an example

I had a friend with a weight problem....

Now, lest you call me the pot which calls the kettle black, i'll tell you what my own weight-history has been.  Having been diagnosed with hypothyroidism at the age of six months, I spent my entire childhood hungry for meat but raised on white bread, margarine, 2% milk, cereal and sandwiches, school lunches and a real home-cooked dinner -- the usual stuff for the '60s!  I was chubby till puberty, but not obese like the kids one sees nowadays.  At that point, coincidentally, I got fed up with the nerd-harassment I received from the "cool girls" at the bus stop, and started walking the just-over-a-mile to school, and that helped my conditioning considerably.

Through my teens, eating when I wanted and spontaneously fasting when not hungry, I got quite lean but was never skinny;  my grandmother observed once that I was "becoming quite willowy."  At 5'3.5" I weighed between 110 and 115.  This continued into my twenties, but it was during my second pregnancy that I got actually "overweight" and the scale didn't want to dip below 130.

From then on, my weight followed the predictable pattern -- 130s in my 30s, 140s in my 40s, 150s in my 50s.  At one point my weight went up to 165;  I looked in the mirror and to that resemblance of my (obese) grandmother I said, "Grammy, we need to lose weight!"  I learned about low-carb, and the rest is history.

But the point is, i'm not one of those naturally-thin people who can eat ANYTHING, and I never was.  To get back to the subject of my obese friend:

She struggled with her weight by conventional means, and got her doctor to prescribe every pharmaceutical that came along that promised loss.  On speed, she got down to about 160, but couldn't maintain it -- her downfall was always having a naughty food "just this once" every single day.  I've never asked her what she weighs and she doesn't volunteer it.  When I found how effective LC is, I excitedly told her about it and she reluctantly promised to read the Atkins book -- the next time I saw her, she told me her brother said there were kidney problems in the family and none of them (all at least overweight and some grossly obese) should ever try low-carb.  I didn't expostulate.

She's a bread-lover and she's not about to give it up.  It's things like this that make me HAVE to believe in the addictive qualities of wheat and sugar!  Sure, I like them both, but they do such horrible things to my body, I have no temptation to suck it up and keep "using."  Call me a hedonist -- feeling "normal" with energy and no bloat and painlessness of joint and gut is FAR more important to me than being "one of the gang" and eating all the things that make me feel horrible!

I try not to rub in her weight-control "failure" though i'm sure she feels it -- and i'm a dozen years older than she, with far more metabolic baggage.  I saw her last some three years ago when she invited me to do a history program with her, and she hasn't invited me back OR accepted my invitation to visit here.  She's bigger than ever, and is going further down the scary road (which she started down early) of living through her daughters. 

But the thing that called her particularly to mind this morning was a similarity to another obese person of whom we know, and who also loves to sneer at those she wants to consider inferior to her -- "inferior" DESPITE THE FACT THAT THEY'VE CONQUERED THEIR WEIGHT ISSUES, BECOME HEALTHY, AND HAVE SIGNIFICANTLY MORE WORLDLY SUCCESS. 

These people DESPERATELY need to feel good about themselves, as we all do.  The problem is, their means of doing so lies not in saying "I have estimable qualities" but by saying "YOU are a LESSER person than I."  Now, my friend HAS estimable qualities -- she has outstanding talent in a variety of fields!  ONLY the fact that society treats overweight people badly causes her to focus on that one negative, and not on the many positives!  It dims and skews her perception of EVERYTHING in life.  She simply does not see straight, with balance and sense of proportion.

Comparing ourselves to others, instead of looking at ourselves in isolation, is productive of nothing but misery.  If someone out there has defeated the demon which is still plaguing us, what is the rational thing to do?  Whine, that they're luckier?  Hate them for having a quality that we don't?  Or maybe, studying their method, and see if it's something that might work for us too, even though we may have to do a little sacrificing?

CS's unbounded venom against carbohydrate-reduction advocates is nothing but a measure of her own pain.  She strikes out to distract herself, to keep from looking within, and her self-delusion is her armor.  She has NEVER debunked ANYTHING despite her claims, nor is anyone jealous or afraid of her.  People dread her certainly -- just like we dread the approach of every unpleasant person we know.  They spoil the mood of every happy get-together ... because they don't know how to behave so as to receive positive attention, and they can't stand to see others GETTING that kind of attention or having a good time while they're NOT. 

Funny -- my friend always used to claim that people were jealous of her, too.  On what basis they were supposed to be jealous was the unanswered question.