Around my 25th I started to diet and lost until 59 kilo. That gave me a kick, but with my 1.73 meters length it was ridiculous. Besides that it hurt when I sat down on a bench. The weight was back in no time and it didn’t take long before I was heavier than ever before.
When I see photos from the past I see a pretty girl with a beautiful body. How did I come to the idea that I per se had to get weight off my buttock and legs? While my face got smaller and my boobs disappeared? Bizar!
Somewhere I picked up the idea that I was too fat and so I started to diet. My body had to become different from what it was. They are selling a lot of nonsense to us every day about how we have to look like. Lots of money is stolen from people who suffer because of this. And as a result I was discontent for years with a perfect healthy and strong body. And all this fixing the exterior never improved anything to myself nor my life.
Countless diets I have followed. Always with success, because I have no lack of discipline. So I was proud when I got lighter and frustrated when I got heavier. Because I always gain some more weight. In hindsight a ridiculous waste of time and energy.
Candy for the road
Beliefs we get from home, just like our eating habits. In my family diabetes patients swarmed around, with or without their toes or legs amputated. “It runs in the family” they said, “and you’ll get insulin. First pills and later you have to inject.” My grandma (also a shooter) always gave us ‘a candy for the road’. I often chose a ‘cows-bar’. The love of my grandmother I can still miss when I see a ‘koetjes-reep’. But that’s not a reason anymore to eat them. In the past it was, before I started to see how often food is related to emotions. We celebrated life with sweets and ice-cream and treacly lemonade. And tea with lots of sugar, poured out with love. Same with alcohol.
However long ago I decided not to wait for my diabetes destiny. So I asked the question if the risk to get diabetes maybe was not in our genes, but more in the fact that we consumed a lot of sugar. Like candies, soft drinks and alcohol. But that was considered a weird question.
Quite young I learned: “Always finish your plate, disposing it is a sin, you don’t know what hunger means” and more dogmas like that. And stories about the hunger winter, starvation, etc. Well meant, but my boundaries of ‘enough’ were totally ignored.
Never diet again
At a young age I was ‘infected’ by the thought that there was always something wrong with my body and it took years before I saw this was nonsense. The older I got the more difficult it became keep a certain weight. And which amount was it that I so absolutely had to keep? And who decided about that? Around the menopause moisture retention started and I felt even becoming heavier and slower.
I didn’t want the continious whimper about food any longer. Also I wanted my clothes to keep fitting comfortable. And I wanted to deal normally with food and not give it any importance anymore at all.
Dus ik beet me erin vast om dit probleem op te lossen en uiteindelijk lukte dat. Nadat ik me verdiepte in de dieetindustrie nam ik het besluit om
NOOIT meer op dieet te gaan.
Dat was de eerste stap naar echte verandering.
So I put my teeth in solving this problem and finally I did it. After I researched in depth the diet industry I decided to
NEVER go on any diet anymore. That was the first step to real change.
And away with the scale!
When I want to learn a method or technique I always go ’through the water’ myself. I walk the talk. I absorb the theory and dive into the practice, because in there I get to experience and understand it. And so I find and develop better techniques and so I get better and better results. What’s good I bring into my practice and here I help people, who have difficulties with keeping on weight and related issues.
The actual solution to my problem was in letting go of underlying emotions and learned beliefs. That solved actually all of it and it had nothing to do with dieting. It was more about unlearning what was not mine than about learning something new.
True beauty comes from inside. So I could diet till I dropped down or rebuild my total body so to speak, but when the junk is not disposed, I have to keep carrying it with me. Literally!
According to Louse Hay, the writer of You can heal your life about diseases and emotions, diabetes is a physical response on internal anger. My family had, after 2 world wars, hard labor and still poor, reason enough to be angry. And they were good at it. And me, being raised by angry people also got angry fast, like a kind of first impulse. How could I know?
I’ve learned to let it all go, especially in the last years with the help of specific techniques. For that I didn’t have to relive all past misery again in hours long therapy sessions. On the contrary, I laughed a lot during this liberating course.
I totally ignore all the rules
I became sweeter, at first to myself. Wherefore I started to watch myself differently, with more patience and amazement. Because I actually am a tough stayer with a thank-goodness unstoppable good sense of humor. Without that I would never have come this far. And of course, I have a different effect on my environment. Now I’m good with myself my life is easier and more pleasant, in spite of all the madness in the world.
I’m a good cook, but I rather spend no longer than 15 minutes in the kitchen. Actually I ignore all the rules around what is and should not be done and I eat intuitively, only when I really have appetite and I and I stop when it’s enough.
My thoughts and feelings about myself have more influence on my physical health that the food I put into my mouth.
