Responsibility without self-hatred

Do you ever find yourself waiting for someone to come and rescue you from your fat?

I do.

It makes no sense whatsoever, but it is a fantasy I have entertained repeatedly.

Perhaps somebody will arrive with the exact words that finally change me. Perhaps I will discover the one plan that makes the whole thing easy. Perhaps I will wake up one morning and the weight will simply be gone, like a minor skin complaint or the other sock from a matching pair.

Nobody is coming. Nobody. I checked…sorry.

Other people can encourage me. They can tell me I look well, notice that I have lost weight or kindly refrain from eating a family-sized bag of crisps directly beside my head.

They cannot lose the weight for me.

Nobody else can make the thousands of private choices. Nobody can climb inside my mind at seven in the evening and settle the argument between the food I want now and the result I want later. Nobody can make me stop eating when I have had enough, go for the walk I am trying to avoid or honestly record the thing I was hoping did not count because I ate it while standing up.

The responsibility is mine.

For a long time, I heard that as a threat.

I thought responsibility had to hurt

Taking responsibility used to mean finding myself guilty and delivering the sentence immediately.

If I ate far more than I intended, I did not simply admit that the choice had been unhelpful. I called myself names. I spoke to myself as though I was weak, greedy and uniquely incapable of learning anything from the previous eighteen attempts.

I thought that was honesty.

It felt suitably severe. Surely I could not be accused of letting myself off the hook if I had spent half the evening verbally dragging myself through the streets.

The problem was that the cruelty rarely produced anything useful.

It made me feel worse, and feeling worse made comfort more appealing. It made the task feel hopeless, and hopelessness is very good at ordering another snack.

I was not taking responsibility. I was collapsing underneath it.

Accountability should eventually lead to an action.

Calling myself disgusting was not an action. It was just noise.

Nobody else can care for me on my behalf

The fact that nobody can do this for me does not have to mean I am alone in some bleak little punishment chamber with a boiled egg.

It means I have been given responsibility for myself.

My body is mine to live in. My mind is mine to listen to. My health, confidence, comfort and future are personal to me in a way they cannot be personal to anybody else.

Other people may love me enormously, but they do not wake up inside my body.

They do not carry the physical discomfort. They do not hear every argument in my head. They do not know exactly why this matters to me or how many times I have privately promised myself that I will try again.

That is why taking responsibility can be an act of love.

I am not making these choices because I deserve less pleasure until I become thinner. I am making them because I deserve care now.

Sometimes care looks gentle. Sometimes it looks like rest, a forgiving meal after an imperfect day or refusing to make one bad choice emotionally larger than it was.

Sometimes care looks like saying no.

Not because I hate myself, but because I do not want every passing appetite to make decisions for the whole of me.

Self-compassion is not pretending nothing matters

There is an uncomfortable edge to all this.

Self-compassion is not the same as letting myself off the hook.

I can understand why I did something without pretending I had no choice. I can admit that I was tired, upset, tempted or surrounded by food I love. Those things may be true.

It can also be true that I kept going after I had had enough.

Reasons matter because they help me understand myself. Excuses become a problem when they remove me from the scene altogether, as though the food simply happened and I was an innocent bystander wearing crumbs.

My choices still count.

The difference is that they do not have to become a verdict on whether I am worthy of kindness.

I can say, “That did not help me,” without adding, “because I am hopeless.”

I can say, “I need to handle that differently next time,” without beginning a prosecution.

I can be firm without turning myself into an enemy.

I am responsible for the person doing the work

This may be the part I missed for years.

I am responsible for losing the weight, but I am also responsible for the treatment of the woman trying to lose it.

I cannot claim to be caring for myself while speaking to myself like someone I despise.

There is a contradiction in saying I want to honour my body while punishing it for disappointing me. There is another in saying I am doing this for my wellbeing while making my own mind a thoroughly unpleasant place to live.

The person making the difficult choices needs honesty.

She also needs patience, respect and the occasional acknowledgement that this is genuinely hard.

Not endless excuses. Not indulgence dressed up as healing. Not a certificate congratulating her for considering a walk.

Just decent treatment.

No one is coming to rescue me from my fat.

I am already here, and apparently I have the job.