The Disconnection between self-perception and reality.

 

In Peter Fitzsimons book “The Great Aussie Bloke Slim Down” he talks about how even at 150 kg he considered himself a “fine figure of a man”. This is despite as he also admits that that is the last thing he was. Fitzsimons encourages his readers to accept that they aren’t wonderful specimens of manhood.

There is this clear disconnection between what we are and how we perceive ourselves.  

My brother told of when he was forced to detox from a Benzodiazepine addiction. He heard the nurses talking about “that fucking junky in the cubicle”. He asked them where the junky was so he could give the guy shit. The nurse replied that they were talking about him. Which was a well over due and sudden shock to him. Up until that time Mark hadn’t self-identified as having a drug addiction. And logically because there was no acceptance of a reality, Mark hadn’t taken responsibility for the addiction. Mark didn’t perceive of himself as a drug addict, he just needed the benzodiazepine to be calm…and in order to tweak that calm he would combine the benzo’s with Coke. The interaction between the caffeine and the sedative enhanced the buzz. But Mark wasn’t an addict and didn’t have a problem until the disconnection between fact and self-perception was resolved.

Until I read Fitzsimons book, I thought that I looked great. I used to talk sneeringly about those fat sacks of shit. I was happy to weigh as much as a friend, his wife and his infant daughter COMBINED weighed. I removed a kg from the displayed weight every time I stood on the scales. It is only now that I have admitted that I am a fat sack of shit that I have begun to lose weight. Once I stopped lying to myself and decided to be honest true change has begun to happen. So the 101 kg I was in November 2016 was returned to the 102 kg it was meant to be. I took Fitzsimons at his word and killed the sugar in my diet. And the weight falls off. Since the 29^th of November 2016 I have lost over 5 kg. I am on my way to 87 kg.

I also viewed myself as being athletic…man boobs notwithstanding.  In an early photo of my relationship with Selina we are cuddled up in bed. Sent the photo to my brother, he replied that my breasts were bigger than hers. I wasn’t happy, but I did little or nothing about it. The delusion ran deeper. In early December I use the Heart Foundations BMI calculator…it tells me that at 183 cm tall, and 100 kg, the reality is that I am, for all my self-delusion, obese. I use the waistline calculator…and learn that I need to lose 13 cm off my waist to be healthy. Fitzsimons talks about his “come to Jesus moment”. In fact Fitzsimons has had at least three such moments. The first is when he gave up smoking. The second is when he gave up drinking and the third is when he finally realised the reason why he wasn’t the Stud he thought of himself as and removed sugar from his diet.

 My first “come to Jesus” happened on a bus halfway across the Nullarbor Plain in 1998. I was at 140 kg and realised that I didn’t have a lot of room. I also realised that at that weight I wasn’t likely to make it to 50. I went home, lost about 20 kg and was accused by my then wife of trying to get into someone else’s pants. The second moment was when I met Selina and realised that fitness and fertility are connected, I lose weight to improve my fertility. I drop to 110 kg. The third moment was when I tried to fuck someone a fair bit younger than myself, only to be told “Why should my wife fuck you, a fat sack of shit, when she can fuck trim men in their 30’s?” in response I cracked the sooks and dropped 10 kg which took me to 100 kg. The final moment has been the one I’m currently experiencing. In July I walked the 126 km The Great Victorian Rail Trail and experience constipation. I start eating a lot of fruit, a kg of prunes, up to 10 banana a week, plus whatever my eldest son doesn’t finish when he has his nightly serve of fruit, I gain weight. So you can see I’m working my way through almost 3 kg of fruit a week….a shitload of fructose. I also am consuming in various products about another 100-200 grams of sugar a week, my weight plateaus at 102 kg. As I say above. I remove the fruit and other sugar from my diet, and the weight drops suddenly.

You can see where my self-perception wasn’t having all that much to do with reality? Here I was thinking I was a likely winner of Stud Muffin of the Year, and the truth was that I was every bit one of those fat sacks of shit I sneered at. A certain amount of self-loathing is needed to lose weight. You have to genuinely hate the way you look and feel in order to lose the weight you need to. You have to loathe the sluggishness, the tiredness, the fact that every time you see a reflection of yourself that you are seeing someone who will die younger than they need to. This is where connecting with the reality that you are a fat sack of shit comes in, once you accept that there is a problem with your weight, self-perception and reality finally shake hands. Conversely, you need to love yourself.

I know, I’ve just contradicted myself. You have to hate how you look and feel, yet love yourself enough to do something about it before nature does. Stay morbidly obese, refuse to connect reality to self-perception and eventually the weight problem will resolve itself. Death resolves ALL issues with weight. So just sit there, do nothing, keep smoking and eating the way you are, and sooner rather than later, the obesity won’t be an issue, you won’t have an obesity problem. There won’t be a problem, because you will be dead. Which is where reality will triumph over your delusional self-perception.