Normal Eating

One year ago (almost) today I discovered normal eating.  I had a particularly frustrating day on my diet of choice (Weight Watchers) and desperately went searching online for answers.  I first searched “oral fixation” because I knew there must be a name for my affliction.  I learned that this affliction didn’t have much to do with eating food.  So I kept looking and eventually found a website called www.overcomingovereating.com.  I started reading through a list of qualities and realized this was my problem.  I found a couple of books and ordered them off Amazon (“Overcoming Overeating” and “Breaking Free From Emotional Eating”).  I learned so much from those books and immediately started making changes in my life that were very scary.  I threw away my scale, cleaned out my closet of any clothes that didn’t fit, got a full-length mirror and started eating whatever I wanted.  I went to the grocery store and put everything I love in the cart to bring home, and in large quantities.

It was scary and fun at the same time.  I had no idea what was going to happen but I knew what I was doing wasn’t working so maybe I needed to take a leap of faith.  Those around me were more than a little worried.  Both my husband and mother thought I was going to get super fat.  Somehow I wasn’t worried about that, though.  A few things led me to that feeling. 

First, I knew that I had been a normal eater at one time.  I didn’t gain weight until the last year of college.  All through the rest of my life I was of normal size.  I wasn’t super skinny or anything, but I was a normal athletic teen and I didn’t remember ever having an eating issue.  I did get skinny my senior year in high school but that was mostly because of boyfriend issues.  I just didn’t feel like eating.  Other than that I was pretty normal.  Food was never a huge focus in my life, I just ate when I was hungry.  So I believed I could have that again.

The second reason is because just before my wedding I started losing weight without even trying.  For some reason I didn’t focus on that for my wedding like some people do.  But during the weeks leading up to my wedding the weight just started coming off all by itself.  I wasn’t doing anything!  In fact, when I started to notice the scale dropping I thought it was kind of weird and just kept thinking, this will stop soon, it’s just a fluke.  But it didn’t stop and I kept losing right up until the big day.  I lost about 20lbs during that time.  It was like the weight just fell off.  So I knew it was possible to eat what I wanted and still lose weight.  Logically it made sense to me.

So I took a leap of faith.  And now, 1 year later, I am probably only 10 lbs heavier than I was, if that.  So I found out that it is possible to stop dieting and not blow up like a whale.  Amazing!  It really is, actually.

I am starting this blog so I can write about my experience moving toward normal eating.  I think it will help me make progress and maybe someday it will help someone else just to know the path I took.  There are many dieting and weght loss blogs and many non-dieting fat positive blogs, but very few that have to do with normal eating.  Either that or I haven’t found them yet.

Over the next few days I will write about what I have learned in the past year, what has changed and what’s stayed the same, where I am in the process and what my next steps will be.  I will also talk about the resources I currently use and don’t use and why.