No Low Carber Is An Island: Dealing with Acts of Sabotage & Self Sabotage

In the movie Cast Away, Tom Hanks character is marooned on a deserted island where for four years he consumes a nearly perfect low carbohydrate diet of crab and coconut. On this Paleolithic diet, it is no surprise that his body becomes sculpted, lean and strong.

Of course, we could all do that if we were in such a situation. If the only foods available to us were the healthiest of low carb foods we would never be tempted, would we?

Some of us recreate this as much as possible in our own lives. We fill our pantries and refrigerators and desk drawers with nothing but low carb food. It helps; it helps a great deal in our quest to stay on plan. In fact, it often works perfectly until our spouse or our mother or our friend drops by with a birthday cake for us, probably our very favorite kind of cake.

Lucky Tom Hanks. Nobody invited him out for pizza when he was having a bad day when he was feeling sorry for himself. No wonder he stayed on plan so well.

Do Our Temptations Come From Friends and Family?

Too often it is our relationships with and feelings toward other people that bring us to the point of irresistible temptation. Why is that?

I wonder if at some fundamental level it is because we are not sure in and of ourselves who we are. If we do not have a clear definition of ourselves, and if, therefore, we too often define ourselves in comparison and relation to someone else.

When I first started my weight loss journey (this time!) in 1996, I did not tell anyone I was trying to lose weight. I didn’t follow any particular plan, I just tried to eat less. No one knew I was on a diet, and I had not made a commitment to myself about what I would or would not eat, or about how much and how often I would eat.

In doing this I did not have to look or act differently and, in fact, I did not have to acknowledge out loud that I needed and wanted to lose weight. This was very possibly because I did not in my heart of hearts believe that I could lose the excess weight or keep it off if I did.

I did lose some weight, but over the holidays it began to come back. Somehow, though, I had decided that I did not want to be so fat. On February 1, 1997, I started on Atkins. I had lost weight on Atkins in the 60s, the 70s, and the 80s; I believed I could do it again.

This time it was different. I told someone I was doing it. First my secretary, whose job it was to keep my office refrigerator stocked with meat, cheese, olives, nuts, water, and diet cokes. Then I told my mother, who invited me over for dinner. Then, as my weight loss began to show, my friends, as I explained that the 2 dozen naked buffalo wings with blue cheese were how I was losing weight.

Problem solved. As I got my weight down and as I began to feel wonderful, I remembered that I had always looked and felt good on low carbohydrate diets. This was who I was. I announced to the world at large my carnivorosity and I believed it myself. It was firmly embedded in my self-image and my public image and I would never cheat again. HA!

Sure, my friends no longer offered me cookies. But I could easily buy them for myself. Lucky Tom Hanks. No Mrs. Fields counters at the mall food court for him.

I found that my ability to stay on plan was about more than just my relationship with myself and with food. I had a number of other relationships to work through before I got to goal. And, in the 2 1/2 years I’ve been maintaining at goal, I’ve found some more.

Looking back, in many ways I have defined myself within relationships in a way that did not allow me to be thin and sexy and athletic. Sometimes the other people involved knew what was going on and participated in the game and sometimes they did not.

There was Barb, my college and post grad-roommate. She was the pretty one. I was the smart one. I’m not ugly, and Barb isn’t stupid, but for as long as we were close friends she acted like a lovely little bimbo and I acted like the smart funny girl every man wants for a best friend. We had to end the friendship before either one of us could move on, before she could get a meaningful career and before I could find a husband and lover.

Maybe this was just acting out my childhood drama, the smart oldest daughter of a successful father and a pretty, ultra-feminine mother. Years later, when I finally got down to a smaller size than my mother, when my jeans were finally too tight for her, and I realized that I was slimmer and sexier than she was, I almost lost my breath. It was such a revelation! I’d been carrying a seventy pound suitcase around for decades. Putting it down with a great thump made me feel almost disorientingly euphoric.

My ex-husband and I had our own unspoken agreement. He smoked. I was fat. It wasn’t until we were divorcing that we said out loud what we had both complied in. As long as he smoked, hey, who was he to talk about my weight? As long as I was fat, hey, who was I to complain about his cigarettes? There was in that arrangement a deep sense of resentment. Neither of us was happy with it. But it kept us even. It was fair. It was miserable.

We got divorced. I lost weight, gained weight, and then eventually lost it and kept it off. He still smokes.

How I defined myself in relation to them that was my problem

In all of those cases, it wasn’t the other person that was causing my eating and making me fat. It was how I defined myself in relation to them that was my problem. My self-definition was as the fat one. So it was no surprise that I would eat exactly what I needed to keep my physical self congruent with that definition.

In some cases, the other party was participating; in some cases, they were not.

My mother, as it turned out, was never threatened by my being thinner than she and she supports me in my way of eating. But other low carbers are not so lucky, and so they must struggle to free their own self-images, to change the status quo, while the other party is struggling to maintain it.

My sister is angry with me. We share genetics and environment; we have both fought obesity all of our lives. Now that I have won and am continuing to win that battle, it seems to be threatening to her. There has always been a great deal of competition between us. Growing up, as the younger sister, she could never compete with my achievements. So she was the good girl, the people pleaser. Since I have lost weight, she has begun a not so very covert campaign to paint me as selfish and uncooperative within the family circle. This maintains her positive self-image of good girl at my expense. I’m not playing that game with her, but it is still keeping her fat and miserable as I eat large amounts of meat and linger at the dinner table in conversation and she heroically does the dishes and then eats her dessert in solitary martyrdom in the kitchen, standing up.

Low Carb and Your Happiness

I read of low carbers who are concerned that if they became slim they might leave their current partners, or whose partners are concerned that they would leave if they thought they could do better if they were slim. That can be a terrifying prospect, and rather than face it, out come the boxes of chocolates on Valentine’s Day.

I read of low carbers who are so unhappy in their stressful jobs that a carton of Ding Dongs at night seems the only way to bring their world into balance; the only way to make life fair is to give themselves the temporary comfort of food and drink. This is easier than dealing with fundamental changes like getting a better education, or moving, or learning to stand up for themselves, or whatever else it would take to provide themselves with a more satisfying environment. As long as they stay as they are, it’s the boss fault, and they have no responsibility for their own obesity.

And back to myself, even working through all of these issues, why does a disappointment or setback in my love life send me to chocolate? Oh sure, I’m a good low carber, so it’s always sugar free chocolate now. But it never calls to me when I am happy with the status quo between my boyfriend and me.

I don’t have the answer to that one yet. But I know now that I am not alone on a deserted island with only crab and coconut to eat, where there’s no one else around to make me feel like eating something else. As long as I am alive and interacting with other people I am vulnerable to reacting emotionally in my relationships with them. And when I react emotionally in a relationship, and if it is a negative emotion, and if that negative emotion is related to a long standing belief about myself, then I may eat wrong foods and drink wrong drinks.

So here it is, a fundamental truth for me. In order to stay slim I must seek out healthy relationships. And in order to stay thin I must seek out my own inner mental health.

And here I thought getting to goal weight would be the end of it.

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