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Today I finished reading a book that Joanna gave me last
week, called When Food Is Love.
After spending about a month a while ago reading
Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child,
and doing the self-hypnosis exercises, and the writing a letter
to yourself with your non-dominant hand, and not finding any
great traumas or even any ungrieved pain from my childhood
lurking within me, I wasn't pleased to see this new book
start right in on its thesis that compulsive overeating is generally
hiding a fear of intimacy, a feeling that one is not worthy of being
loved, stemming from the experiences of being beaten, raped, and
abandoned as a child. (run-on sentence) I had gotten enough of that
from the first book.
While various things in the book did strike a chord with me,
like the fact that my compulsive eating occurs when I'm alone,
and possibly depressed (or even angry at someone), and that there is a
feeling that things would be better in my life if I weighed
considerably less, I'm just not seeing the underlying reasons
for these things that these books suggest.
While I acknowledge that these people have long studied these things,
and claim therapeutic success, and thus substantiation, for their
theories, and I don't want to sound arrogant by naysaying them without
any evidence to refute them, the possibility is never lost on me that
perhaps they're just quacks.
<RANT>
This all came about because my bad self-image based on my weight
came up during the conversation, which I hadn't brought up with her
before. She had the gall to say that I'm not fat. I don't understand
why people feel the need to say that to people who know perfectly
well that they are fat. Sure, I see people every day who
are fatter than I am, and I see people ever day less so, and people
who are not overweight at all. And some of those fat people are full
of self-love, and some of self-loathing; how overweight they are, and
how they feel about that, are not relevant to my weight and
my feelings. And I'm not deluding myself that I need to lose
three hundred pounds; I'm simply being honest with myself, on this issue
anyway; and I'm the one who sees me naked in the mirror every day.
I know I'm fat, and I wish people (funny how they're usually the nicely
slender ones) would stop insisting that I'm not.
</RANT>
In case you're wondering, I'm:
5 feet, 9 inches tall
220 pounds
It being August 8 currently in the Pacific Time Zone, I'll wish my
brother Jeff a Happy 44th Birthday, wherever he is.