A few links

As I ponder where to take this blog and what to do with it I read material about unschooling.

My new guru is Dayna Martin, who has been on the Dr. Phil show to exemplify unschooling and has posted some videos about unschooling at youtube. Her site is Unschooling America. Her blog is also really interesting and full of life, at Sparkling Martins. She has been invited to be the keynote speaker at the first European unschooling conference, held in London in July. I'm seriously envious of this lady with her 4 shiny children and an adventure-filled life...

I also found a nice post about unschooling food, which is very close to the overcoming overeating approach to eating and feeding children.

This is my rendition of a postcard photo I found rather soon after starting OO at a Stockholm museum. One of my friends commented that "she doesn't look healthy". It makes me think people are hung up on the idea of fat and fatness as something unhealthy, and that weight is considered a central defining characteristic of a person, and especially of a body.  What I would like is to note that maybe she has a few extra pounds, but what else is there about her? Is she a mother? Is she going to be a mother soon? How is her life like?... Maybe we usually don't really need to think about who people in images, where only the body is shown, are like. When we see a thin model we are supposed to think that "I want to look like that", the corollary being here "I don't want to look like that". Great image. 

Good advice from When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies

by Jane R. Hirschmann and Carol H. Munter  p. 273-274 

"When you swore off diets, you promised yourself that you would accept your body regardless of its size. When you then feel pleased about losing weight, that promise rings hollow.

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Since self-rejection always triggers mouth hunger, however, it is important to find a way to feel pleased about your weight loss without rejecting who you were before you shed the pounds. 

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You can best remain neutral after you have lost weight if you do the following: 

1. Remind yourself that you are having a "diet" reaction, if you start feeling thrilled about losing weight.

2. Remember your old body and remind yourself to be respectful of how nice it was.

3. Take a minute to think about your real achievement: that you non longer feel compelled to eat when you are not hungry.

4. Get back to your mirror work, always stricing to inhabit your body out to the edges. If you keep up with the changes in your body, you will be prepared when others react to your appearance and you will not get carried away by their applause. No doubt they think that you look better when you are thin, but they have not challenged their prejudices the way you have. " 

I think that this advice is valid even when applied to not losing the weight, but gaining some. I might well gain more weight and I'm afraid that I'll reject myself if that happens. (I can just have that feeling without food, though. That's "the real accomplishment"! Makes me think I never was as deeply in the hole as the majority who read the book. No wonder, many of them where put on diets as children.) I don't agree with everyone being thrilled with weight loss, that is more American in my view, at least the "tell it to your face"-approach to applauding it. Of course there are people who will now "accept you better". But it's no real acceptance, one just needs to feel the sorrow of being only conditionally "applaused". 

I think about food a lot now; I'm really thinking that it's hard-wired into our body to become obsessed with food when we're physically deprived. Too bad dieters scold themselves for it. I wish for everyone a compassionate relationship with their life and their body. 

losing weight now - how far have I come?

In my second year at university I started to diet. I was really unhappy, physically sick (due to non-weight issues) and I was stuck in my life at Helsinki. Dieting was, of course, the wrong course to take but I managed to follow the weight watchers points program for a year or so and lost more than 10 kgs. Afterwards the weight started to creep back in, and I was really unsure about what I felt like eating, when I was hungry and my life overall. I was unhappy. I remember one instance when I was sitting on my floor, probably eating something "forbidden" and had an epiphany: "I will never be able to eat exactly what I want!" It felt like a huge blow, but I believe now that that's what started my transformation. 

My history with food had been relatively painless, but with my body it was always problematic. My body was not respected by my parents, neither was my femininity. I didn't have a healthy respect for myself to start with. When I was 12 I suddenly realised that I was too much, too fat, too big (too much a woman). I went from wearing whatever I wanted to wearing what I thought I didn't look so fat in. After that I always had the sense that my life would start after I became acceptable, a bit thinner. I was not fat at all, very healthy with some curves. But nevertheless I had the feeling that life had to be postponed until I became something else. Now I know that you either are completely acceptable or not, that its a decision other people make for you, and that if you're lucky, you can take it from them and decide for yourself at some point... I was not accepted at my "home" and seeing myself as too much, too fat, was just code for my life not being good for me. I now feel that I'm only just now becoming truly alive after having been seriously traumatized (my own diagnosis) by my childhood environment. Dieting was never going to be the way to health or happiness. 

