I had my appointment with the psychologist this morning and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Would I have to lie on a couch and discuss my childhood? Would it be a load of gobbledegook, would the psychologist be a trippy hippy talking about abstracts and nonsense? All these thoughts went through my head but I actually quite enjoyed it – a chance to talk about me and my weight/food problems with someone who wasn’t judging me (and as much as I love my Mum and husband they do judge). We talked around a lot of things I explained how my Mum out of love, ingrained in me at an early age that being overweight was bad and should be punished. I don’t mean she locked me in my room or beat me with broom handles but I went on my first diet with my Mum at 9 years old and from as far back as I can remember she was always telling me I would have to be careful as we had fat genes in our family – so I wasn’t allowed to eat the same things as my brother, I got presents at Easter instead of chocolate, I wasn’t allowed dessert or pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. I always felt life wasn’t fair. My Mum was very self conscious about her own weight but you know the really stupid thing is that she was never really overweight. She has big legs and bum but she has never been over a dress size 16 (UK size) and a size 14 on top. She is not and has never been obese. Looking back at pictures, neither was I as a child, chubby yes but obese no. I didn’t really fall in the obese category until I left home and went off to Uni and too much socialising and takeaways took a toll. Plus I could eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted and no-one could stop me now……

We talked over whether my weight made me feel I was “not good enough” and I said I couldn’t quite relate to that and when we explored it, it came out that I saw my weight as “failure”. That I measure my life in terms of success and failure. I have a good job, a lovely (most of the time) husband, a good quality of life here in Oz – all of these are big ticks, the successes in my life. The weight has been my constant failure and the diets are the punishments I apply to myself because of that failure (an extension of the punishments my parents applied to me as a child). This is the mind set I have to try and change – but you know the ironic thing when my old job wasn’t working out last year (ie. it became the failure in my life that eclipsed the weight) I punished my self with food – I ate and ate til I felt sick almost every night and I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

The most interesting part of our conversation was about the conscious mind and the level of control it can really have over your actions. The psychologist described it like an iceberg – your conscious mind is just the tip, the bit you can hear and are aware of. Your sub-conscious mind is the mass below the surface that you aren’t even aware of but can bring you down – attached to that is your body and it’s physiological needs which talk directly to your sub-conscious. We vain, self important human beings think we can control all of this with the tip of the iceberg – we tell ourselves we will cut back on what we eat and exercise more and punish ourselves when it doesn’t happen. It’s kind of how I feel – my mind knows what I should be doing, it knows there is no reason why I can’t but sometime it feels my body is acting on it’s own accord, I walk in to a supermarket or a petrol station  saying “just buy what you need” and walk out with a jumbo bar of chocolate clutched in my sweaty hands without any real recall of how it happened!

The trick I’m told is learning that sometimes our body will take control – ie in times of high stress our physiological needs will take priority. You just have to recognise that and learn to recover from it – unfortunately what happens with people with weight issues is that when we give into a physiological need we then deem ourselves as “not good enough” or “a failure” and fall straight back into our crooked learned and social patterns, ie. we compound the issue. I’ve fallen off the wagon so I might as well go the whole hog sort of attitude – I certainly recognise that in myself.

When I lost all that weight on the VLCD diet I swore I would control my weight gain but what happened was when I moved to Oz, alone for 9 months. I was in a new country without friends and family. It was exciting but it was also stressful and food and socialising became an important part of my life and some weight crept back on about 2 stone (28lbs) – and something in my mind went – “oh well you are fat again now so you might as well give up – see told you couldn’t do it – you are such a failure – don’t know why you bother – just accept you and always will be a  fat girl”

So instead of accepting that at that stage of my life I was going through some stresses that caused my weight to fluctuate as a physiological response and once that stage was over I could return to a status quo – I punished myself further instead and continued to binge and eat even when the stresses were removed.

Well I think that’s enough naval gazing for today – I haven’t decided whether I’ll go back but I might once I have the band – because I am determined to use the time I have with the band to relearn some of my thinking patterns – I think of the band as my little enforcer as it will make it very difficult for me to binge eat – hopefully I will learn how to cope with the urges to eat in other ways.