Psychodietician: We are more than fat tissue

Do we really need to love our bodies?

Magdalena Hajkiewicz-Mielniczuk: No. But it would be worth accepting them.

Will it be easier for us?

Definitely. After all, we will spend our entire lives in this body. A relationship with it will not be helped by constantly blaming it or treating it like a punching bag. So I would approach the body as I would another human being – with kindness. Because why should I be mean to someone when they haven’t done anything wrong to me?

I know what I’m saying. For me, focusing on my appearance has taken a lot of the joy out of life.

What does that mean?

By the fourth or fifth grade of elementary school, I was already on a diet. I got my ‘knowledge’ about weight loss from a forum of anorexic women, the so called butterflies. The girls bragged about not feeling hungry thanks to drinking coffee and some commonly available pills. In secret from my parents, I tried these methods. I didn’t lose any weight. And that was because I was visiting my grandmother afterwards. Grandma would bake biscuits and all my efforts would be in vain. When I couldn’t get enough, she would give me two zlotys for candy. I didn’t tell my parents that either. I didn’t understand why they didn’t pamper me like she did.

Back then I think I envied my mum’s figure. She has always been thin. Her wedding dress fit me at the age of nine. And it would have been all right if I hadn’t stopped growing in fourth grade. I stopped at 167 centimetres then. I started getting fat. A tummy appeared.

Why is there such pressure to look good at the age of 10?

Fatter girls were less liked. And I wanted to be cool. Just like my slim friend that everyone cherished. I felt like her shadow – plumper, uglier and inferior. My weight loss at the time was reminiscent of the spurt of many of the clients I manage today. Which is to say: tomorrow I’m getting up and tackling my weight! Yes, I would get up, go to school, and then stop by my grandmother’s for 25 dumplings with strawberries and be mad at myself.

What else did you think of yourself?

That I wasn’t good enough. In secondary school, my mood wasn’t even improved by top grades or exemption from end-of-school tests. I was especially sad when Valentine’s Day cards were distributed around the classrooms. The cool girls – meaning only the skinny ones – would get a lot of cards. Me? One or none. To please boys more, I started playing shooters.

In high school, I still had a dramatic image of myself. I looked in the mirror and thought: so fat! Whereas when others looked at me, they repeated: ‘Magda, that’s enough’. I didn’t listen to them. I thought my 123 pounds was still a lot. I wanted a body like all fitness women – hard, fleshy and compact. I thought they looked like that every day. That if I burn fat, I will finally discover muscle underneath. As a result, I turned to a well-known personal trainer. He prescribed me a diet of 1400 calories a day, disregarding my weight. Fortunately, the diet proved too difficult. I only kept it up for a month. I reported it all on my blog. I gathered quite a few followers around it. In it, I described my weight loss progress and how I motivate myself to workout.

The problem is that since I ditched the 1400 calorie diet, I started eating more. My struggle in my head began as well. Every day I seemed to gain weight. I would glance in the mirror non-stop. ‘Can you see my thicker thighs yet?’, I used to chat up my loved ones.

You soon decided to study dietetics. Weren’t you concerned that it might exacerbate your problems with appearance?

My teachers were pushing me to go into medicine or pharmacy. And I was just interested in nutrition. I remember that a cooking class was part of the college experience. What we cooked then was left for us. And one time when we were preparing dumplings, I ate a lot of them. I was remorseful. To see if I had gained weight, I took a picture of myself. I was looking for folds on my belly. Then I posted them on Instagram with the caption: ‘Summer closet fittings. Here’s what I do when it comes to taking on a project for college. And surprisingly, after a full day of eating and cooking at university, my stomach didn’t let it show. Food technology in dietetics is not fit at all (...). Magda from “I Know What I’m Eating” is also a human being, but it’s not worth going from one extreme to another’. Yeah, right...

You could delete this post today.

But then no one would see the road I’ve been down. Oh, look, another picture. I specifically moved the silhouette back on it. I thought that with this pose, people would not notice my thick thighs.

What if they really were like that?

At that time, I would have felt less valuable. No wonder I developed an anxiety neurosis because of this attitude. It started in my third year of dietetics. At the time, I was a day student, coaching, working as the sole dietician for a catering company, running a blog, but I also already had my first clients. Zero time for yourself, your partner and your friends. I was not resting. At one point I was so tired that I didn’t have the strength to work. I would fall asleep with remorse because I wanted to make up for everything the next day. Nothing worked.

My workaholism and perfectionism were joined by my low self-esteem. I told myself that when I lost even one pound, I would be better. But I did it and nothing happened. Around the same time my grandmother passed away. The day after her funeral I went to Tour de Pologne, where I was to be a hostess. I didn’t even have time to experience grief. From all this, neurosis and panic attacks were later born.

