As a short woman with a low tdee, I used to always feel bitter and short-changed. As one of the shortest people I know, I have corospondingly one of the lowest calorie "allowances". Everyone around me has a bigger "calorie allowance" and it felt really unfair for a long time.
My bitterness was a huge distraction and the feeling of "unfairness" was used to "justify" more than one week-ruining binge.
It felt so unfair when I was eating 1200 calories a day only losing a lb a week and then I go and read about people eating 1800 calories a day losing twice or even triple that.
But I ran across, of all things, a political bumper sticker that changed my perspective. It read,
When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
It made me stop and think. In a hypothetical perfectly fair world, how much food would any single person get? I believe the answer is,"enough."
I would not expect a 2 year old child to receive the same dinner as a 6 ft 6 adult. In fact, if they did receive the same amount of food, either the adult went hungry (not fair) or the child received more than their fair share (not fair).
And with that thought experiment, I realized... I WAS that two-year old. I WAS that child who received more than their fair share. That's how I got to be 200+ lbs at barely 5 feet tall. I was eating SO MUCH MORE than I needed that I could literally lose over HALF my body weight and still be considered in the "healthy" BMI range.
I'd been over-eating for my ENTIRE LIFE, and now, forced to confront the reality of what my ACTUAL fair share is, it's less than I had before, and that felt unfair.
Once I realized this, I realized that the "unfair" part was not that I have to eat less now. The unfair part was that I was taking waaaaaaay too much before.
Realizing this made me SO much less unhappy and bitter. Rather than complain in my head about my S/O who literally eats 3x what I do and doesn't gain weight (yay 98th percentile in height and a super-active lifestyle) I can spend my energy focusing on my goals rather than being pissed.
I'm not posting this to chastise anyone or try to say "this is the right way to think about it and anyone who disagrees is wrong".
I am posting this because this change in my thinking made my life SIGNIFICANTLY better. I'm less angry, I'm less resentful, and I don't feel that the universe is unfair against me personally anymore. I don't feel like I've been stuck with the short end of the stick anymore.
After this epiphany, it's been much easier to simply focus on the work and take a BIG chunk of the negative emotions out of it. I wanted to share in case it might help someone else too.
So maybe next time you catch yourself thinking, "It's so unfair I don't get to eat as much as s/he does!" you can stop and change your thought to, "It's so hard to come to terms with the fact that my WHOLE LIFE I've been over-eating and to change my habits to what my body actually needs."
This put the power back in my hands, rather than it being the universe's fault for the fairness/unfairness. For me, that has made such an emotional difference.
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/37fntoR
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