For most of my life I was overweight, and there was alot of other issues around that like being picked on at school because of it, an unhealthy relationship with food and struggling to lose the weight.
Around 7 years ago I was really exploring this and spent alot of time dealing with the emotional issues, trauma and such that was making it difficult for me to lose weight. I totally transformed myself, losing 52kg. I started eating the healthiest I ever have in my life, and i’ve improved that even more after I got lyme.
After losing the weight I put on quite a bit of muscle and was in the best shape of my life. I was around 88kg of muscle, and people would comment on my arms alot. But I noticed I still didn’t feel secure in myself.
This really become obvious when I first got lyme and wasn’t eating much and was very sick so I lost a fair bit of muscle. I had skin hanging off my shoulders, I didn’t take any photos of myself at that time because I just felt so crap and didn’t want a reminder of it. I wish I had now because i’ve put on a little bit of muscle again and it’d be interesting to see the change. Though i’ve pretty much had to accept I most likely won’t get back to where I was, as my strength still isn’t very high so I can’t workout intensely enough. Also in the end the huge amount of work towards it and obsessing about it didn’t really have much paypack.
I really become aware of even when I kept putting on more muscle, getting in better shape that I still didn’t feel good about myself> I still thought I was fat and unattractive alot of the time.
What also links back to something else i’ve talked about in an earlier article, it didn’t really help me with women as much as I expected. I still felt insecure around attractive women, felt like I wasn’t good enough. The surprising thing was that alot of the women I ended up with weren’t of much better quality than I could have gotten when I was very overweight. Like they would be fat, unattractive, smoking, unhealthy. Very frustrating.
I realized that what was going on was it was my own insecurities, and my levels of deservedness. I just didn’t feel deserving, or good enough for attractive girls even if I was in the best shape of my life and I looked like I should be with them.
My insecurities would just make me maybe talk to a few of them and not get anywhere, or be extra sensetive to rejection and then end up just accepting the first girl who come along who wasn’t very high quality. Then i’d feel more like crap after i’d sleep with them and feel a little disgusted with myself.
During this process of losing the muscle I noticed that when I went back to the gym after a while I felt really insecure and weird, because I kind of went from being one of the top percentage in the gym to someone who was out of shape and not looking very good at all. I really struggled with frustration over that, and frustration of not being able to workout very intensely, only being able to do gentle workouts because of my strength and stamina levels.
My confidence and sense of self was quite low already from being so sick, but this made it worse.
I started working on some of these insecurities, and started to feel better about myself. I started to socialize more than I had in quite a few years. And I realized that people liked and accepted me even if I wasn’t in the ideal shape I wanted to be in.
I started to accept that yes I do want to look good and be fit, it’s still important. But that I don’t need to goto the extreme, because the issue is what’s going on inside myself and not how I look on the outside.
Being in good shape gave me some confidence, but it wasn’t exactly stable, depending on the day i’d think I look good, or disgusting even when on both of those days I didn’t look any different.
This is NOT an excuse to say that if you’re incredibly overweight to just accept it and feel good about yourself. This fat acceptance stuff is incredibly stupid, and those people are just rationalizing their own issues.
They are neither ‘healthy at any weight’ or attractive being like 150kg and pretending “I’m a BBW, men should just be attracted to me” like some women do. I’ve seen alot of delusion on dating sites around this. (Men do it too, but this is a much more obvious example that you’ll see alot.)
Obviously Self Acceptance is important, but if you’re just doing the Self Acceptance while still being incredibly overweight then you’re missing something. But if you’re at the other extreme, in really good shape and somehow just don’t feel good about yourself, then you have to work on something internally and realize you don’t have to be totally perfect to be good enough.
You’re Right, But How Do I Do This?
I’ve written about 2 ways in The Frustration Of Chronic Illness And Not Being Able To Be With Women Physically – Part 1 and The Frustration Of Chronic Illness And Not Being Able To Be With Women Physically – Part 2
But if you’ve had enough reading today, here’s a summary.
PSTEC.
An effective method where you simply just listen to an audio, keep in mind a past memory, trauma or a general emotion and the audio guides you to let it go. They also have audios on shifting limiting beliefs to something more positive. The benefit is the simplicity.
Inner Child Work.
A highly effective method that goes deeper, but takes more time to learn, along with developing your intuition and some experimentation. It’s all about reconnecting with your Inner Child inside, sending him love, accepting him, helping him feel the past negative emotions and giving him your wisdom as an adult to transform the negative beliefs he developed early on.
I’ve written a free guide on this, go here and put your email in to recieve.