I experienced my first panic attack in October 2016. I was on a bus to meet a friend. I suddenly felt weak. When I got off, my heart began to rumble, chills came over me. I sat down at the bus stop. I called a friend to come to me as soon as possible because I couldn’t handle it alone. I thought I was dying. After a while a man noticed me. He reassured that he had taken a lifeguarding course. He called for an ambulance. He asked if I felt a tingling in my hand, and his words worked like autosuggestions. So I felt it. To which he says: ‘You may have atrial fibrillation’. I panicked even more. The attack passed when I saw an ambulance 40 minutes later. The paramedics asked what was wrong with me. I couldn’t explain. Once in the ambulance, they measured my blood pressure and heart rate. Normal results. Perhaps that is why I was later greeted in the emergency room with the words: ‘Oh, another doll with a headache’.

I was lucky though – a friend I had at the time was going through similar attacks. She suggested anxiety neurosis and a visit to a psychotherapist.

Did you care?

‘Well, okay, I survived one attack’, was my only reflection from the event. I didn’t have time to get sick. I was busy with work. After five days, however, a second panic attack occurred. Then another and another, after which I felt worse and worse. I had trouble sleeping. Sometimes I would wake up at night, go to my roommate and ask her to hug me. I fell asleep in class. It lasted six months. I couldn’t take it any more, so I signed up with a psychotherapist in February. I didn’t tell anyone about it because I treated the office visit as my weakness. When the therapist asked at the first meeting what had been going on since October, I spread my arms. I remembered nothing. A black hole.

After leaving the office, I had a moment of enlightenment: ‘Wow, life doesn’t look like I thought it would’. I realised that the world is not that simple. That I have influence over my thoughts. Observing them fascinated me. That’s why I started studying psychodietetics after my bachelor’s degree. It differed from regular dietetics in its approach to the client. The dietician worked with clients who did not know how to eat healthy. And a psychodietician with those who say: ‘I’ve tried so many times to lose weight, but when I see sweets, I can’t help myself’. So it was about the psychological aspect of eating.

And hadn’t you already become a hostage to your own success by then?

Probably so. However, psychotherapy has shown me how to relax. So, I started to let my workouts go a little more. I napped and walked more often. I was getting healthy, but I was getting fat. And I was especially afraid of those extra pounds. Because I was still accompanied by thinking: ‘You can’t get fat, you just can’t!’.

A breakthrough in my own body perception occurred in July 2021. I then stood in front of the mirror and found that I looked... normal. At the same time, I still put up a post on Instagram. I added four photos of me on vacation, in a bathing suit. With a description: ‘Today I want to share that I have freed myself from making happiness dependent on appearance. (...) I still find it hard to believe that I am adding a photo with a visible fold that I now genuinely like (...). Paradoxically, to get to this point, I had to gain weight instead of losing it’.

There were several comments under the post that it was an excuse.

I could have acted like a certain influencer who wrote on social media: ‘Listen, I’ve gained weight, what a failure! In that case, I’m organising a challenge where we lose weight together’. But I didn’t want it that way. After all, in my own activity I tried not to colour my life, I also showed its worse moments. When I asked clients and observers what they valued my activity for, they alternately listed honesty and authenticity. I didn’t lose my job because of my confession. My courses continued to be purchased. And if I stopped being an authority figure for someone because I gained 22 pounds, they could stop listening to me at any time.

Weren’t you worried that people would accuse you of incompetence?

Some have written that this is how I justify my laziness. I shared their messages to show that body acceptance doesn’t mean doing nothing. I created a board on which I listed my own accomplishments. These included coming out of anxiety neurosis, regaining peace in my life, starting two companies, releasing six courses, becoming a college coordinator for psychodietetics, studying psychology (because I enrolled in a new major), and conducting dozens of webinars and lectures. ‘Best Regards, Lazy Magda’, I wrote at the end.

So can a psychodietician get fat?

an oncologist smoke cigarettes? Dieticians, like all humans, are more than body fat. Do you know how many of them wrote to me after that vacation post? They were all afraid of one thing – that customers would notice their extra pounds.

And probably that they would be judged by them. Why are we so eager to comment on someone else’s body?

many, appearance is paramount. Even HR professionals admit that thin people have more job opportunities than obese people. I don’t accept that. And I’m probably about to hear: after all, she’s promoting obesity! Gee, but imagine a campaign where from now on we will only show obese people on billboards. Will it make thin people want to look like this? No. And will the obese finally have representation in and support from society? Yes.

