Becoming Overweight
I found myself becoming gradually overweight and only doing something about it when I hit 100 Kgs (220 Lbs). It was a shock to see another digit appear on the scales I suppose.
Now I am pondering why I didn’t spot my weight rising and do something to keep it in check. It seems obvious to regulate diet and exercise throughout your life to prevent yourself becoming fat. The reverse would apply to people that become underweight.
So it must be a mental thing. Things such as contentment, laziness, comfort eating, stress etc.
I think in my case it was job-related stress causing me to over eat and drink. Spending everyday at work in variable levels of stress was balanced by delicious foods, snacks, beer and wine in the evening. Also, when I didn’t exercise much, my weight shot up.
Maybe I am more susceptible to stress now? It could be due to a lack of goals? When I left university to start work I was excited and had no stress. I was also thin with hardly any fat.
A few years later I got married, had a boy and bought a house. Then money got really tight as interest rates rose and I started sinking into debt. I think that was the time when I piled on the pounds.
I lost most of the fat when I took up Karate. This caused me to do a lot of physical exercise. I stopped Karate a few years later and my weight shot up again. But I got it down again my introducing lots of physical exercise.
But I did the same thing again. Stopped exercising (due to loss of health club membership) and the weight shot up again. I am currently on a downward cycle after introducing physical exercise back into my life.
Now this exercise does not rely on me going to a club I should be able to keep my weight down. But, the root cause seems to be mental. I think I have a stress problem that I cure by overindulging in things.
It’s been good to write this post. It got me thinking and I suspect that what I need is some major goals and direction to add to my meandering life. I think it was Tony Robbins who suggested you develop a “Magnificent Obsession” in “Awaken the Giant Within”. Also, more recently Timothy Ferris suggests Obsessing on a subject such as learning a foreign language when you visit somewhere.
Although we often look at the mind and body as separate parts, they are much more intertwined and dependent on each other. Of course, that is natural as mind and body form one complete organism.
The term psychosomatic was misused for a long time as people, including much of the medical community often referred to it as meaning ‘it’s in their mind’; rather suggesting that the mind is separate from the body, and therefore cannot affect the body.
The term psychosomatic is derived from two root words in Greek: psycho, meaning mind; and soma, meaning body. The term itself refers to a mind-body connection, and not a ‘it’s in the mind’ definition as it has so often been misused.
Stress is a major cause in illness, weight gain, and even death. As much as mental stress can have a debilitating affect on the body, physical stress can affect the mind just as much; an example would be someone who is in pain or otherwise ill becoming difficult with which to deal.
I have, in dealing with stress, or just life in general, certainly abused things. I was a heavy drinker and resorted to the use of too many painkillers for what I perceived to be helping to alleviate the pain, when in reality it was causing it as it was eating a hole in my stomach, literally. This was my poor way of dealing with taking care someone in their last few years and trying to work. I ended up with a perforated ulcer and had to have part of my stomach removed.
That was a two way street as stress, mental, was affecting me and I was doing physical damage to myself, and, in turn, the physical damage I was doing was affecting my state of mind.
Though a bit of an extreme example in associating the state of one’s mind to weight gain or loss, but it is essentially the same. perhaps it is safer to use food rather than abuse the body with drugs and alcohol.
Interestingly, neither helps with the stress, but, on the contrary, makes it worse. We turn to something to feed a nedd, or drown a pain, but it becomes an addiction, and now we have two problems.
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