My Alter Ego

One of my favorite quotes from FRIENDS, is when Monica says, "I need to do this for the fat girl inside of me. I never let her eat!" I adopted that quote a couple of years ago to represent my own battle with weight loss. Anyone who has talked to me lately has probably heard me refer to the "Fat Tonya." No, I don't have multiple personality disorder. But I find it helpful to compartmentalize my negative self image, inability to control my cravings, and overall feeling of failure for not losing weight. I discovered that Fat Tonya (F.T.) lies to me to get what she wants. And what does F.T. want? She wants to be fat, of course! Here are some lies F.T. tells me:

You blew it at lunch eating fast food. You might as well blow it for the rest of the day.

You are really hungry. You need to eat more than one serving to compensate.

You are stressed right now. You need to eat something bad to feel better.

Don't pay attention to what people regard as "healthy." Everyone says something different, so you might as well just eat what you want.

You don't want to be regarded as a "health nut."

You are ugly because you are overweight.


You know you will never succeed, so you might as well quit now.

And there are many, many more. These are the feelings that I face almost on a daily basis. It took me years (yes, I mean years) to just discover that these lies existed, AND to be able to pinpoint specific lies.


So, this weekend I discovered another lie. It ties into a lot of the ones mentioned above, but I think it deserves to be by itself. The lie is, "It is impossible to eat healthy at home when you are working full-time." This is the lie that F.T. says when I'm at the grocery store. And F.T. has it partly right on this one. It IS hard to cook dinner every night when I don't get home until 6:00 to begin with. I mean, sometimes you just have to break out the "Skillet Sensation" even though it is loaded with unhealthy carbs and sugar. However, I have come up with a way to sort of get around this issue. I cook the "Skillet Sensation." But, instead of having the 1 cup serving like it suggests on the nutrition facts, I eat 1/2 cup of the "Skillet Sensation" and fill up on frozen veggies that are easy to cook. Now, some people will read this and say, "Well, duh!" But these ideas don't come easily for me. For 15 some-odd years, my mind has been developing F.T. and her lies. And for 15 years I have been listening to her without even acknowledging her existence. So, the fact that I can coherently write down what F.T. is telling me and find ways to prove her wrong, is a HUGE step. I can feel F.T. losing her strength. She still has a lot of fight in her, but slowly and surely, she is fading. Last week is a perfect example. Remember the chocolate bar? Well, I didn't eat it in one sitting. I actually had a 1/3 of a bar each day for three days!! I bought my pullover as my reward (read Chocolate Battle). One of these days, I will proudly be able to stand up with a carrot in my hand, look in the mirror and declare,
"Be gone, Fat Tonya!"