211.2 Living Without the 3Ds

I've been thinking about this for a while now, the part that dreaming, denial and delusion play in weight gain and weight tolerance.  Do you like the term weight tolerance?  I just made it up.  It means wearing the weight with the attitude that no one can see it, and it really doesn't matter.

Dreaming -  I have been dreaming or fantasizing about losing weight for much of my adult life.  When I would walk by a store window full of beautiful clothes, or I would be getting ready to go out and wasn't satisfied with how I looked, I would dream about how in a week, or even the next day I would start a diet and then I would be able to wear those clothes, and feel really pretty.  I would dream about how if I started the following Monday, that within a month I would look so much better.  I have discovered that dreaming just doesn't cut it.

Denial -  When I was much heavier, I could read the scale as easily as I read it now.  But there is a big difference between then and now.  Even while being weighed at my MD's office (leading to major anxiety), I could always say to myself that the scale was wrong, or that the clothing I was wearing was exceptionally heavy, even though I had chosen the outfit because it was not going to add a lot of weight.  In fact, I have been known to question the MD's scale more than once.  And, I decided that most people wouldn't notice that I was so heavy, and that health-wise it really didn't matter all that much.

Delusion...  Remember my blog about how I looked in the photos taken at the wedding... the appearance of that rather large woman who was wearing my dress?  That was a point where I was definitely delusional.  I had moved from denial to delusions of slender.  I really thought I looked much slimmer.  I believed I was much thinner than I obviously was.

What I have been thinking about in all of this is that using the 3 Ds to play mind games is not new or unusual.  I think that this is a common way of dealing with the things in life we don't want to face.  I am now trying to live in the present without delusion, without denial, and without dreaming about how I wish things were.  By taking action to lose the weight, I have been able to let go of the 3 Ds and find it feels so much better.