In the comments on my article from Friday, I’ve been asked how many kilos I have lost and how, in the end, I cope with this weight loss. It’s funny because it’s sensibly the same subject as the one we discussed during my last session with doctor Zermati.
“If you were to stop losing weight, if these 10 kilos were the maximum you could lose while keeping eating like you do now, how would you feel?” he asked.
“I would be perfectly fine with it”. It came out just like that, without second thought, and I think it was totally honest. You could think that 69 kilos for 1m63 – less 11 thus to be precise – it’s far from the current ideals. You could even say that in terms of ambition I play it safe. But I have to remind everyone that I’m a yo-yo backpacker. And being 38 years old, you are indeed not always reasonable, but you know certain things. Like you haven’t been programmed to be in the same category as Charlotte, Vanessa[1] or Kate.
The doctor seemed rather surprised by this cry from the heart but in a good way. During our first conversation, after discussing my weight history over the years from when I was 15, he evaluated my set point (weight for which, a priori, I am genetically programmed – bitch mother nature) around 67-68 kilos. Meaning we are reaching the target, if there were a target.
But despite everything, he warned me, it might well be right now that it really begins. Simply because we’ll have to identify how I manage what he calls the “weight stress factor”. Namely the fear of putting on weight again. Thus the necessity not to lose too much, I guess. The more you try to maintain a weight that is not your set point, the more stressed out you are not to succeed and the higher the risk to put on weight again. I point out that this is my own extrapolation, the doctor did not deal with it in depth but this is what I’ve deduced and what I deduce from my past experiences.
While if you content yourself with your “set-point”, a priori it is possible to eat your fill, according to your desires, without triggering the infernal mechanism.
Nevertheless, even in this case, the fear to put on weight again is there and I won’t hide it. If I were Dalai Lama, we’d know it.
It’s actually to deal with this fear that doctor Zermati gave me this little exercise for the next session : write what I would feel if a) I were slimmer, b) I’d put on weight again. And also what my kin, according to me, would think in both scenarios.
Objective: working on the image we have of ourselves and the image we think people have of us.
Of course, I haven’t started my homework when it’s due in two days. But I have an idea and promise, if you’re interested, I’ll share what I can say here. I have my decency, eh, even if it’s not always blindingly obvious on these pages.
That’s it, I realise that actually, I haven’t really answered the question from the beginning on how I’m coping with weight lost. Not yet. But the coming list will be, I’m sure, a good start…
Edit: the picture is supposed to illustrate this great coming reflection. Ok, it’s woolly, but sometimes I think hard about the images, right…
[1] TN: Reference to Vanessa Paradis and Charlotte Gainsbourg who are two, rather thin, French artists.
