When I lose weight, I’ll finally like myself

So, first I spend a whole chapter saying that normal weight is more attractive, and now I’m presenting the nice idea that once you’ve lost weight, you’ll feel more beautiful as an aspect of fat logic? Well … yes, I am.

In fact, I’m convinced that false hopes in this area are quite often a source of disappointment and frustration, and lead to people abandoning their diets. It’s not for nothing that I have tried to give priority to the medical and general benefits of having a healthy weight, rather than focusing on appearance. The reason I am writing about it nonetheless, is that being attractive to others is a great motivation for some people, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Personally, I think the health aspect is more important, but that’s also because I have already felt the consequences. When I was 20, my priorities were different (which, in my case, was one of the reasons why I then regained weight).

Attractiveness is important in our society, and since you’re often considered attractive as the result of signs of good health (such as shiny hair, an upright posture and taut muscles, clear skin, or healthy teeth), the two go hand in hand. So it would be ridiculous and schoolmarmish of me to wag a finger and say, ‘Appearances are not important, you have to lose weight for the right (i.e., my) reasons.’

It’s certainly not wrong, shallow, or stupid to hope to get a better feeling about your body, increase your self-esteem, or gain more self-confidence by losing weight. I have often been asked — I think it might even be the question I’ve been asked most — how my feelings about my own body have changed since losing so much weight.

It’s not such an easy question to answer. My appearance was never really important to me. I was always fine to sit down in front of TV and enjoy an episode of Germany’s Next Top Model with a bar of chocolate and still feel great. I didn’t find my 150 kg body disgusting, repulsive, or ugly. When I started to lose weight, my view of my body changed. I looked at things more critically for the first time, consciously perceiving things that I had ignored or suppressed until then: the fact that my stomach hung down over my thighs; and that I had skin folds where there should not be any, and that they rub against each other and gather sweat between them in the summer; and that some areas were unpleasantly lumpy or asymmetrical (the more fatty tissue you have, the more asymmetrically it is distributed — for example, my left knee was much fatter than my right one); and the fact that normal body parts like my collarbones weren’t visible at all.

I realised for the first time that our thighs are not naturally designed to rub together when we walk. It was a realisation that really took weeks to sink in properly: thighs are not supposed to rub against each other. It would be totally illogical for our body to chafe in that way while walking normally (people used to walk an average of 35 km a day). For a while after I realised this, I paid attention to people’s thighs while out shopping in town, and I noticed that most of them rubbed against each other. By the way, I’m not talking about the ‘thigh gap’ — the space between the inner thighs some people have even when they are standing with their feet together. I am talking about normal standing or walking, with your legs hip-width apart. When I reached a weight of about 70 kg, I noticed the lack of friction noise when I was walking for the first time.

When I realised those things, they started bothering me. I was aware of my belly when it lay on my thighs. I pinched at my skin folds or looked critically at my legs in the mirror when they were squeezed together. I still didn’t feel bad about it at the time, because I was completely sure that these were temporary features, and whenever I criticised my body, there was always a ‘still’ at the back of my mind. My legs are still rubbing together. My belly is still bulging over my thighs. My collarbones aren’t visible yet. I started sometimes talking negatively about my body, which I had never done before.

This had a lot to do with my altered attitude towards my body (fat). I used to be my fat, in a way. ‘Fat’ was part of my identity and something that made me who I was. When someone criticised fatness, I felt personally criticised. This has now changed, radically. In my mind, my fat turned into no more than an energy store that was too full. I didn’t feel like a ‘fat person’ any more, but rather a person who was ‘temporarily still carrying excessive fat’. This is probably down to the fact that my personal fat logic consisted mainly of the belief that I was naturally fat because of my genes and my family background, and being fat was part of my basic makeup. When I started to question that fat logic and began to understand that being fat was merely an (extended) behaviour of mine, I saw it in a completely different way and took a much more objective view.

All in all, this was a very positive development, but it also took on an extreme nature for a short time. I deliberately looked at surgical photos and videos of obese people and the fatty tissue in their abdominal cavity. I looked at fatty livers and fatty hearts, and for a short time, I felt disgusted by the thought of the yellow, bloated tissue that was inside me. Understanding the biological processes and realising the biological purpose of adipose tissue fortunately helped me to regain a more neutral view. I don’t know to what extent the process I went through is typical, but plenty of people who have also lost weight, or are in the process of doing so, speak of increased self-criticism and a temporarily less positive body image. I think it’s normal to go through a temporary phase of increased dissatisfaction in the course of a process of change, and I also think that it takes this dissatisfaction to push you to make a change at all.

