They’d been tight since Passover, the holiday that celebrates the liberation of the Jews from slavery and their exodus from Egypt. During Passover, we acknowledge this freedom by telling the exodus story at ritual gatherings called seders. We also acknowledge it by consuming astonishing amounts of food that people who are trying to free themselves from strokes and heart attacks wouldn’t consider eating. For the Passover holiday, I ate matzo balls made with chicken fat, fruit compote made with pineapples dipped in heavy syrup, and noodle pudding made with butter, brown sugar, and sour cream. For dessert, I ate cheesecake and two kinds of flourless chocolate cake. I did this every night for 5 nights. During the days, I ate leftovers from the night before. Although I make it a practice not to weigh myself, my fat jeans always tell me when I’ve gained weight. I figured I’d put on 4, possibly 5, pounds, and, for the umpteenth time, I was convinced that my brain had truly snapped and I was 5 minutes away from being as big as a house. Or at least a small cottage. I thought about getting liposuction, flogging myself, or buying a bigger pair of jeans. They were all out of the question—especially the buying bigger jeans option. I’d rather have a root canal without novocaine. Of course, I have another choice. I can always decide that I’m not going to go around feeling (and declaring that I feel) fat. I can disengage from that alluring drama with its attendant sweeps of emotion, even though it’s like separating yourself from Krazy Glue. I know how to do it, but I’m also quite fond of drama. All Hail, Drama Queen I’m most familiar with myself as an insecure, anxious, bingey type of gal who could gain weight or fall apart at the slightest provocation. Replacing this woozy self-image with one of solidity and strength has been, and continues to be, a struggle. I’ve always had to be very careful about how I talk to myself, and whether my one-person dialogue is kind or mean. So I know that when I’m using “I feel fat” language, I am in trouble. In the 27 years I’ve been listening to myself and other women talking about weight, I’ve learned this much: Feeling fat has nothing to do with being fat. I’ve heard women who are a size 16 talk about how thin they feel, and I’ve heard women who are a size 4 talk about how fat they feel. I’ve also heard women talk about feeling fat one moment and thin the next. In one of my recent classes, someone said, “If I woke up tomorrow and this whole issue with food was gone, I wouldn’t know how to judge myself. Right now, being thin is how I know I’m good. Feeling fat is how I know I’m bad. If I didn’t have this system of fat and thin, I would feel terribly lost.” More from Prevention: Love Your Belly At Any Age! [pagebreak] We wouldn’t resort to a constant state of feeling fat if it didn’t serve us in basic, primal ways. No one keeps eating and overeating and feeling miserable unless it has a benefit. Maybe it makes you feel safe. Maybe it’s because feeling fat connects you to the millions of other women in the country on constant diets. It allows you to fit in, to feel the same as everyone else. More from Prevention: 8 Friends Every Woman Needs The problem is that it also cuts you off at the knees. No matter how much you weigh, when you feel fat, you take scissors to your life and cut it down to the size you think it’s supposed to be so you’ll be loved and accepted. I’ve known women who greet every compliment on their hair, their skin, their most recent accomplishment with an “Oh, but I’m so fat.” Like the woman in my class, “feeling fat” is the handy scapegoat for all the bad feelings they have. And that’s why it’s so dangerous. When you tell yourself you feel fat, you make it impossible to figure out what is actually going on in your head. Perhaps you really are uncomfortable with your size and are ready to lose weight. But perhaps you’re actually lonely, excited, happy, or threatened. You’ll never know what you’re feeling, or what you need to do, as long as you translate uncomfortable or unfamiliar feelings, positive or negative, into the familiar refrain “I feel fat.” And you will never be happy until you stop thinking happy is a synonym for thin. (Find out how you can make happiness a priority.) Don’t Fight Your Feelings Do you really think that what you want from being “thin and gorgeous and happy” will ever be achieved by telling yourself that you are fat and ugly? When the women I work with contact the power, strength, and joy inside of them—even if they’re 70 pounds overweight—they have an “Aha!” moment. “This is it! This is what I wanted all along, what I thought I could only get by being thin.” After arriving at this understanding, they are no longer fighting the voices in their heads that tell them they are fat and ugly and simultaneously want to deprive them of the only sweetness left: food. Losing weight is no longer a struggle because all parts of them—their mind and body—are now on the same side. They realize that you can’t love yourself by hating yourself. (Read about one Prevention reader’s “Aha!” moment, and how she walked off 149 pounds.) Now is the time to stop and ask yourself what the goal really is. Is it to be thin at all costs? Or is being thin the means to self-love? Because if it’s the latter, then you can start today, right now, this minute. Begin by changing the language you use when you talk to yourself. Disengage from the drama of feeling fat. Treat yourself with kindness, curiosity, and humor so that everything in your life becomes fluid, unfettered, and easy. Including, of course, your jeans. More from Prevention: 10 Tricks For Turning Around A “Fat” Day
