In my value system, food is not a moral issue

“In my value system, food is not a moral issue.”

Nancy Clark

It’s been more than two years since I started running and losing weight, and more than a year since I hit my goal weight.

This was a big change for me. At no previous time in my post-pubescent life have I been at a “normal” weight. I went through some old clothes at my parents house a few weeks ago and nothing I owned in high school fits very well.

There’s been some time behind this change now. Enough time that it feels real. That it wasn’t just a lucky blip. A fluke. I can buy size 8 jeans without worrying if I will fit into them again in three months.

Everything I read tells me that this is an anomaly. Most people don’t get to stay thin. Especially not people who weren’t thin in the first place. I’m supposed to spend my life holding the fear that I’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll all be back.

It’s hard for me, my 27-year-old self, to look back at my 24-year-old self and see what she was doing wrong. On most days, what I eat and drink doesn’t look very different from that time.

But I lost 45 pounds. And I’ve kept it off. So I must have done something different.

What really appeals to me about this book I’ve been reading, Why We Get Fat, is that it challenges the assumption that we are fat because we simply “lack the discipline … or wherewithal to eat less and move more.”

“In the more than six decades since the end of the Second World War, when this question of what causes us to fatten — calories or carbohydrates — has been argued, it has often seemed like a religious issue rather than a scientific one. So many different belief systems enter into the question of what constitutes a healthy diet that the scientific question — why do we get fat? — has gotten lost along the way.”

—Why Do We Get Fat, introduction

The book is written like a vindication for the obese. We aren’t fat because we eat too much and move too little, we eat too much and move too little because we are fat.

But I look back at my own life and it doesn’t pass the straight-face test. Sure, I wasn’t a lazy, gluttonous person in 2010. But what happened on August 25, 2010 that gave me the energy to start running and burning more calories?

The answer is that I changed my habits. Every night when I come home, if I didn’t go out earlier in the day, no matter how I feel, I go for a run. In time, it felt strange not to do it.

And mysteriously I did not start eating more to compensate for all the calories I was burning.

I’m having trouble concluding this post, or figuring out what I started out to say. I think it comes from looking at Pinterest and women’s health magazines and seeing all this self-loathing fitness porn and it makes me want to scream but I can’t stop reading it anyway.

It needs to start from a place of self-love and appreciation. I like how Nancy describes it in her book. She says not to see a diet as a “nonstop event” that would last for weeks or months until you reach your target weight. Rather it’s a daily choice that depends on the stress level for the day.

Whatever you can do today, that’s what you do.

Namaste, friends.

 

 

Pattie Reaves

About Pattie Reaves

I'm a new mom and renegade fitness blogger at After the Couch. I live in Brewer with my husband, Tony, our daughter Felicity, and our two pugs, Georgia and Scoop.