games. I like the Sporty ones and the keep fit ones and the game that I really enjoyed was the dance mat games. But even though I’ve found exercise I enjoy, I can’t keep to regular attendance and haven’t now touched it for months except for the occasional half hour with my children.

So, what is it all about then? I’ve spoken of not valuing myself and that’s what it comes down to, although I feel that’s too glib an answer. I’m rejecting the importance my parents placed on food, saying it isn’t the most important thing in my life and shouldn’t be. I’m stopping myself from feeling and doing the things I need to in order to be happier about myself. It’s as if I want to hide inside a blob and not come out to engage with life. But I do want to live and be alive. My father dismisses issues of lack of self-worth as being irrelevant and I think to some extent I’m saying, “Look at me, how I feel is relevant, otherwise I wouldn’t be this fat”.

I need to learn to say and feel “Look at me, how I feel is relevant and important. I feel happy and I look marvellous”.

We’re Wired to Maintain A Healthy Weight

Tags

confusion, exercise, HAES, struggle, weight

From the Preface “I learned that I didn’t have an eating problem, but I clearly had a problem taking care of myself”.

I’ve looked after my mother. I’ve tried to look after my family at times, to be ‘piggy in the middle’ between different family members. I’ve looked after my partners and my children. I shall go on looking after my children until I die. I’m not very good at looking after me. I’m very aware that this is where all that lack  of self-esteem has led me and now that I’ve reached the point where I need to learn to look after me if I want to progress as a human being I need help and guidance. Hence the reading.

The first chapter looks at the physiological way our body monitors and regulates our metabolism, hunger, appetite, feeling full, body fat. If left alone, our body would fluctuate gently around a natural level, a setpoint. Losing weight by dieting can raise this setpoint to protect the body against future starvation. By dieting we’re forcing our body to not do what it’s supposed to do and the system breaks down.

“Your body wants to maintain the status quo and is stubbornly resistant to change. When you lose body fat, the very loss of fat triggers processes to reclaim it. So losing weight in and of itself is counterproductive to maintaining weight loss”.

My body weight has fluctuated since I first gave birth. I put on an extra stone for each pregnancy, weight that I subsequently more or less lost. I lost two stone when I got divorced. I went to Weight Watchers and achieved gold after my third child and got down to a size 10 (UK). That was because I was so miserable in my life that losing weight seemed the only thing I could control and achieve. After my fourth pregnancy I probably lost a stone again but then quit smoking which, whilst hugely positive, put two stone on. I started going back to Weight Watchers and that is when I realised that the whole diet thing just wasn’t going to work and gave up. I’ve steadily increased weight ever since. Now I’ve put my weight fluctuations down to pregnancies, rather than to emotional changes or influences in my life at the time and of course these two overlap.

I understand that I am confused about my body and I’m appreciating that whilst some of this is due to childhood influences around food, a lot is also due to the cultural pressure to look good in order to feel good, rather than the other way round. Going back to the previous post I don’t trust my intuition about food. I used to. I feel that I eat relatively healthily and that confuses me.

I do drink too much alcohol and am fully aware of that. I vary between not drinking, trying to minimise consumption, and not worrying about it. I am quite happy to just have a glass or two at home of an evening, or half a dozen beers or so if I’m out. And anywhere in between.

As to my metabolism, well I’m always tired. I sleep fitfully, waking up several times during the night and often struggling to get to sleep in the first place. I can’t sleep in much even when I have the opportunity. I feel, but again I no longer trust my instincts, that I spend too much time sitting down and not enough being physically active, whether formal exercise or otherwise. I do struggle with exercise as it makes me think of all those walks I went on as a child, whether I wanted to or not and the lack of enjoyment and loneliness that came with. I need to throw off those connotations.

I feel that everything’s wrong about the way I physically live or that if it’s not wrong, I don’t know that it’s right. I’m only just realising how confused I am.

Quotes are taken from “Health at Every Size” by Linda Bacon