Self-loathing, Messes and Lies, Oh My!

I am on the scale this morning and the nasty little imp that dances around and points to the number while laughing hysterically is back. The 2-pound loss I was so pleased with earlier in the week has come back to find me. The “imp,” of course, is all in my head (you hope, for my sake) but I feel as if he’s there pointing and laughing and mocking me, doing the Macarena and using exaggerated gestures for the part where he slaps his backside, as if it is so gigantic, he can scarcely reach it. I am annoyed with myself and revert to my habit of self-loathing. Before I know what I’m doing I’m in the pantry eating a reduced fat cookie and thinking “Why do I even try?!”

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Back this train up!!

If I allow self-loathing to creep in, I spend all of my energy feeling foolish and embarrassed. Self-loathing says “You’re an idiot. You have no self-control. No discipline. Seriously, two weeks in and you’ve already blown it? Pathetic. Here, eat a low-fat cookie. Or a cheesecake. Go ahead…you’ll feel better, really.”

The devil may not really be a little red guy with horns and a pitch-fork, but I’m pretty sure that self-loathing personified looks exactly like that. And it gets me over and over again.

My little red friend is a deceiver and a fraud.

Self-loathing uses all of our energy on self-flagellation and leaves nothing in the tank for strategizing on how to make better choices the next time, and THAT is what makes it such a waste.

I made another unpleasant discovery about this emotional waste of energy: When I berate myself over the poor choices that convert to extra pounds, I FEEL as if I’m repentant for those choices, but when it comes to the work of actually PROVING that I’m repentant by making better choices going forward, I justify and deny. I justify the cookie by saying “but I did so well all week” and I deny that the quantities I ate were out of line. It’s so much easier to beat myself up about my bad choices (or deny their impact) than it is to change them. I get to feel as if I care while continuing the self-destructive behavior that suggests I really don’t.

I threw the rest of the cookie in the trash and sat down for a moment to think honestly about the last few days. It was Labor Day weekend and Dave went camping with a friend of his. I took my son to a movie and ate popcorn that I’d planned on with a Coke that I hadn’t. Two dinners at my mom and dad’s were dominated by poor choices and poor portion control. It was enough to reverse the 2 pound loss I’d been so proud of earlier in the week. And enough to bring around my old friend self-loathing to remind me what a failure I am.

But I’m not falling for his derailment tactics this time.

I can continue to hate being overweight. Or I can change it. It’s that simple. Simple, but oh, so difficult in its execution.

I have to continue to identify the emotional aspect to my desire for food. I have to learn to actually think not only about what I’m eating, but control how much – especially when I’m eating away from home, outside the safety of my pre-planned menu. And I have to pray. A lot.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that part of me truly hoped that once I had identified my “issues” with food and recognized how my idolatrous relationship with chocolate was adversely affecting my life (physical and spiritual) that God would supernaturally free me from those issues. While God certainly has the power to do that, He also has the wisdom not to.

Like most 4-year-old boys, my son loves to make a mess. Last winter he went through a stage where he would dump his toy bins – ALL of them – out on the floor creating a massive pile of Fisher-Price chaos in the middle of his playroom. This was great fun until it came time to clean it up. The first few times he did this, I helped him. It was a pretty overwhelming job for a 3 ½ year old, and I thought that as long as he was also putting things away, there was no reason not to help expedite the process. One morning, when I heard the sound of the first bin being dumped out, I added something new to my “Please don’t do that” speech. It was “If you choose to dump out all of your toys, I will not help you clean up the mess. You will do it yourself.”

He smiled sweetly at me and proceeded to dump them out onto the floor. I smiled back. And then, in a while, when he was ready to move onto something different, I reminded him that he needed to take care of Mount Playskool before he did anything else. He quit smiling.

Clean-up was excruciatingly slow. There was a lot of whining. And crying. And fussing. I stood firm and reminded him that I had warned him ahead of time that if he chose to make that mess, I would not help clean it up. And I didn’t. Finally, the last of the cars and blocks made their way back into the bins.

I would love to say he never did that again, but he tried it twice more after that. Each time I made him clean it up himself. Each time it was excruciatingly slow. Each time, more tears and more fussing. But I stood firm and now he doesn’t make those messes anymore.

He learned that the fun just isn’t worth the unpleasant cleanup.

In some ways, my world isn’t so different from Carson’s. Like him, I have to come to a place where I understand that the “fun” of bad eating habits just isn’t worth the unpleasant cleanup.

God could certainly have miraculously changed my mindset about food to help me clean up my mess. But I wouldn’t learn anything. If I had continued to pick up Carson’s pile-o-disaster, I guarantee he would still be making it. It is only the impact of having to clean it up himself that makes him think twice before he starts dumping.

God is going to allow me to go through the difficult and sometimes unpleasant process of cleaning this thing up because through this process He wants to teach me how to become better equipped to handle life down the line. He wants me to depend on Him, not food, and though it may take tears and fussing, I’m going to learn that.

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul says:

But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Philippians 3:13b-15

I choose to look forward, not back. I am cutting ties with self-loathing and am choosing to press on. A healthier me is only part of the goal, and the prize is so much greater than just a smaller-sized wardrobe. Ultimately the journey is a spiritual one as much as a physical one, and it is the journey that matures me.

On to a new week!