Self-confidence comes mainly through inner factors: pride in achieving certain (partial) objectives, enjoyment of new experiences and the process of change, and also the knowledge that you can change things — it does not come so much from the immediate feeling of being more beautiful or more attractive. This can sometimes be disconcerting for the people around you, because they only see a positive change and can’t understand why you are now more self-critical or dissatisfied. Self-criticism may even be perceived as offensive (especially if the other person is similarly overweight or even more so) or as a clumsy attempt to fish for compliments.

Another important factor for me was building up muscle. At the age of 20, I lost a lot of weight, but completely without exercising, which is why I was slim, but not at all ‘taut’. My body awareness was completely different from what it is today. At that time my bum hurt when I sat down, but I thought that was just the way it was for thin people. Today my bum is padded with muscles, and it doesn’t hurt when I’m sitting.

After 30 extremely unsporty years, now, for the first time, I can feel my muscles. I didn’t know what it felt like to have muscles. What I used to think of as (defined) muscles when I squeezed my arms and legs was probably mostly fat. I was shocked by how hard muscle mass feels. My body suddenly felt completely different. One night I got up to go to the toilet, half-asleep, and was very taken aback when I sat down and put my hand on my thigh and it felt completely unfamiliar to me. I would often lie in bed in the morning feeling my thighs or ribs and struggling to understand this difference compared to the softness of before. On the one hand, I was proud and pleased, but on the other, it was unfamiliar and felt wrong to me. It took several months for me to ‘catch up’ with the change.

That might make it sound like I’ve turned into an extreme body builder, but that’s not what I mean. It was just that the contrast to my former self was so stark. With a body-fat ratio of about 19 per cent, I am fit for a woman, but certainly not extremely muscular. But the lack of that centimetre-thick layer of fat covering my entire body was unfamiliar, and it therefore seemed more extreme to me. Seeing and feeling those muscles was a great source of body positivity for me, especially in contrast to my 20-year-old, unfit but slender self. At that time, I was happy not to be fat any more, but my attitude to my own body wasn’t particularly improved. This time, the pride and the positive feelings came not so much from my appearance, but from discovering what my body was now capable of and the associated idea that I could be athletic, if I wanted to be. Trying out new sports and being able to do certain movements and exercises successfully straight away, or being able to run several kilometres when I tried jogging for the first time in ten years, gave me much more delight than seeing my slimmer figure in the mirror.

And what about now? Well, I’m in the region of my target weight and have been maintaining it for a few months, and some of those same processes are still ongoing. I’m more aware of my body than I used to be, I look in the mirror more often, and I feel much more positive overall. My skin isn’t completely taut in some places, like my bust, belly and thighs. It’s not so bad that I would seriously consider surgery, but it’s not ideal either. I have set myself various goals — psychologically speaking, it is always easier to achieve a positive goal than to avoid a negative one.

The goal ‘I won’t put weight back on’ would be the worst possible one for maintaining your new weight, because the subconscious mind doesn’t understand negative messages. If you say, ‘I won’t be afraid’, your subconscious mind focuses on ‘be afraid’. On the other hand, if you say, ‘I am going to stay calm’, your subconscious focuses on ‘stay calm’. And it’s the same with your target weight. I don’t want to lose any more weight, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have any more goals. But the goals I have are more like fixed points in the distance that I’m aiming for, and if I don’t quite make it, it won’t be the end of the world.

A sixpack and tight stomach would be great. To be able to run a half marathon and tackle a grade X climbing route, too. The desire to have a sixpack is a little bit embarrassing for me even as I write this, as I can imagine some readers saying ‘How shallow’ — but for me it’s an incentive, and it gives me motivation. I like to think of Ernestine Shepherd, a body builder who was born in 1936 (I very much recommend a Google image-search) and who, at almost 80 years of age, has the body of a 20-year-old. That is also my goal: to look better and be fitter at 60 or 70 than I was at 20.

Goals like these quickly bring out negative reactions, because it is easy to assume they’re born of self-loathing. But I don’t hate myself at all. I set myself ambitious goals in other areas of my life, too; but thinking about how I’d like to improve our garden in the spring doesn’t mean that I hate the yard. Attending professional further training courses doesn’t mean I think I’m bad at my job, and I don’t think this book is complete rubbish when I proofread it and add a few lines or correct spelling mistakes.

Goals are motivating. The act of setting goals per se is a sign of self-esteem and self-confidence. I say this as a psychotherapist who sees often enough how difficult it is for patients at the beginning of their treatment to set goals, when they can’t even imagine themselves ever getting better.

Goals are great, as long as they’re not about achieving performance outcomes, in which the attainment of the goal no longer serves your own benefit, but rather is about gaining a particular (imagined) worth from outside yourself. The difference is that a positive goal is something you want to achieve for yourself — a performance-oriented goal is one that a person hopes will help them become something (‘I have to graduate with straight A’s or I’m a failure’ or ‘I have to have a thigh gap or I’ll never be attractive and never get a boyfriend’).