Annas story
Chubby all along! CBC Blood test helps to. Now they would say curvy but already in elementary school the kids made fun of me calling me fat…
On a diet for 16 years, failure after failure; an unfinished journey for me, that of losing weight. Cries, secret binges, thin then fat, dieting again and even fatter! People had no other arguments when they met me: “You’ve lost so much weight, you’re beautiful!” Or: “Too bad you lost so much weight, how come you gained weight again?”.
People talk and don’t know how much harm it does you, how many tears behind those extra kilos and how much effort behind those less kilos! That constant feeling of not having made it, a life of continuous deprivation, humiliation!
Adolescence marked by “BBC News” with those showgirls as our models and me always feeling inadequate, me who never found fashionable clothes, me who didn’t breathe just to squeeze into the last size of jeans available.
All my high school friends got engaged in the first year, the years of endless engagements while I was in a stable relationship with the scale, the longest cohabitation of my life!
Why couldn’t I finish a diet? What did I compensate for with food? Why did I secretly start a pack of snacks and not know how to stop until it was finished?
The people who were close to me, who loved me, did everything they could to encourage me because they saw me unhappy! But there is no right way to tell someone to go on a diet, not without hurting them!
I saw myself, I have always seen myself and if I didn’t see myself there were the tight clothes to remind me that I had to lose weight but I wasn’t ready, not mature enough to understand that the diet is a demanding journey, very demanding, even on an emotional and energy level!
Someone like me, who gets fat even with air, will have to be careful all my life, so at 40 I understood that I had to start listening to myself, to love myself, to think about ME!
So I wasn’t happy, I could have accepted myself, we are in 2020 today you can be curvy and fashionable at the same time…
But no, I didn’t like myself, I didn’t accept myself! The image reflected in the mirror was always in conflict with the internal one and so I said to myself ENOUGH, at 40 years old, enough of feeling sorry for myself with the excuse of having been on a diet all my life, of having tried everything!
And so one hot afternoon in August, I opened Instagram and vented to the “world” by telling my story and promising, to everyone and first of all to myself, that in September I would undertake the LAST diet of my life!
Now I’m here writing, 8 months later and 26 kg less… I DID IT!
HOW? By sharing my experience with the many people who, like me, have been on a diet all their lives, creating a sort of virtual mutual support group on Instagram!
I opened up and talked about the problem of being overweight with simplicity and knowledge because I had experienced it firsthand, I shared my eating pattern and day after day my walks, my meals, my goals on the scale, the plateaus, light and delicious but “diet-saving” recipes and my smiles!
I didn’t just give, it was a mutual sharing, little by little people started to support me, they started the diet with me, they listened to me and told me, we became more and more, we gave each other a virtual hand creating such a strong network that supported me until the final finish line!
Many people made it with me, some in September, some in January, some today… Some to lose a few kilos, some a lot like me and some didn’t have to lose any at all but felt part of a large sphere of positive energy and strength and told me that I seemed like my lifelong friend and that my positivity was contagious!
It’s not over, it will never end, but I have achieved a wonderful goal; having the man of my life by my side, who has always supported me, encouraged me and never said: “Go on a diet, you’ve gained too much weight!” and thousands of virtual supporters who believed in me and didn’t make me feel like a failure for not having made it in all the previous years!
I learned that diets don’t exist, instead there is a healthy diet to be tailored to you, based on your tastes, your needs and to be taken as a model for your whole life!
I understood firsthand that drastic diets don’t go anywhere but lead us to guaranteed failures, that what is needed is common sense and flexibility!
The real victory today is having changed my lifestyle and understood that I can LIVE, compensating the next day without too many deprivations and without gaining 20 kg back every time!
Vera Killian
PSYCHOLOGIST/PSYCHOTHERAPIST
discover the expert
Dear Anna.,
from your story a very important theme emerges that guided your adolescence and part of your adult life: the complex and difficult relationship between you and your body and between you and diets.
It was as if everything revolved around your ability or not to lose weight: your mind focused on what others perceived of your body shape and you were bombarded by media and television that only offered models of perfect and perfectly thin women.
You yourself now realize that very probably, through food you were looking for compensation, but then you were never able to finish a diet.
The moment you decided to start loving yourself, you understood that you had to listen to yourself first and put yourself and the acceptance of your body first. You gave voice to your outburst through one of the tools that today guarantees the greatest possible resonance towards the outside (Instagram) and you stopped sinking into that void that had to be continually filled. Telling your story without filters, 40 years of hate and love with yourself, with your body and with food and doing it publicly allowed you to start again, this time no longer alone.
It seems that you found the strength precisely through sharing the discomfort that characterized you and that you understood was also the discomfort of many other people. Coincidentally, you managed to lose many pounds, without then putting them back on.