Shame on Me or Shame on You?

I shame myself more than the combined amount of shaming I get from family, friends or strangers. Is it because I am overweight or is it that I lack confidence? I think I lack confidence because I am overweight and therefore often make myself feel shame or guilt. Sadly this is part of the spiral that makes fat people fatter, we make a poor choice and then shame ourselves so badly that we turn to food to feel better or punish ourselves.

Lately I have found myself being shamed for different things however. The first is sleeping in. When I was a teacher, I would sleep as long as I could before I had to get ready to be at school. I had to be in the classroom for 8:45 and ready to teach. I might hop in the shower at 8:00, gobble down a quick breakfast and be out the door, walk up the hill and into my classroom for 8:40 just in time to greet my students for the day. Not much has changed, I do the same with appointments or parties to this day. I retired early, I am just now 50... but many of my friends are working during the day, so the other retirees I am spending time with are often quite a bit older than me. I am not sure if that is the difference, as you get older maybe you rise earlier, but I have had more than 2 ladies now comment on HOW much I

sleep in.

I mean, I can sleep until 11 o'clock, so when I say sleep in, I mean it! How they react though has made me feel like, this is simply wrong, and I should not be doing this. In fact, I already felt guilty about it, so when they made comments, like, "you've got to be kidding me?", it hit home. (okay, I guess I really am lazy and sloth-like, thanks for confirming that for me.) I had been setting my alarm to go off at 9:00 a.m., well at 8:50 birds chirp, then at 9:00 Google says the weather, tells me a joke and reads me the world news. At 9:15 music plays and finally at 9:30 an actual alarm goes off. I was getting in the habit of being downstairs by 10:00 and enjoying a morning routine of coffee with protein and playing my word games. This schedule seems to have been derailed by the recent time change and ovulation, yes that is right my ovulation of all things, another post will be written about that shortly. But here I am having trouble getting out of bed again before 10:30. The first question people ask me is what time I go to bed. I am lights out by I would say between 11:00 and 11:30 p.m. each night. I wake up 2 times to pee and sleep hard after 6:00 a.m. it seems. It takes me a long time to feel awake.

My husband is lights out by 10:30, while I read for another 30-40 minutes. He however wakes up on average by 6:30 a.m. and I almost never hear him get out of bed. He is getting typically 8 hours of sleep a night, whereas I am sleeping closer to 10 or 11 hours per night.

When I was teaching, I was always tired. Just before I retired I was napping for 90 minutes about 3 times a week and sleeping in on the weekends. If you ask me, I would tell you, I likely need more sleep because I am overweight... again a self-blame game. I have no idea if that is true or not? I am much more rested now, and don't feel in a constant state of tiredness like I used to. If I sleep too long, then I do find it harder to fall asleep at night, but also my back gets sore if I stay in bed too long. How long do you sleep a night? Do you feel rested when you wake up? Do you wake up at the same time on weekends as you do during the week? Let me know in the comments.

Okay, that was a long rant on its own, enough for a solo post likely, but alas, more shaming has been done, so I continue - lol! The other recent shaming I experienced, which I have had before, is for the amount of sugar I eat. Now, I know that added sugar is not good for you, so maybe being shamed for eating sweet treats is not a bad thing - they care about your health and want you to be in better shape... but at the moment when you are eating it, it hits like a brick. A recent example is that I was at the curling rink and had to bring my breakfast with me, as I slept in too long and didn't leave myself enough time to do this before my carpool (this is not a surprise to you after you just read the above l-o-n-g spiel about sleeping in until the last minute... should I mention I don't get picked up for curling until 12:30 after lunch - sigh!) I digress, I brought a Tupperware of my chocolate oatmeal. Two different ladies commented on how that wasn't good for me and how they eat their oatmeal with only cinnamon, nuts and milk. (Well goodie for you, I seriously wish I could choke that down, but I need sugar or it tastes like cardboard to me.) Of course I did not say that out loud, but after all my diets, I have tried and tried to get rid of sugar and I honest to gawd feel like my body just needs it. I am lying to myself I am sure, but without it, I am miserable. Yep, my mood, but also is it possible my body is so used to it that when I do not have it, it misses it - kind of like a friend? Life is better with a friend, right?

Yes, I will actually have withdrawal symptoms when I go cold turkey, no added sugar, any addict does, and I am addicted to sugar for sure. Lots of people say this, but in my case I know it to be true. My brain literally works differently when I am eating sugar, it doesn't think, it just does. I guess like a drug it lowers my inhibitions in a way. But with all the talk of food noise and Ozempic, etc. I would say when I am eating more sugar than I should be, my food noise disappears because my brain doesn't let me take the time to really think about my choices, it just does it before I can even say no almost. That's why when I want to do Weightwatchers or "get back on the wagon", I need time. I need at least 4 or 5 days to be really present and determined to say no, to drink the water, to deal with the headaches and cravings. If I can get at least 1 week of eating on track into the schedule, then it becomes MUCH easier to say no and to have control again. I have had friends ask me, "so are you on or off your diet right now? Just want to know so I can make us supper plans?" I totally get why they ask this, they are not wrong, but it does knock the wind out of your sails to know that your friends know you so well that you probably already fell off your diet. I have had friends say, "How can you eat that?", "I would throw up if I ate that much chocolate?", "Are you getting two scoops of ice cream?", "I could never eat that for breakfast"... For all the internal dialogue I have, if I actually decided to eat 2 scoops of ice cream in front of another person and not hide it from the world, the last thing I need is someone to call me out on it.

Now all that said, I am guilty of shaming other people for just the opposite. My husband has definitely been poked fun of for not having cravings, for eating too boring, for making me feel bad because I want to have a treat and he is not hungry, for not wanting to share a piece of cake with me... I have also judged him for his extreme dedication to exercise or doing his physiotherapy every day, twice a day and how consistent he is. I mean, he is just being awesome and doing what he should be and I shame him for those habits...

I guess this whole post, even though I talk about specific shaming, is simply to say it happens. When it does happen, what do you do about it? How do you feel? What are you shamed for? Do you call people out when they do it and how they make you feel? I tend to internalize it and say nothing, more guilt and shame for me to feel, even if they didn't mean it that way at all. Intentions can be good, but that doesn't mean it makes you feel good.