Ben Davis IS Gaining Weight

9th June 2012

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Ben Davis IS Gaining Weight

Ok people I need some honest opinions here. I started this blog after reading Ben Davis’ story of weight loss and his journey to strength. He is the whole reason I started to do life. If he lost weight. I could lose weight (shut up, I’m still working on it)

Now forgive me. But… is it just me or is Ben getting fat again?

Here’s the thing about Ben Davis, as far as I can make out. I mean, I haven’t tumblr-stalked him back to the first post. So maybe I missed it. But in my experience, and I have been working on it for more than 6 years, weight loss is really a mental game. I don’t mean that you lose weight via the power of your mind. Obviously not! But it’s more that if your mind is not on board for any reason, you won’t lose weight, or else you will re-gain it.

Ben has done an insane amount of exercise. But I’ve not noticed a whole heck of a lot of posts about the psychological work involved. Just at the top, there’s the part where one must dig deep to understand what drove the overweight process in the first place: why did you seek comfort/love/protection/whatever in the pantry? Then learning to heal those issues without recourse to food. Forgiving anybody who might have contributed to those issues. (Hello, Pa Davis.) Just these steps can block most people’s progress. But there’s plenty more. Mourning the old lifestyle that must remain dead forever. Mourning the old self and also forgiving the old self for everything. (That one’s a tough one, the forgiving.) Letting go of self-loathing so that all of your actions can now come from a place of self-love. Learning to actually see the new self, another very tough step. (I’m obviously working on this one myself right now.) Learning to understand and accept one’s new position in society. Accepting the way that one’s relationships with close family and friends may be impacted by all these changes. Working through any ambivalence or outright prejudices that one might be harboring about fatness or thin-ness. And of course on a technical level, one must learn how to eat for maintenance which is not a negligible challenge.

This is just what I can think of off the cuff right now. I’m sure there’s more. Particularly since I have not gotten all the way down the path myself, so there’s bound to be some things I have not even gotten a glimpse of yet.

Ben’s only human, and he’s young, too. Doing all this emotional work is extremely difficult and there’s really not a lot of good instruction on it out there. Believe me, I have been looking. I mean, there are a few books. But not much. And very few people have written memoirs detailing the psychological journey of weight loss. They really gloss it over. So the whole thing is quite isolating. It seems as though nobody can understand or relate to it at all. So it’s quite a challenge to get appropriate support, when you don’t need someone to say, “get your ass out there and run,” but rather you need someone to say, “what is really bothering you right now? You need to face it and release it.”

So that is my take on the Ben situation. My take is: it’s really not at all surprising he has gained some weight, because he still has a crap ton of personal work to dig through. Good luck, Mr. Davis! I’m rooting for you.

Tagged: Ben Davis weight loss Self Acceptance body image body acceptance ideas leedoeslife bigfatshoe