I had a very dear friend, we’ll call her Sue, who was quite overweight (FYI I got Sue’s permission before writing this). Try as I might, nothing I did could convince her to drop the pounds. I invited her to exercise classes with me, insisted we eat only healthy foods together, I nagged and pestered, but to no avail. I worried constantly about Sue since she is a friend that I love and depend on in my life; I was so afraid she would be fat forever and then die, very young, from weight related complications, and leave me behind (since overweight people never die like us thin folks, from car crashes, or skydiving accidents, or getting run over by a charging rhino). I couldn’t imagine life without Sue and I just didn’t understand why she didn’t love me enough to stop killing herself by overeating.

So hopefully,  just reading this story starts cluing you into the many points of crazy in my thinking. Clearly, I had a ton of permanent beliefs here: 1) That when someone is overweight they will be so forever, that it will necessarily be the cause of their death, soon.  Needless to say this is all ridiculous –my own weight is all over the place, higher during my monthly ‘lady time’, around Christmas and vacations. It gets lower when I’m sick, when I get extra turbo in the gym, or when my husband–an amazing cook–isn’t around to cook for me.  Moreover, there are plenty of overweight folks that live long and full lives, skinny folks who die young and also who die old. My Grandma May was a ‘full figured’ woman when she died in her late 80s. My other grandma, a waif of a woman, died in her 90s. I look at cancer patients, like my dad, and they can get so so skinny; sudden unexplained weight loss is  a warning sign of cancer. This idea that health and life and death are all necessarily linked to weight in a fixed way is nuts.

Crazier still though, is that I believed that it was my ‘job’ as a friend to to make Sue lose weight. That if I could figure out the right thing to say or do I would control her and her actions. But really, is that what a ‘friend’ is, is that their ‘job’ — a weight loss coach ? Even if it was my job…could I do it? Could I control Sue? I thought back to when I used to smoke. I knew my family and friends wanted me to stop, it’s dangerous, but did I stop because someone else wanted me to? Of course not — I stopped when I was ready, when I had had enough,  when I no longer wanted the risk. Why should I insist Sue be any different?   

Craziest of all though was the belief that if Sue really loved me she would just become an  anorexic gym rat, like me.  First off, how in the heck did I make a friend’s struggle with their weight about me? About my loss and my needs? Moreover, this idea that love always looks a single way –that there is a correlation to being loved and to having the person who loves me do exactly what I want, defied so many of my experiences of love. When I was a smoker, did I not love my family and friends? Or did I just take love breaks while I was out having a cigarette? Back when I didn’t want to go to school and my parents made me, did they not love me, or me them, because we wanted different things?  

In essence I wanted something, someone, to be different than what they were. This is the very foundation of suffering. And suffer I did, with all those nights awake worrying about Sue, with my sense of inadequacy and frustration not being able to change her. And what about Sue? I certainly didn’t think she just loved being nagged by me; still, I jeopardized our friendship with my behaviors.  Honestly, when I look back at how I spoke to and treated Sue around this issue, I feel so fortunate she had so much more patience with me then I showed to her and that we are still friends today.