“You gain strength, experience and confidence by every experience where you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
About 3 or 4 months into my weight loss journey, I began seeing a counselor. I discussed my fear of gaining back all of the weight I had lost and my fear of failure.
Losing weight made me so incredibly happy. I was able to fit into smaller size clothes. I was able to travel to my dream destination and actively hike. I was making new friends and going out more often. I was starting to get my life back. Yet, for some reason I believed I was destined to be fat. I believed I would gain the weight back. It was a fear. This fear could have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the counselor helped me verbalize what was different about my weight loss efforts this time around. We talked about how I had changed and how I was still changing.
Through school I felt like an outcast because of my weight. I was very down on myself. I talked about what it felt like to have no friends in school and what it felt like for the school gym teacher to tell me I was “pathetic”. These were very raw and emotional topics for me, but going through the process of discussing them and getting my feelings out in the open was very healing and empowering. Through counseling, I stopped blaming myself for my weight problems and as a result my self-esteem increased dramatically.
The counselor also helped me realize my destructive behaviors, which often resulted in weight gain. These behaviors included taking on too much (like work and grad school) or putting the needs of others above my own. I learned new methods to say "no" to work and family demands that would jeopardize the time I needed to invest in myself and my health. The counselor helped me realize all of the situations where I turned to food for comfort and we discussed other methods for coping with stress. This process even involved looking back into my childhood where a lot of my emotional dependence on food began.
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