Authors: Augusten Burroughs
She’s an ambitious and successful woman; she pursues what she wants with dedication and focus.
If you spend twenty years trying to get something and you still don’t have it, is it admirable to keep trying? Or did you pass admirable several miles back and it’s getting close to straightjacket time?
If you are no closer to having something you’ve been chasing for twenty years, your data is broken. Either you can’t get
it, period; you already have it; you don’t really need or want it; or it’s not real.
If this is you and your weight is like a war that you fight with yourself, maybe you should try this: what about not dieting?
If the pressure were off—really off—and you had your own full permission to eat what you wanted, would this make you happy?
When nothing is forbidden, when it’s truly perfectly okay for you to climb into bed with a great book, a yellow layer cake from the bakery, and a fork, the cake suddenly has no more street value than the carrot stick. At least after the fourth time you do this. Exotic medical conditions aside, when there is no judgment with respect to what you eat—when you freely and openly allow yourself anything and as much as you please—the calories may add up, but their value to you decreases. The forbidden element is now gone. The rebellion is gone. The treat is gone because everything is a treat so nothing is.
The trick to this is, you can’t pep talk yourself into such an attitude and then eat tons of shit, gain weight, and be frustrated because this “not dieting” diet failed, like all the others. You have to let yourself eat how you want to eat for the rest of your life.
It’s like buying a really high-quality blue-chip stock for the long-term as opposed to the flashy, sensational bargain that will turn a profit overnight before evaporating.
Almost every serial dieter I know speaks of his or her “relationship with food” and how “complex” it is.
As with any shitty relationship, the solution is not to spend years in couples therapy and scheduling sex every Wednesday. If it’s really a shitty relationship, you have to leave it.
If you go on a diet and you lose weight and keep the weight off, that means you wanted it, you got what you wanted, then you actually liked having it, so you’ve kept it.
But if you diet and fail and diet and fail, you clearly have to stop with the dieting because you don’t like diets of any kind enough to follow them.
So. You let yourself eat anything you want and food becomes a commodity. It’s less interesting to stand before the glittering, freshly stocked All You Can Eat buffet when you have been standing there every night for the past six months, eating all you want, which is less and less each time. When no food is off-limits, all food becomes equal and calories evaporate, even if they pile on. But these calories, no matter how actually fattening, contain no meaning. Your war with your weight must end because wars require more than one active party.
You could end up actually losing the weight you could never lose back when you were trying like hell to lose it.
Maybe it will take months or even years for this weight to come off. If it happens, it happens as a result of allowing yourself something, not denying. The weight is lost naturally, from a positive mind-set, not manically banished and forbidden to return.
You might not lose any weight at all and this needs to be fine with you.
Unless you have a medical condition or you engage in zero physical activity, your body will try and be the weight it wants to be. It’s quite possible your arms and legs and butt will be larger than you have told yourself they ought to be.
The only real authority in the matter is your body. And some bodies are designed to be larger than others. Some people
can be quite large and live healthy, very long lives. We’re a fat-paranoid nation, but in the data I looked at from the CDC, people who were a little bit larger lived longer and were insulated against certain diseases.
Plus, of all the things you could do with your life, spending so much mental and physical energy on your gastrointestinal tract is somehow too wasteful.
Knowing that you’ll feel great about yourself, look amazing, and have so much more fun as a thin person is exactly like believing that being rich would end your financial worries and free you to do things like shop for seven-hundred-dollar vintage T-shirts and finally learn glassblowing. So that you could enjoy life instead of struggling constantly.
No doubt, some things would be better as a skinnier person, just as some things would improve with wealth. But happiness or satisfaction or contentment are not among these things.
Like so much in life, happiness is sold separately.
A more disappointment-resistant plan would be to get “thin happy” now at whatever weight you are. So that
thin
doesn’t equal
happy
to you anymore. It’s less compelling to obsess over getting more of something you already have.
Losing weight is something you absolutely can do and you don’t need a book or a scale to do it.
All you need is
need.
You must want to lose the weight and become that skinny person more than you want to eat, more than you want the comfort that food provides you. You must want to lose weight to such an extent that the want is transformed under the pressure of your focused and powerful desire into a diamond of pure need.
When want is aimed in a very specific direction, when the want you feel is so strong it’s a need, achieving your goal is simple. Not necessarily easy. But simple. And fast, even if it takes a long time. Because when you are focused on a goal, the little steps involved in reaching that goal—such as time—just don’t make it onto your radar; they don’t matter.
If willpower is required to achieve this goal, that’s how you know you don’t want it enough on a deep, organic level.
Mechanical failure will eventually occur.
Willpower is like holding your breath: you can only do it for so long.
Which is exactly why will-powering your way through to
thin
won’t work. Can you name a single example in your life of when you
ever
needed willpower to get something you really, really wanted,
needed
?
If you are trapped in a car underwater, you will not need willpower to roll down the window. You will feel only one thing: the need for air. You will start trying to roll down that window and either you will roll it down or you will die trying.
Where there is willpower there is a Band-Aid that’s eventually going to fall off.
You only need willpower to get what you don’t want or you only
want
to want. By want to want, I mean, something you wish you wanted. But don’t really.
If you find that you require willpower to lose weight, you aren’t ready to lose weight. There you have the truth, as much as you may despise hearing it.
You don’t want it deeply and completely enough.
Something within you is reserved in the matter.
This is what you need to solve. You need to know where that voice of dissent is coming from.
