Letting go of the "large" person and seeing YOU

 

I thought I would get a little personal with our blog today and talk about the tricks our minds play on us when we lose weight.

It is especially hard on my loved ones when they can clearly see what I look like now, but I don't. I think unless you have been in “my shoes”, people do not realise the emotional downside to being overweight almost your entire life to becoming healthy. You do not know how to look at the world, or yourself, any differently. 

Sometimes I look into the mirror and think, "Wow, look how far you've come!," but a lot of the times, I still see the old me in my head and honestly forget. It is hard to remember, when all you have ever really known is a world in which you are obese/overweight.

When I go into stores, I always grab a large. Sometimes I get all "aha, you've lost weight!" mode and give myself a mental pat on the back while I grab a medium, only for the medium to be too big. So yes I am training my brain to realise it can actually go and pick up an extra small or a small. This experience can be very daunting and confrontational!

Why does this happen? Let’s look at the “science”.  Source from: Sandra Blakeslee, Matthew Blakeslee

There are findings about how your brain maps your body, the space around your body, and your social world.  Body maps reveal how your mind and body interact to create a sense of being a whole, independent, embodied individual. It also shows how easily that sense can cause confusion, and how you can bring it back into balance when it falls out of sync.

To grasp the concept of a body map, ask yourself, how do you know your hand belongs to you? You might answer, "Well, I just know. I can feel things through it and command it to move how I want."

This deep sense of control does not just pop into your mind. It arises from a masterpiece of coordinated activity between various maps of your body - that are etched into the thinly layered surface of your brain. For example, your brain has a fundamental touch map, with swaths of tissue dedicated to mapping touch sensations. When someone taps you on the shoulder, you know it was your shoulder and not your neck because the cells that make up your shoulder map become active while the cells in your neck maps stay quiet.

Right next to your touch map is a second fundamental map, which handles not sensation but movement. You can choose which finger to wiggle because each finger is represented separately in your motor map. The cells in the chosen finger map fire, sending commands down to your muscles to make the intended movement happen.

Beyond these two basic maps you have many others that map your muscles, joints, bones and insides, as well as your immediate plans, goals, and your body's enormous library of "muscle memories." Your brain also maps the space around your body. Wave your arm up over your head, out to your side and down to your leg. Each point of that space is mapped inside your brain in relation to your body.

In other words, your brain contains an extensive network of body maps that are always interacting - the vast majority of it occurring outside of consciousness - to give you that misleading self-evident sense that, yes, every part of your body, inside and out, belongs to you, is accurately understood and perceived by you, and is there when you need it.

This view of yourself is not entirely unfounded, but it provides an explanation on what is happening under the hood -- details that can have big consequences for leading you down the garden path into denial, delusion or unwarranted self-scorn.

To grasp why you may still feel large after losing weight, I would ask you to consider two particular body maps that can strongly conflict, giving you the sense that you are doomed to be large. One maps the internal felt position of your body. The other is a distributed map concerning your beliefs about your body.

The first map, called the body schema, is based on signals from your muscles, bones, tendons, skin, and joints that tell your brain where you are located in space and how your body is configured. This map is dynamic, meaning it changes from moment to moment as you move around in the world. It also contains memories of how your muscles engage to produce different actions and postures. And it incorporates your ability to balance your body against the force of gravity.

When you lose a significant amount of weight, your body schema will update itself accordingly. The unconscious signals coming up from your body into your brain reflect a thinner, lighter, more flexible self. Your clothes fit differently; your jeans are looser etc.

And yet, like millions of others who have successfully toned up and slimmed down, may still feel large. The signals from your thinner body schema are not penetrating all the way up into consciousness. Sure, you notice you look somehow thinner in the mirror, a little bit, maybe, but that is not how you feel. You feel large, and you continue to see your former self because another body-mapping system is trumping your schema. It is called the body image, and it is composed of a more widely distributed collection of mental images, memories, beliefs and opinions about your body.

Your body image stems primarily from experiences in childhood and adolescence. We all have political and religious beliefs and we also have beliefs about our body – sound familiar “I am fat and unattractive; my body is disgusting and frightening; and so on - are built up from what you see around you, what people who are close to you say, and how people in your society behave. For example, a young girl who is teased mercilessly about being flat chested may never think of her body as being normal. A little boy who is teased for having pop-out ears may never, despite later changes in proportions to his face, stop seeing a freak staring back at him through the looking glass.

Thus your body image, held in memory and language circuits throughout your brain, can easily overwhelm your slimmed-down body schema. You get discouraged and regain the weight you can't stop believing any other way. Your yo-yo dieting begins another new cycle.

Fortunately, there are ways to restore this schema-image disconnect. For example, wobble boards used by personal trainers bring your body schema into sharp relief, forcing you to attend to the signals you may normally tune out because they frighten or discomfit you. You could also find a therapist who you can talk with about these issues.

A colleague had suggested (which has helped me so much) is find an old photograph of yourself (at your biggest) and pop it to the left of your mirror, then find a photo of where you want to be (be realistic in finding one, and cut a photo of your head from another photo and place it on top of that body photograph) to the right of your mirror. When you get dressed of a morning, stand in between those two photographs.  You will see where you were, where you are and where you want to get too.

I also found some great tips by Lavinia Rodriguez, which I am now implementing in my every day life to overcome this craziness!  

• Learn to accept yourself based on the overwhelming evidence coming from the outside world who views your body more realistically than you do.
• Decide that you are going to trust other people (the world in general - not a single person) more than yourself when it comes to how big your body is since they are more accurate than you are at it.
• Work on accepting that although you perceive yourself and feel fat, it is not true because there is too much evidence to the contrary.
• Remind yourself at every instance that it is impossible to suddenly be fatter than you were a few moments ago so it has to be a distortion.
• Use self-talk to keep reminding yourself that the distortion will change as you learn to accept yourself unconditionally and trust that the problem has nothing to do with the size of your body.
• Focus on other things in life that bring enjoyment and activity.
• Dare to do the opposite of what your mind is telling you. If your mind is telling you to not go out because you are fat, purposely go out. If it says not to wear something because you're too fat, purposely wear it.
• Trust that you can get past this and recover.
• Get a life apart from your body size.
• Leave the past behind.

After implementing some of the suggestions above, I must say today for the first time in a long time since shedding such a big amount of weight, I felt slimmer and actually saw myself "tiny".  It was such a shock but yes it does happen.   Here is a photo after a Makeup Masterclass with Michael Brown.  I would obviously like to think it wasn’t because we glammed ourselves up with makeup, but it is actually me now (which I am believing more everyday).

Me in the black (of course)

I really believe the most important thing is, do not be so hard on yourself.  Enjoy your achievements and love life!

Marg xx