Don’t blame yourself into shame over weight loss. Learn the Diamond plan for shame free body management.
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Like most people I’ve struggled with my weight. Growing up I was a skinny little kid until my mother figured I needed meat to fatten me up. My father had left when I was five years old and the advertisements of the times associated meat and manliness. It was also a time when people were encouraged to have huge freezers in their suburban garages and stock it with meat that was delivered once a month.
I grew up eating meat three times a day, an all American diet. With my father gone, my mother had to leave the home to work and a quick breakfast consisted of a hamburger, instant rice, and applesauce (a growing boy needs his fruits and vegetables, though canned applesauce wasn’t the healthiest fruit and the vegetables somehow got left out.) For lunch I had some kind of chop and a steak for dinner. Now I remember, the vegetables came for dinner in the form of canned peas and spinach (I was a Popeye fan and knew I had to eat my spinach.)
I kept my weight down by exercising a lot. I was an active kid and played sports throughout high school and college. It wasn’t until I graduated college and got out in the work world that my weight started increasing. Here’s where the shame begins. I thought it was my fault that I was putting on weight. I worked hard to lose weight, which I usually did, only to put it back on again.
Over the years I tried all the diets—low carb, high carb, Weight Watchers, Gluten-free. They all worked for a short time but none of them worked for long. I’m five feet five inches tall (It took me a long time to deal with the shame of being short) and I had ballooned to 170 pounds. I became depressed, short-tempered, and angry all the time.
My ideal weight was 140. I’d work my way down to 150, but couldn’t get rid of the last ten pounds. You know the ones I mean, right? But then I figured out that shame was the thing that was keeping me fat and a shame-free way of eating would get me down to where I wanted to be. I’m happy to report I now weigh 140 and I’ve maintained my weight at that level for more than two years. Here’s what I’ve learned:
Being overweight is not a personal issue. It’s a social calamity.
The reason most of us are ashamed of our weight is because we believe we are to blame for our weight gain. According to the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, 69% of all adults over twenty are overweight or obese. Further, 18.4% of adolescents age 12-19 years are obese, as are 18% of children age 6-11 and 12.1% of children age 2-5 years of age. When huge percentages of our adults and children are overweight, we know the problem is not our lack of will power.
2. Fattening us up is good business for our Government/Industrial food system.
Increasingly we live in a system where big business decides what and how we eat and our government supports business interests more than health interests. According to the American Public Health Association,
“The food system represents a significant portion of the US economy, accounting for at least $1 trillion in annual sales, 13% of the gross national product, and 17% of the workforce.”
When the goal of the system is to increase profits rather than improve health, we are given the kind of processed foods that makes the most money for corporate giants like Pepsico, Tyson Foods, Nestle, Kraft Foods, and General Mills. The American Public Health Association concludes,
“The US industrial food system provides plentiful, relatively inexpensive food, but much of it is unhealthy, and the system is not sustainable.”
Eating the way we eat is shameful and suicidal.
It doesn’t take a health expert to convince us that we’re killing ourselves when 70% of adults are overweight and we’re fattening our children to make even more of them overweight when they grow up. While we’re killing ourselves, we’re also destroying the life-support system of the planet. According to a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), our diets and, specifically, the meat in them cause more greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxide, and the like to spew into the atmosphere than either transportation or industry.
The Diamond Plan for Shame Free Weight Loss
Eat real food, close to home, from local farmers, not corporate giants.
- Follow food writer, Michael Pollan’s, simple advice. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
- Make your beverage of choice tap water. Convincing us that our local water is unsafe is a corporate boondoggle to make us pay for bottled water and other expensive, high calorie beverages.
- Weigh yourself every day and adjust what you eat to fit the weight you want to be.
- Be joyful. Life is a gift. Remember what Elizabeth Kubler Ross said:
Image: Lauren Manning/Flickr“Each of us is life a snow-flake, absolutely beautiful and unique, and here for a very short time.”