Shedding: I gave away the last of my fat clothes today.

Shedding

I like the verb To Shed. It feels liberating to need and want less than before. Today I shed my fat clothes. Other than a few choice pieces that I will have made smaller and just one outfit that will remind me how very large and obese I once was I have given away my entire fat wardrobe.

I started a few months ago with black bags of things for St Luke’s Hospice shop in Bellville but today was the final clearance. I feel lighter because of it. It also means that there is no easy going back to being obese, which is the way it should be.

Shedding also means, for me anyway, that there are fewer protective layers between me and the world. The impact of this is that I am more short-tempered than ever before. The opposite is also true, I find that I’m feeling happier when I’m happy, so all emotions are more intense. I mentioned this to a friend recently who shared his own journey from addiction to health and said that he and other people in recovery commonly experience this. So, please consider this a warning and explanation – if I snap your head off at the slightest provocation this is why.

My mother was an early Weight Watchers adopter. She talked about the “witch of a woman” who ran the meetings who said that if you cheat it is like throwing your money out of the window and, Ma said, would throw people’s money to illustrate the point. I’m not sure why this anecdote stayed as clearly in my consciousness as it did – this must have happened more than 30 years ago – but I thought immediately of that when he took the cookie and it took all my “be pleasant” strength not to say what I thought: “you obviously don’t want to lose weight: if you did, you wouldn’t take the cookie.”

Of course this makes me hugely judgmental and lacking in empathy for how hard it must be for him but I think it is also the truth. This is why Knowing Why, being 100% clear about what really is the motivation to lose weight; stop smoking; stop drinking excessively;  gambling uncontrollably and a hundred other compelling but destructive behaviours, is essential if we are to succeed. Perhaps, as my recovering friend suggests, he hasn’t yet reached rock bottom.

I know that I can be cutting, severe and too easily dismissive of the struggles we all face but what worked for me is treating myself with the same severity – the tough love approach worked for me and if, in time, I get called a witch (or worse) for saying how I see it, I will just have to live with that.