Pow! Statement #1 – Video Transcript
Hi everybody welcome to Navigating Weight Loss my name is Regina. Today we’re going to do our first Pow! Statement. What’s a Pow! Statement? It stands for Pearls of Wisdom. These seemingly small statements that end up packing an emotional punch.
The first one I want to share with you is one that I saw on Facebook a couple of years ago and when I first read it I remember chuckling and then crying. This is what is said: You are not fat, you have fat. You also have finger nails; you are not finger nails. And I remember chuckling and then I felt the color drain from my face because the gravity of the statement caught me off guard because for the first time in my entire life I recognized my weight outside of my person.
I’d been overweight since I was 12 years old. Super morbidly obese for most of my life so for 30 years I had the broken record playing in my head that I am fat. I am fat. But fat was something that I had it certainly wasn’t who I was. Yet, that was the very definition I told myself. And it was reinforced by 99 percent of the magazines that you read things you see on TV. Everything had that two facts together where my personhood and my weight were one. When honestly they were separate all along.
That ended up opening a true pivotal turning point for me. Because as I started to lose weight I started to notice something very different and then I started to hear other people say it so I knew it wasn’t unique to me and that was when you start to lose weight you tend to not know where you fit. Hear me out. Most of my life I was 99 out of 100 percent of the time the largest person in a room. I knew to expect that it was the reality of me. And when I started to lose weight and I was no longer the largest person in the room it made me almost uncomfortable because we become very comfortable in our places even if those places aren’t the best for us. It’s the thing that we know. So, when I was able to recall back on remembering that my weight is not my person, it is not who I am it did change the view of myself and it helped me turn off that replaying record in my head that I kept drilling into myself who I thought I was. And I’m not that at all and neither are you! Thanks so much! Bye!
One response
“You are not fat.. you have fat” is SUCH a powerful statement, you’re right and it’s hard to believe when you believe you are /know you are/ have been told you are/the scale says you are fat! But you’re right, too, that you have to shift your thinking from ‘I am fat (and therefore a failure, awful, undeserving of love or compassion)’ to ‘My body is carrying extra fat (and therefore I need to change my behaviors to make my body healthier, stronger) .
Interestingly, recently, as I’ve lost weight I’m now dealing with the opposite: I am not thin.. my body is thinner. Who I am hasn’t changed drastically – there have been shifts in thinking and behaving, but who I am fundamentally is the same… but I’m thin now. People see me as better, worse, b*itchy, picky, etc rather than all the adjectives they used when I was overweight.
All that to say – I agree it’s important to see that YOU are not your body. 🙂