Myth #22 Weight loss pills work
Myth #23 Weight loss pills help with long term weight loss
Working full time was a big adjustment from the student lifestyle. Teaching is overwhelming when you’ve been doing it for a long time but when you first start, it is a herculanean struggle to try and figure out what needs to be done, do it, see if it works, tweak it, and try again. Self-care and exercise start to go further and further down the list of priorities, and eating to replace sleep was how I tried to cope with it.
About June in my second year of teaching, one of the parents in my class came in for parent-teacher-interviews at the end of Term 3, and she’d lost loads of weight. She was looking very svelte, and seemed very pleased with herself. I asked her what her secret was and she told me that she’d tried these weight loss pills, and the weight had just fallen off.
Well, 2 years into teaching and nothing else I was doing seemed to be working, so I thought I would give this a try.
I thought this sounded amazing! I had a family holiday coming up in the September school holidays, and parents to impress with my adulting prowess – I did not want the lecture about how teaching was going to ruin my life and how I’d be doomed to stress and fatness.
I got it in my head that both of my parents would approve of me more when I was thin. It’s not based entirely in reality, but brains are gonna brain, and I did not want my parents giving out to me about my size while we were supposed to be celebrating Brendon’s 21st.
My first teaching job was turning to shit, and ultimately, I would quit the week before this trip, after nearly two years of trying to please a principal who had already made up her mind that she would never be pleased.
I had gotten myself into such a state that I was depressed, utterly hopeless, near suicidal, burnt out, had stopped eating because ‘I wasn’t good enough for food’ and a whole bunch of toxic stuff.
But the weight loss pills? They were AMAZING! The weight just fell off. I was no longer hungry, and had to force myself to eat.
My boyfriend at the time, a science teacher, picked up the jar in my room one day, and was utterly astonished. “Lauren, are you seriously taking these?”
“Yea, why?”
“Just looking at the list of ingredients, and this one here is going to ruin your liver, this one here is going to ruin your kidneys…”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Do you not look into these things before you put them into your body?”
“….No?”
He shook his head in dismay. “Lauren, you’re beautiful how you are, you don’t need this shit!”
I count myself very lucky to have always had a long line of guys willing to wax lyrical about my beauty at any given point in time, ulterior motives aside.
Parental success criteria is a powerful force. Or at least my perception of parental success criteria. It takes a lot of intentional disentangling to extricate oneself from it.
I truly believed that my parents approved of me more when I was thinner. Sure, they loved me and everything, but they liked me more when I was thin. I could probably build a case to that effect, but I suspect if I presented it to either of them, they’d be devastated such a thought ever entered my mind.
I completed the month’s course of weight loss pills, dropped two dress sizes, and went off to Australia feeling great!
When we believe slightly insane things, we do slightly insane things.
I believed my parents’ approval conditional on my thinness, and if I could control my body, then also perhaps I could control my career which was crumbling before it got off the ground. So I took weight loss pills, as if it was an entirely normal and inconsequential thing to do.
I was congratulated for my weight loss.
I grinned, and thoroughly enjoyed our holiday on the Gold Coast.
Successfully duped… that time.
Who was really duped though?
As soon as I stopped taking them, I ballooned back to the weight I had been prior to taking them, and then a little bit more for good measure. It seems my body was convinced there’d been a famine, and it had been starving.
It was utterly pointless! And expensive – over $100 a month for the pill subscription.
A quick fix never really fixes anything.
The slow, small, incremental change is the way to go, but holy moly, it is so much harder.