Latest Diet Crazy: Have You Tried Changing Your Personality?
To lose weight, I had to change my personality.
Realizations and Reevaluations
Sitting here many years later, I weigh less than I did in 8th grade and am realizing the flaws in my previous thoughts. There are “truths”, stories we commit to, that become our personality. Reevaluating my relationship with food back in March, I kept returning to a “why/because” from kindergarten. We were required to clean our plates before going to recess. I would explain to others, mostly needing to affirm it aloud myself, “So I never learned to feel full, only to recognize what (over) full looked like.”
The Story of Overeating
I accepted this full stop—meaning it became the cornerstone of my explanation, my excuse, for overeating. This was part of a more complex story linked to the lack of care growing up, leading to food insecurity and gorging: the lack of role models—my dad's daily regime of Marlboro Reds and a thermos of Folgers; being labeled a “good eater” by my family, partly due to their own ignorant prejudices about what a kid adopted from a third-world country should be like—sickly, frail. “But you came off the plane—was there anything left for the other babies?!”
Envy and Solitude
I envied my friend’s relationship with her grandmother, who taught her to listen to her body's signals of fullness. What a beautiful gift from a guiding light. But my story is one of solitude, lack of support, doing it myself, and cultivating resilience.
The Impact of Childhood Conditioning
It is completely messed up to barter clean plates for playtime. Yes, this muted the signals of “full” my body continued to send despite being ignored for nearly my entire life. I had let overeating become part of my personality—partially as a way to stay connected to my family, and partly as a pass for not facing the difficulty of moderate eating. And yes, this was a 35-year-old truth that could change. It was the beginning of the story, not the inevitable end.
The Stories I Told Myself
I told myself many stories:
My body likes being 150. It is easy to get there and hard to get past it.
I can’t know when I’m full unless I’m stuffed.
My weight fluctuates seasonally. (True, but there are reasonable and unreasonable margins.)
I don’t want to be seen as small and vulnerable. “Cute/adorable/small” are labels to abhor as a feminist.
It’s okay to feel desirable because of my strength but not because of the numbers on the scale. (It was vain to want to be small but admirable to want to be strong.)
Thin women are annoying.
Vanity is the lowest common denominator of those with little consciousness.
Dieting as a personality is a shitty personality.
Portioning is a mental illness.
Facing the Truth
Comedian Pete Holmes said something on a podcast that always sticks with me: “Don’t forget you might be wrong.”
Changing My Personality
It may seem obvious to want to stop overeating, but losing any part of myself is a loss. It severs connections to many people. Like “drinking friends,” I needed to consciously decide how to handle “overeating friends”—whether to leave those relationships in the past or try to reconstruct them in a new light. This is hard work. In the confines of my own mind, I needed to detach from the familiar identity of “overeater.” Overeating represented a fearlessness in the face of fat-phobia. It felt powerful to overeat and still be seen as good-looking. But this was disingenuous. I was still scared of being fat and worked out incessantly to balance the scales. I needed to face my prejudices and deconstruct stereotypes. Mostly, I realized they were scapegoats for not doing the work. It’s easier to make fun of yoga than to struggle through a class.
Actionable Steps to Change
Eliminate Distractions
No screens, no music, no podcasts—nothing that pulls your senses away from your meal. SIT DOWN to eat. No grazing while standing up.
Pay Attention
Focus on the taste, texture, and temperature of your food. Take smaller bites and swallow slowly.
Write Everything Down
This is not about reward or punishment, but about truth. I don’t believe in “cheat days.” Your body has no off days, and this mindset starts a slippery slope of shame. Food is food; some serve you better than others. If red looks bad on you, it doesn’t make it a bad color, just not appropriate for you.
Measure things
How many times have you grabbed the wrong container for leftovers? This highlights how our eyes misjudge portions.
Understand Metrics
When starting to run, your body doesn’t know what 100 meters is—so you use a track. It takes time to learn. Portions are often misleading, and food today has many fillers. We need to re-learn, or perhaps learn for the first time, what a serving size is and its impact on our bodies. I hated the idea of being one of THOSE women. But this was a truth I had to face.
Learning to Feel Full
I learned to feel full without overeating. It took about a month of distraction-free meals, limiting excitement with repetitive food choices, and cutting “stupid” sugars (snacks with no nutritional value). Awareness led to weight loss.
Our yogic lessons in “not that”
Holding on to that weight was symbolic of energetically clinging to ideas that didn’t serve me.
Attachments are everywhere- beyond the physical realm of my addiction to sugar, I had to release identities that had run their course and projections rooted in fears that needed to be brought into the light to see the “snake” for the rope it really was.