Very Very Cold Wednesday

A couple of days ago, The Ellen show was on TV and I caught a bit of it. I really do like the Ellen Show, however, if the Woman that I take care of would not have it on, I probably would never watch it. Anyway, one of her guests was Richard Simmons, the fitness guru. Without saying much about what I think of him, Ellen had commented on how he looked like he had lost some weight. He thanked her kindly for noticing and said he had lost 29 pounds. Ellen said that she was a little surprised that “the fitness guru” would find himself needing to lose weight. His response to her was “Well I am human too and I have the same problem as everyone else where I eat things that I shouldn’t and they catch up with me. Then I need to get back to business and get the weight off.”

The irony in this was just amazing to me. So this guy who has probably made millions showing others HOW to lose weight, obviously has no idea how to teach people to keep it off. He is basically saying that being human means all humans will have a weight problem because we eat what we SHOULDN’T and then we have to work really hard to get it off. AND EVERYONE IS OK WITH THAT! Then there was a man who had worked for Ellen who was approached by Richard Simmons when he previously appeared on the show. Richard went up to him and told him that he could help him. The man was overweight. After about three weeks he contacted Richard and said he was “ready to change his life”. Then came the dramatic entrance to of the “before and after” and I think he had lost over 200 lbs. Well of course he looked like a different person. Then Ellen said something that really struck me. She said to this guy, “I used to see you when you worked here and I just knew you couldn’t have been happy.” She was referring to his weight. The reason why this struck me because our society so much grabs on to the idea that “Thin people are happy, fat people are not”. Unhappiness comes from fear and just because you lose weight doesn’t mean any of those fears Now if I would have heard in the interview “I really reached down deep and learned why food was a problem in my life and then I started loving myself by treating myself with kindness…” then I would have felt like it was a story. But people really believe that they can have someone like Richard Simmons physically train them and then lose weight and the problem is solved. We have soooo bought into this madness. It is absolutely crazy! You can not just change a behavior and then the reason why the behavior existed in the first place is gone!

Then I picked up a copy of a recent tabloid and they had pictured several people and the caption said “they lost a TON of weight”. Curious as I am, I went to the page to read the story. They had the typical before and after pictures. Then they had a story on each person about why they thought they needed to lose weight and how they did it. Each one of them went on some time of deprivation diet. Whether it was counting points, no carbs, some type of bars, it was some type of deprivation. They all exclaimed how “easy” it was which always makes me laugh. It is as if by claiming that it was easy, somehow makes their pain worthwhile. When I quit smoking through hypnosis I told everyone it was really easy, and it was. The first 48 hours were tough, but after that, I never wanted a cigarette again and to me that was easy. Unfortunately food feeds many demons that we have in our closets and we have to have food to survive. Many of our personal problems are handled through food. You can be on a high for a while after losing weight, but the demons that made you overweight in the first place are still there unless you have taken the steps to get rid of them.