About a year after I stopped dieting I had become disillusioned with it in general and I was wondering if something truly was wrong with me or with diets. And I managed to find the trust that the fault was in diets, and that I would never diet again. I think that I did a google search with "non diet" or something similar and somehow stumbled upon the Overcoming Overeating approach. It's a non diet approach to resolving overeating and other food-related coping mechanisms (such as excessive dieting), the basic premise being that dieting doesn't work but just creates unhealthy thoughts about food and our bodies, and if weight is an issue it will gradually fall off into a naturally good level after eating exactly what we want for a while. 

I started following the approach, went to 4 different candy stores every day to "stock up" on fffs (formerly forbidden foods) and tried to trust my sense of what I want to eat. I noticed that I really didn't know when I was hungry or what I felt like eating. I think now that I never really fully gave myself the financial permission to buy exactly what I want but the approach worked nevertheless. Now for a few years I've had the food at the back of my mind, and have thought mostly about what I would like to eat, and what I would like to eat in terms of being healthier, and mostly managed to eat whatever I like. My idea of what I like and how I want to eat only becomes clearer and clearer with time, and it's usually never a problem to stop eating after I've had what is a truly satisfying amount. After initially gaining about 5kg with starting follow OO (and having the diet-induced binges that fell off after a while: an example is the time I ate 1l of ice cream with a full packet of muffins, and I have eaten neither for weeks now) I have been gradually losing weight. Some of my weight loss is due to different medications, but I have never gained a lot weight or eaten excessively even though I really believe that I can eat exactly what I want! 

 

This last week, however, I've been reading the sister book to Overcoming Overeating, When Women Stop Hating their Bodies. I've had it for a while now but never really read it. I want to remind myself of the approach because I'm starting to notice that I still associate thinness and losing weight with 'being good' or 'being more beautiful'. The fact is I'm losing weight. Mostly I think that it is because I had a gallbladder surgery in November, and now I seem to digest less of what I eat, and to crave less of the things I used to like, such as bread and yoghurt. I have a physical sense of deprivation, and that is enough to make food and eating a topic of thoughts (the reason dieters are so obbsessed with everything food-related). I'd like to trust that I offer myself exactly what I want and that I will not abandon myself if I lose more weight or if my weight starts to rise again after my body has gotten used to the surgery. My trust is a bit shaky now that I notice that I'm secretly happy about having lost weight. 

I'm also starting to realise how much progress I've made through OO these last years, now that I notice eating more. I notice that I leave food when I've had enough to eat (even at my boyfriend's sister or with his parents) and am learning to communicate what I want clearly (makes me notice that I know what I want, it's the communicating part I'm learning). I haven't really talked to P about his food issues but I get the sense that he is not as free around food as I am: makes me sad, but on the other hand makes me notice that I've been able to rid my life of a lot of unnecessary stress. I also usually experience my emotions without turning to food - it never was a huge issue for me but after dieting I did have some bingeing. I still think that many emotions I simply am not aware of (repress), but my vehicle is not food. I'm elated now that I have this freedom and that I found such a valuable resource at an important junction in my life. And maybe I can view this situation a lot more constructively than I would've been able to before my dieting days. The truth is that after OO I'm better off, I have a far better idea of what I want and need than I had even before dieting. 

My plans is to find out more about what I'd like to eat now that my appetite has changed, and to get used to my body as it is now (OO mirror work, which means just looking at yourself in the mirror without judgments, with the view of just taking in information) and to let go of the thoughts about a certain body being better than another. Yesterday I went to prisma (huge supermarket) and bought different things that I think that I'll like more, like salmon.  I'll write about how things go here.