One of my students showed me how wrong we can be in judging someone’s appearance. Her husband had a serious accident. He needed basic care around him afterwards. This lady had to take care of several children, a home and a job. She had the right not to handle it, because in an instant her life was turned upside down. Her needs receded into the background. She had no time to worry about her nutrition or physical activity. She was carrying a huge weight and got fat because of it. And then suddenly she read somewhere that people get fat because they are lazy. Do you understand this absurdity?

We think that if we point out that someone is overweight or obese, they will convert. This is not true. The decision to make a lifestyle change is entirely up to them. Interestingly, they don’t have to take it up at all. ‘But then we all pay for the treatment of such a person’, some thunder. Then why aren’t they knocking cigarettes out of people’s mouths in the street? After all, this would save them from lung cancer and their wallets from paying when smokers end up in oncology.

So we treat someone’s additional pounds as an invitation to criticise them. We criticise because we think obese people have no idea about their appearance and lack mirrors at home. Have you ever heard them respond to criticism: ‘Oh, thank you for giving us such a hard time. That’s very helpful’? Exactly.

And how do you help them?

Most of all, I would like to get to a point with them where they don’t compare their weight or consider themselves losers because of the extra pounds. I explain to them that you can’t lose 60 pounds in one day. Weight loss is a long-term process spread over several months or even years. That’s why I teach my clients to live with their current weight. If they accept it, they will shed unnecessary ballast from their heads. Especially since they have one hell of a task ahead of them – changing their lifestyle. Neither getting mad at yourself nor pressure will help here.

I also explain to clients that being overweight or obese is a consequence of other problems. That our thinking is primarily responsible for our appearance. I emphasise these two sentences because we are not taught to treat mental and physical problems equally. Obesity is often the first time we even notice that something is wrong. But admitting it does not yet mean getting to the source of the problem.

I start my work with clients with their memories of food, weight loss. If they have always been obese, we try to build a new lifestyle. And if they gained weight suddenly, we try as much as possible to place their old habits in the current reality or to develop completely new ones. In the second case, almost one hundred percent of the clients are those who have gained weight due to various problems: infidelity, divorce, psychological or physical violence at home, bullying at work. In their drama, food proved to be the only safe haven. If they combined fatty with sweet, they stimulated the reward centre in the brain. There was a release of dopamine that prompted: ‘Are you unwell? Eat something’. They ate, and then another hormone shot. It was a vicious circle that turned into a habit and, for some, even an addiction.

Is that why you say you are repairing your relationship with food?

If it is disturbed, then that’s a problem. After all, we can even hate ourselves because of food. We torture ourselves with it. We vent our emotions. We take a similar approach to alcohol and work. But with one difference – we can’t survive without food.

I see autoimmunity in some clients on a nutritional basis. I remember one woman who was experiencing bouts of overeating. She had a good knowledge of the calories of the foods in question. That’s why she chewed, spit out, chewed and then spit out some of them. And so on, several times a day. You don’t even realise the disgust she felt for herself.

Admittedly, I had never experienced such a condition, but I understood her. After all, I knew what it was like to lose control of myself. When I had a panic attack, I thought I was going to run out into the street for help and get crushed by the crowd.

Is it easier to understand your mentees when you have experienced some of their problems already?

More than once someone would come into my office and say puzzled: ‘I suddenly realised I had gained 10 pounds’. And I had the same thing happen to me recently! I gained weight and didn’t even notice it. I just chose wider blouses, dresses. The situation changed when, unexpectedly, I could barely fit into my trousers. Well, and when I went to the mountains, where I realised that I was no longer in the same shape as I used to be. To my surprise, I didn’t get any philosophy out of it. Of course, I would follow my husband afterwards and repeat: ‘God, Kuba, I’d like to lose weight’. But it was a moment, because I quickly rationalised to myself: ‘Magda, you arranged your flat, you overcame the neurosis. You were occupied with other things, so you gained weight. Instead of torturing yourself with it, think better about how you’re going to deal with it’.

With this kind of thinking, I stopped being in constant conflict with my body. We got along. When I gained weight, I used to say: ‘You’ve gained weight, so this means that...’. And today, it’s enough to say: ‘I just put on weight’. And this is where you put the period.

 

Magdalena Hajkiewicz-Mielniczuk – dietician, psychodietician, lecturer. On social media she runs the profile ‘Wiem, co jem’ [‘I Know What I’m Eating’], where she popularises knowledge about rational nutrition and mental health. Author of training courses in psychodietetics. Winner of the Fitness Motywatory [Fitness Motivators] award for the most motivating nutritionist on the internet

Author: Łukasz Filip

Photo: unsplash.com

The text was published on wysokie obcasy.pl on 2 April 2022.