You know, i’ve been thinking lately about life and the battle of the bulge. It occurred to me that many people hit rock bottom before they do something about their weight. I suppose that an addiction to food is like any other addiction. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, right? But how do you know when you’ve hit rock bottom?
Cath Lawson says:
Sometimes you need to hit rock bottom before you can improve your life and begin to achieve your dreams. This may sound like madness. Surely most sane people wouldn’t want to wait until they’re in a heap of trouble before they try to improve their lives right?
And I agree with her statement. Why would sane people want to land in a heap of trouble before improving their lives? Well… in my 29 years of life… I have come to the conclusion that it’s because of the comfort factor. The comfort factor is when people are comfortable with the way they are living. Sure, I might be overweight and unhappy about it… but I am also married, have three beautiful children and live a comfortable life. Other than my weight, there’s not much else wrong.
Now, if some of those comfort elements suddenly turned sour, I could say that I hit rock bottom.
Here is an interesting an anonymous post on help.com. From her entry, you can clearly see that it was written by a young teenager. She describes her version of hitting rock bottom:
I lost my best friend a couple months ago, and she’s really the only one I can cry my eyes out in front of.
Poor girl. 
But she hits on something here. Because her version of hitting rock bottom is losing someone that she loves deeply. There is something to be said about having someone in your life who you can be yourself around.
On one of the sites I visit frequently (The Experience Project), I have found an interesting post about “hitting rock bottom”. In fact, I can totally relate to this person’s post. Except I divulge in extreme eating and not-so-much with the drinking and smoking.
I guess i’ve always been the the more “depressed” type. always hated admitting it, i thought i was just weird, but according to the therapists ive gone to i was suffering from severe long term depression. okayy well whatever. i could change that. ( that was my game plan)
So he acknowledges that he has always hovered around rock bottom and with my weight loss issues, that’s how I feel too more often than not.
Furthering my quest for more “hitting rock-bottom”, I decided to peruse an anti-meth site. Who would know more about hitting rock bottom than people with addictions, right?
And a poster by the name Rancid1 had a really good answer:
It’s different for everyone.
For me, I had to loose something that I thought I would never loose. My own sanity. Insanity scared me so much that I wanted to die, and I went crying to someone and begged them to make the voices in my head go away.
It’s different for everyone, but most people have to loose something that they never thought they would loose.
So I suppose in the end, hitting rock bottom means that you lose something dear to you. It could be a person, something material, a job or even in extreme cases, all of the above.
But what I haven’t figured out yet, is what does hitting rock bottom mean in terms of weight loss?
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What an interesting post!
To answer your last question, I think hitting rock bottom has NOTHING to do with weight loss.
You can be addicted to anything. I went to Overeaters Anonymous (yes, it’s a real thing) meetings for over a year. TRUST ME being addicted to food – or the feelings that you get from food is very possible.
But I think that when you hit the place where you say to yourself “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH” is actually a place that you start loving yourself…or at least it was for me. When I finally had gained enough weight that I thought “there has to be a better way…and I want and deserve that way!” was when I started to get help. I started to care – and it started with the “one day at a time” mentality. As in “today I choose to be healthier.” That can be true for all addictions and even with food, for all sizes.
So, see, I don’t think rock bottom has anything to do with weight loss. I think it has everything to do with love and self-care.
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I absolutely agree with what you have said!
However, I always wondered if people hit some sort of “rock bottom” before making the decision to change their lives.
And I do think that we torture ourselves with these addictions because we don’t think that we are worth the time. Food (like any addiction I suppose) suppresses and masks the feelings and gives us a short and false sense of hope.
The sad part is… that for most of us food-addicts (myself 100% included), we have spent most of our lives trying to understand this addiction. We understand it but sometimes we still may not have a good grasp on how to change it. You know what I mean?
Thank you SO much for your insightful response!!!
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