Staying out of the prisons that we’ve built for ourselves
By: Mart-Mari Breedt
Tags: Obesity, Introspection, Prison, Weight Loss, Maintenance

Being obese is like serving a prison sentence in a prison that you’ve built for yourself. You cannot move freely. You cannot fully be who you want to be. You cannot wear what you want to wear. Your health might even be suffering from your excess weight. Because of your weight, you are probably not even treated the way you deserve to be treated. You cannot even get a weekend pass out of this prison. There is no quick escape. And you did it all to yourself!

Finding your way out of this prison is like navigating your way through a maze — an extremely complicated maze! Every twist, corner and turn promise a new way out. And not you, nor anyone else, have a top view of this “maze prison” to help you navigate it.

Very basic Google searches can already show you some of the options to be found in the weight-loss maze:

You can lose weight by matching your diet to your blood type. At least your blood type always stays the same and is not subject to interpretation — unlike personality traits or energy levels. Or perhaps you should pick the diet that is right for your body shape? Or what about the one that is right for your personality? After all it makes sense that a “Wonder woman” would lose weight differently to a “Nurturer”.

If you find yourself to be the outlier in the “matching” types of diets, you can always try a diet that excludes certain food groups. There are diets that swear the culprit is the carbohydrate family. “Cut out all carbs!”, they’ll scream. But is that not where we are suppose to get our energy from? How about a low-fat diet then? If you still want your slice of bread… “Fats are too dense in energy. Do not eat them if you want to lose weight.” Others are convinced that the problem must be in the cooking of food. “Only raw food. It’s how nature intended it.”, they’ll advice.

Where nature fails us, medicine and other man-made products step in. “Here, try this shake”, or: “These tablets will make your metabolism faster.” You can even get tablets to suppress you appetite. Yet I always thought that a healthy appetite is a sign of good health?

Even in the spectrum of balanced diets, the options are overwhelming. You can go to a dietitian. You can join a weight-loss club and program. Or just try Ketogenic, Paleo, Vegetarian or Vegan etc.

And every diet has its own wonderful unbelievable success stories. Terrible before and beautiful after photos. Promises of success.

Weaving your way through the overwhelming variety and types of diets out there, and picking one is already difficult enough. Then sticking with that chosen lifestyle and actually losing the weight… Nearly impossible! It’s like being the tiny marble in the marble maze, always rolling back or taking a wrong turn, never finding the concave space where you can finally come to rest.

In Computer Science we call these types of problems NP-C (Non-polynomial Complete) problems. In layman’s terms this means that once you have a solution to the problem it is easy to verify that it is actually a solution. I.e. someone who has already lost weight can easily say: “Yes, this worked for me. Here, this is how I did it.” While verifying a solution is easy, there is no quick way to determine a solution in the first place. The variety and types of potential solutions and permutations are just too vast. The best solution to an NP-C problem is to use heuristics or approximation.

So given both the problem and the vast solution space, if you do manage to actually reach your goal weight, everyone expects you to just be in this magical place where you will keep the weight off forever and ever. Never has a bigger lie been told! Yet still, that is how being thin is sold to us! A magical place where you will always be thin and happy. Actually you are this tiny marble just waiting to be knocked out of its concave resting spot by the next bump in the road. Never able to escape for good. The odds are forever stacked against you.

December 2019 I found myself standing at the end of an 80 kg weight-loss journey, wondering where the heck could I find some glue to glue down this tiny marble? Or what I can do for myself and no-one else to bump or rock the maze? So much information is out there on how to lose weight. So much, that it actually is overwhelming! Yet so little is written on maintaining a huge weight-loss. In fact the most popular view on weight-loss maintenance is that it is impossible. Once a fatty, always a fatty! Refusing to accept this view, I started my blog. And in my very first blog post, when I still knew nothing, I asked these questions:

"If you are a person of normal weight reading this, I’d like to ask you this: How do thin people stay thin? Do you ever consider your diet? Do you ever weigh yourself? And if you do, how often? I come from an overweight family and all I’ve ever known is how to be fat…"

I’ve since come to realise that the one group of people, the people I view as never having struggled with their weight, and the other group of people, ex-fatties like myself, we do not play the same game. I am resting in a concave space, waiting for life to knock me out again. They are not in a maze at all. The weight-loss field is not one they’ve ever needed to navigate. I started my maintenance journey by asking the wrong questions. Even the right answers to the wrong questions do not mean anything to your problem. Instead I should’ve asked:

How did I get in the maze in the first place?