Joining the Thin Club

Food Compromises with Family Members

Once upon a time, I used to keep a lot of treats (snacks, junk food, sweets) in the house. As you might imagine, I don't do that anymore. Even though I'm glad to say I don't crave sugary treats the way I used to, I still don't want those sorts of temptations around, for me or my family.

This transition has probably been easier for me than for a lot of people. Since my divorce, I'm a single mom, and while THAT isn't easy, it does mean that I'm the boss at home. I get to make the rules about what is allowed in the kitchen cupboards, without undergoing difficult negotiations with another adult in the house (partner, spouse, whatever). And while you better believe that my kids complained at first, they've adjusted. Now, I am happy to say, with the new rules in place, my kids are healthier too.

But what do you do if you don't get to make all the rules? What if someone in your household insists that just because YOU don't want to keep cookies around anymore, the rest of the family shouldn't have to suffer?

Well, first of all, as a member of the Thin Club, I hope you've learned by now that going without cookies (at least most of the time) doesn't exactly qualify as suffering. I also hope that you can, calmly and rationally, explain this to your family members, and that they are as supportive of your new lifestyle and your new priorities as you deserve.

The trick in all of this is to create a compromise that everyone can live with. If cookies are your Kryptonite, the one non-Thin Club food you just cannot pass up, make a deal with the other members of your household that none of you will buy cookies or keep them in the house.

Be sure to make it clear that they are welcome to have cookies elsewhere (e.g. in their desk at work), provided they don't break the new household rule. In exchange, though, you may need to live with other temptations, like potato chips, that aren't as hard for you personally to resist.

You face challenges like this every day when you leave the house. I promise you: you can learn to resist them in your cupboards at home, too.

Coping with Underminers

There's a very funny column that ran occasionally in The New Yorker for a couple of years called "The Underminer." The gist of the column is that the Underminer, the unnamed first-person narrator of the column, would run into a friend or an acquaintance, and over the course of their conversation would completely crush the other person's self-esteem by comparing said person's (sometimes modest) accomplishments with his or her own totally outlandish ones.

The column worked because we all know someone like that, who seeks to deliberately make us feel bad about ourselves.  (I noticed when I did an Amazon search for the Underminer book that a book called The Sociopath Next Door came up as a Related Title, but that's a discussion for another day.) 

Undermining takes a lot of forms, all of them dangerous. For me it was the friends who seemed to want me to stay fat. Most of these friends were fat themselves, and maybe in denial about it. These were friends I used to spend lots of time with. We loved going to restaurants together, watching movies (with lots of snacks!) at each other's houses, and so on. People I'd known for years. But when I started to lose the weight, and started to make permanent changes to my lifestyle, these friends seemed to take it as a personal attack on them.

How does that work, exactly? Because I was doing something, finally, about not just my weight, but my health, I was snubbing them, or making a comment about their choices?

Because we'd been friends for so long, I sincerely tried to keep the friendships going.  But while I was enjoying my new, more active lifestyle, my friends wanted our time together to be like it used to be, complete with the calorie-fests that just do not fit with my new life and my new figure. And when I would try to tell them that I couldn't go back to my old ways, they would make rude and derogatory comments. It became clear that I couldn't be thin and be their friend.

Given how incredibly unsupportive my friends turned out to be,  I decided I didn't need them in my life anymore. It was a very hard decision to make. But losing weight was without question the best thing I have ever done for myself, and anyone who can't understand or embrace that doesn't belong in my life.

Being thin inspired me in ways I'd never imagined were possible. As I started to lose weight, I began to feel not only better about my appearance, but more powerful. The sense of control over my own body made me want control over my life. Losing the weight indirectly empowered me to finally leave my abusive marriage.

You don't have to be overweight to find yourself in an abusive relationship, but I do think that the low self-esteem that often goes hand in hand with a weight problem makes it harder to find the strength to leave.

It took discipline, motivation, and courage you probably didn't think you had to lose the weight and join the Thin Club. Now that you're in, use that same courage to achieve the personal relationships you know you deserve.

They make it sound so easy

Here is an interesting article from Real Simple magazine last year called "The Secrets of Thin People."

I have mixed feelings about articles like this. On the one hand, there's some good (and possibly counterintuitive) information to be gleaned:  how many of us lifelong dieters really believe in our hearts that skipping meals is bad? 

On the other hand, the point that many thin people are just naturally, genetically thin is news to no one, and possibly disheartening to those of us who struggle with our weight. And it's all too easy to decide that since body type is to some extent genetic, some of us are naturally overweight and therefore there's nothing we can do about it.

As a Thin Club member, you've probably worked very hard to get to where you are now. And after all that hard work, it can be incredibly daunting to find that-- maybe even without realizing it-- you've put on a pound or two, or even ten. (I hope not!)  Joining the Thin Club, though, means a permanent lifestyle change. That can be a real challenge, especially at first. But it's so important to stick with it. 

I recommend treating articles like this as a "cheat sheet." What kinds of behaviors and techniques do "naturally" thin people seem to do automatically, and how can we make them part of our own, new, routines?  How can we change our old ways for the better for good?

Here's the real money quote from the article:

For the thin, feeling strong, healthy, and, yes, slim are powerful rewards — and their chief motivation to continue, as Anne Fletcher, a registered dietitian, has heard from dozens of people. “More than 90 percent of those who have mastered weight maintenance feel like they’re not dieting,” she says. “It becomes a way of life.”

That's good enough for me. How about you?