There once was a time...
About a year ago, I was extremely depressed about my problem with food. I had pretty much conceded that I would probably always be massively overweight and might never find something that worked for me. I hated taking pictures with my husband, because I am so much larger than him. I ate to the point of feeling like I might throw up, and then I ate some more. I told myself that as long as I threw some vegetables in each day, it was okay if I was eating almost 3 times the amount I should have been.Then, right at the crux of my misery, I happened to stumble upon a blog by a woman who labeled herself as a health and wellness coach. At first glance, I was not impressed. I didn't like the idea of saying I had a health coach, because it sounds trivial and meaningless. Why would I pay someone to tell me that I eat like shit? I already knew that.
So, why did I end up actually paying her?
Because she also came from a place of fat. I scrolled down through the blog and read that she had once weighed 300 pounds--a weight which I was on a fast track to becoming. It appealed to me that she might somehow understand how insidious a food addiction can be. How you can go so easily from being on point, focused and motivated, to being deeper in depression than before you had started. How every single time you fail at a diet or exercise plan, you dig yourself deeper into your own grave and that every time you eat it's like shoveling another round of dirt onto your coffin. I needed someone who understood that.I paid the fees and signed the prerequisite forms, and we scheduled our first Skype session. She told me all about her own journey, a word I still despise since the connotation is something new and exciting and my diet and exercise regimen is anything but.
She seemed down-to-earth enough and so I thought, why not? Maybe I just needed someone who could hold me accountable.
I was very successful my first few weeks of dieting. I always am because the first few weeks come at the height of an eating binge and when you very suddenly switch from eating nothing but processed shit to eating whole foods in much smaller portions, then the weight seems to melt. Unfortunately, that never lasts as long as you think it will and the inevitable plateau comes.
Around the time that I started hitting a plateau, I was also working full time, in grad school full time, directing/writing the musical for my high school (a production with over 150 students), and trying to support my husband, who was unemployed. It was more than stressful, it was fucking killing me. After hours at work, and then an hour or two of rehearsal, and then an hour or two of classes, I was so fucking spent that chopping vegetables and counting calories seemed like an impossibility.
But here's what tipped me off...
As would be expected, I was slipping very quickly with the diet and exercise. I was able to keep myself within the calorie limit, but didn't have the time to always prepare a perfectly balanced meal. So, although I was technically doing what my health coach asked of me, she eventually started pointing out that my macronutrients weren't balanced enough. At one point, she actually told me that I needed to cut down on the half an apple I was eating each morning for breakfast! She said that because I ate it with half a cup of oatmeal, it was too many carbs. So then I switched to two eggs and she said it was too much fat. Eventually, I started getting fucking pissed. Why didn't she just tell me exactly what to fucking eat everyday?She also began to become unnecessarily passive aggressive when talking about what I ate for the week. Perhaps that was also part of the problem. Each and every meeting, the first thing she did was run through a list of all the foods I had eaten and try very surreptitiously to shame me for eating them. I'm not sure if she expected me to never eat anything good again, but I made it very clear to her at the beginning that elimination diets never work for me. I would be having ice cream and pizza every once in a while. One time, I entered into tracker that I had taken a bite of a brownie, and the next meeting she said, "I guess you had that because you wanted it, right?" Like there would be any other fucking reason I would eat a brownie.
Finally, after explaining to her how busy I was, and hearing her lecture me about how everyone has the time (which is complete bullshit), the moment that I truly knew I needed to get rid of her was when she outright told me that I needed to give all the other areas in my life the absolute bare minimum in order to succeed at the diet and exercise. Think about that...she wanted me to sacrifice my career, my studies, my students, and my husband, in order to make the diet work.
I didn't seek out a health coach to push me into not giving a shit about anything but health and fitness. I wanted someone who could help me figure out how to fit health and fitness into my life without compromising what I care about the most.
Now, I'm not conceding that ALL health coaches are like this, but it certainly has tainted me for good. I'm actually really fucking sick of the whole "What's your excuse?" mentality. Things like work, children, spouses, and school are not excuses, they are FUCKING REASONS! Reasons to live and yes, sometimes, reasons why you can't always buy the grass-fed beef or cook the gluten free stew.
This inevitably leads these "No excuses" types to argue that if we don't drop everything and make health our number one priority, then certainly we will die. This is an all or nothing argument. Not making health number 1 does not absolutely guarantee that my health won't be a priority at all. Like, you either run 5 miles a day and eat nothing but vegetables, or you devour 5000 calories and need a crane to lift you out of your house. There are a lot of other points along that scale.
Everyone's situation is different, and although I am not at a healthy weight, I am also not at a point where I feel like I will die from cardiac arrest if I ever have a slice of pizza again (and I will). I am now seeing an actual mental health professional, and my eating habits have not been out of control since. Health coaches may not be able to help you do that. At least mine didn't. And all slippery slopes aside, I would much rather find a way to make health work with all the other aspects of my life that are important to me. Because if I didn't have my husband, career, or friends I most certainly wouldn't give a shit about living longer. Live longer for what?
