I’ve struggled for a long time with the thought that I don’t deserve things (for example, see my post from over two years ago, before this weight gain even started). How can I deserve food when I’m in such a large body? How can I deserve my friends when I never do enough for them? How can I deserve to accept myself when I’m unacceptable?
When I brought up my recent post about grades with my therapist, he mentioned that I seemed to have grown up with a very transactional view of things. If I got an A, I got 50 cents. While I endeavor (sometimes unsuccessfully) to teach my kids that they should do the right thing just because it’s the right thing, I realize now that I’ve felt that I don’t deserve kindness from others unless I am helpful or useful to them in some way.
If I flip the script, I don’t feel that way! My friends absolutely deserve my love and respect, not because they help me in certain ways, but because they are just themselves. They are enough. They’re not enough because of this reason and that reason; they’re just enough. End of sentence.
So maybe the same is true for me. Maybe I am enough for my friends. Maybe I am enough to deserve food. Maybe it’s not even about deserving friends or deserving food—those concepts don’t even make sense. My friends are my friends because they love me for who I am, not for what I do or what I look like. Food isn’t something to be earned by restricting enough beforehand or by exercising.
A little over a year ago, when this unexplained (until recently) weight gain started happening, my primary care provider did not handle it well. She just wasn’t sure how to deal with someone with anorexia who was experiencing weight gain past what was absolutely needed, and while my primary now says that even now I’m “healthy”, my previous provider said some very unhelpful things. I realize now that many of her beliefs are disordered and stem from her own problems with her body, but they’ve still stuck with me.
One of those things that I remember very clearly was, “Nobody gets to gain X pounds and not be overweight.” At that point, I was nowhere near having gained that much. It was unimaginable that I would ever do so—nothing in my history suggested that I would ever have such a huge change. I don’t know my numbers now, but I think I may have hit that mark, and that was incredibly hard for me.
I realize now that not only were the number and the sentiment not helpful, however, but the phrasing was really telling. My previous provider was treating weight gain as something someone might be able to earn, in limited quantities. You might “get to gain Y pounds” if you are thin enough, as a reward for working so hard to be thin.
I certainly didn’t want to gain this much weight, but nobody needs to earn the right to gain weight or to eat or even to “overeat”, whatever that means. I remember thinking that everyone deserves to eat if they’re hungry, and that felt like a breakthrough. And it was.
But really, people don’t even need to be hungry to deserve food. You’re full and you see something else that you want to eat? Go for it! It’s your choice to have more, and you don’t need hunger to earn the right to have food.
Of course, that’s much easier to say with the “you” in there. That might be something that only applies to absolutely everyone else in the world…