For example, maybe you know for a fact losing weight will improve your health and how you feel every day and maybe you have several other really smart, reasonable reasons why you want to get thinner. You know you aren’t fooling yourself into thinking your life will be perfect or you will suddenly reverse-age or become beautiful in a way you never were before; you aren’t expecting profound changes to your self or your life, except the ones you know you can expect.
But perhaps despite knowing yourself and your motivations as well as you do, you actually find more emotional comfort in food than you are either aware of or willing to admit.
In other words, some other aspect of your emotional or psychological structure is dependent on your continued ingesting of too many calories.
This would be enough to derail your best efforts every time.
When I say that your want must be transformed into a need, I don’t mean you can sit with almost constipated focus and effort and
try
to want it more than you already do.
What you can do is level with yourself. Allow the voice of dissent you have stifled to speak.
When you really want something to the point of need, you don’t care or even notice the “temptations” that could lead you off course. You don’t struggle with cravings, for example. Sure, maybe you have them, but you don’t pay any attention to them, so they go away.
Wanting something with every cell in your body makes the effort required to achieve what you want incidental, entirely beside the point. Because your focus never wavers from the goal. You aren’t bothered by any distractions because you aren’t looking at them—you are seeing past them to what you want in your future.
Unless some part of you is not fully onboard.
Unless some part of you wants things to stay exactly as they are. And no amount of mental sledgehammering is going to change this. What will change it is exploration.
Maybe there is a very good, smart reason why some part of you wants to remain the weight you’re at. It could be you haven’t been thin since you were sixteen. It could also be that when you think back to being sixteen and thin and happy because you were thin, there was a time when you weren’t so happy. A friend of your brother’s hit on you in a totally invasive, offensive way. Or a family member commented on your breasts and though it was innocent enough, it freaked you out.
This unexamined part of your mental scaffolding is resisting your weight loss efforts out of self-protection. Sometimes, this concern belongs to a much younger version of yourself. Simply recognizing where this fear comes from, combined with your adult experience, is enough for you to realize fully, “Oh. No, that’s not going to be an issue now.”
It really can be something that small and old and childlike that’s holding you back.
It might also be something else. Only you can discover where this holdout is within you.
And it will be something so close to you, you can’t even see it. By close, I mean so intrinsic, so ancient, so much a part of you.
“But I can’t be thinner than my sister. She’ll hate me.”
“But if I do become thin, I might want a different husband, because I settled.”
“If I’m thin, I won’t have my weight issue as company anymore. I’ll be entirely alone. I’ll be entirely exposed.”
If you can reach the core truth of what holds you back, one
of two things will happen: either you will accept things the way they are, fully. Or you will change into the way you want to be, completely.
When you are in 100 percent agreement with yourself in what you want, you will experience only the sensation of progress.
But what happens if you break down one night and raid the vending machine because there’s no other option and you are tired and hungry and frustrated from your nightmare day of travel?
That’s just it: you don’t break down one night and raid the vending machine. No matter what you feel. It just doesn’t happen because the vending machine is not one of the bricks on your path.
It’s almost like this: “falling off the wagon,” or bingeing, or saying “screw it” to your diet is like one passenger on a train filled with eager, punctual commuters who pulls the emergency string and stops the whole train.
Sure, the train operator can restart the train and continue. But now, nobody onboard has confidence that it will not happen again.
So really, you have to locate that single person—and maybe they’re shy and don’t want to be found—and you have to tell them they won’t be punished but you need to know why they stopped the train.
Because they had a reason.
The difference is, it’s not a train; it’s your body. And it’s not a separate passenger who pulled the emergency brake; it’s you.
You need to listen to your full self. Learn the deeper reason why not all of you is in agreement over this losing-weight plan.
Maybe the reason you don’t want to lose weight enough for the process to be simple is because you feel pressure to be thin, but not desire.
Maybe, in other words, you kind of don’t care that much, really.
You think you look pretty good, even if every magazine in the world says you’re a fat cow. Maybe you think, yeah, still.
So the wiser section of your brain that would rather be learning Italian keeps throwing cupcakes at you while you panfry your block of soy protein in oil substitute.
Decisions are beautiful. They are evidence of thought and care. Decisions are the polishing cloths of life.
There is absolutely no shame whatsoever in deciding you’d rather spend your life paying attention to something other than the weight of your physical body.
There is no shame in deciding you look fine just as you are. Or even better than fine. There is no shame in deciding to just be fat.
A FEW YEARS AGO
, I was at a hotel in Palm Springs, sitting by the pool and writing. A few minutes later, a woman sauntered into the area wearing a sarong, high heels, and a dramatic, oversized hat. The woman was what one would typically call fat.
I was astounded by her beauty and her utter command of the entire area surrounding the pool. I glanced around at the other people near me and indeed, every man was watching her. Lust is not easily mistaken for repulsion; these men
wanted her. The women sitting outside were watching her, too. And their expressions were just as easy to read, as clear as words printed on a white page: how the hell is she doing that?
Because this woman was the sexiest, most sensual woman I had yet encountered in California. I expect the vast majority of those looking at her felt exactly the same way.
How was it possible?
It was possible because this woman saw the truth behind “the truth.” She saw that
fat is not hot
is not true.
One day this woman woke up and she put on her jeans and she looked in the mirror and asked herself, as she surely had a thousand times before, “Do these jeans make me look fat?”
But instead of replying to her rhetorical question with a positive, feel-good white lie, she suddenly let out her breath, allowed her stomach to spill over the waistband, and admitted the truth to herself: the jeans did not make her look fat; she
was
fat.