Fattitudes

PART I
A FAT BODY BEGINS WITH A FAT HEAD
INTRODUCTION
WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY
It's ironic, but true, that the reason I doubled my body size was so that I could disappear.
--MARGIE, 34
Hello. My name is Jeff and I'm a clinical psychologist. My wife Norean and I want to tell you a story.
It's a story about our war with weight. It's a story about feelings and issues and how they made us both feel miserable for a long, long time. It's about knowing what to do and not being able to do it. About getting so frustrated and frantic that everything seemed futile. It's a story about fussing and fighting and trying a lot of stupid things that just made it all worse.
It's our story about how we struggled together for over twenty years trying to find an answer.
And finally did.


NOREAN: We want to tell you this story so you can learn from our mistakes. We want to teach you about how people get in their own way trying to lose weight, and about how individuals often work together to cause failure. And we want to help you understand why we do these things to ourselves, even though we want so desperately to be slim and healthy.


JEFF: Right off the bat, I'm going to do what many of our esteemed leaders probably should have done, and that's begin with a full confession: I confess that I used to be a real idiot about the issue of weight. I used to think gaining weight was just a result of being lazy and undisciplined, and losing it was just a matter of willpower. I used to think all you had to do was eat right and exercise and you'd be slim--simple.
So back in 1980 when Norean began to gain weight shortly after we got married, I panicked. She didn't seem to know what to do about it, nor did she seem to want to do anything about it, so I took it upon myself to solve her problems for her. Talk about a big mistake! I pleaded. I whined. I coached. I criticized. I tried to get her to exercise. I hovered over her, watching her portion sizes andcommenting on her junk-food snacking. I urged her to diet, because weight problems run in her family and I didn't want her to end up physically limited and unhealthy. When nothing worked, I got fed up and angry. Things went into the toilet, and we nearly flushed our marriage.
But, as they say, that was then. This is now.
Now I understand.
Somewhere along the way, I got smart. I decided there was more to this weight issue than just food and eating. So I threw off my preconceived notions and stereotypes and began to learn. I taught myself about the emotional complexity of overeating. Armed with new insight, I began to see overweight clients in group and individual therapy. I was able to help them in ways I could never help my own spouse. Then I began to realize my mistakes. It hit me how I'd been part of my wife's problems all those years. I recognized that the truth of the matter was that Norean's overeating wasn't the problem, it was a symptom of the problems both in her past and in our marriage. That's when things began to change.


NOREAN: I don't want it to sound like Jeff's to blame for all of this. It was a combination of a lotof issues--mine, his, ours. You see, I've had a long-standing emotional relationship with food. Back when we got married I weighed about 135 pounds. I'd kill to weigh that now, but at the time I felt fat. I had a lot of issues tied up with my eating. Food has always been a good friend to me. I ate for comfort. I ate for escape. I used my weight to protect me from closeness with others. I used it as a barrier to sexuality. I used my weight to express things I couldn't express any other way. I even used it to punish Jeff for things I thought he needed punishing for. So, because I ate for reasons that had nothing to do with my body's nutritional needs, I gradually gained weight, topping out at around 250 pounds after two children. On the surface I knew I didn't want to be fat, but underneath it all I wasn't emotionally ready to do anything about it. From time to time I tried to lose weight, but it didn't stay off. I tried every diet program under the sun and the only thing I lost was self-respect. I also tried several rounds of psychotherapy because I knew there was more to it than just what I ate. Jeff and I put our heads together trying to understand the complexity of emotional eating, and gradually the light began to dawn. It wasn't until I was able to recognize all of my emotional uses of food and thehidden payoffs of my weight--that is, until I was able to find and foil my fattitudes--that I was able to make a commitment to exercising and eating right. The solution came only after I found the courage to look inside myself and make sense of my chronic self-defeating behavior.


JEFF: We hope that by reading this book you'll be able to resolve your problems a lot more quickly than we did. Now, we'd like to tell you more about "fattitudes"--what they are, what they do, and how you can keep them from fouling up your weight management efforts.
Copyright © 2000 by Jeffrey R. Wilbert and Norean K. Wilbert.