Like several others on this site, I had my gallbladder removed a few weeks ago (despite taking the meds to prevent stones) as a complication of WLS. My husband, who is an acupuncturist, tells me that the gallbladder in Chinese medicine represents judgment. I have judged myself harshly my entire life, and it is part of the reason that I got so heavy and struggled to take and keep the weight off. Since the beginning of my WLS journey, I have worked hard to not judge myself when I struggle or have not made the behavior changes as quickly as I feel I should have.

How many of us have eaten something, beaten ourselves up for eating and then eaten more to cope with the negative feelings? I know I have. More than ever now I need to pay attention to the "judge" inside of me, and I am making a commitment to let go of self judgment as much as possible and to be compassionate while being accountable. Being accountable to eat healthfully (Protein first), hydrate and move my body is essential to being successful, but for me so is balancing it with being mindful about self-judgment.

I posted a bit about mindful self compassion in another thread, but thought I would start a thread about letting go of judgment and self compassion as it is a research-based practice that has been really helpful for me. I read so many posts where people are being so harsh on themselves. Perhaps this works for some, but if it isn't working for you, consider checking out Kristin Neff's work on mindful self-compassion.

http://self-compassion.org/category/blog-articles/

I totally agree - where I'm most inclined to mess myself up is blurring the line between self-compassion and accountability. Still working on that!

Edited November 9, 201510 yr by 2goldengirl

I totally get it. It's a vicious cycle. My personal experience, however, has been that food existed independently of everything else in my life (and consumed it like a cancer). It didn't matter whether I was sad, happy, depressed, ecstatic, nervous, stressed, angry...what have you, it was just there in the same ruthless form in January or June, and in morning, night, or noon. It knew no limits, no breaks, and no compassion. But I can understand why people with actual emotional eating have it so much worse. It was easy to become numb to it the way I experienced it. Hence, why I was once a 50 BMI.

That said, I think we can be fair evaluators of ourselves to a certain extent, but we really need to avoid the danger of letting our dietary choices, body shape, and everything else related to weight percolate the much bigger picture of who we are. The more sources of self-esteem and pride we can find in the world outside of the physical image, the better positioned we are to isolate this one troublesome area of our lives. Successful individuals tend to have enough of these outside identifiers that there simply remains no room for judgment based on food problems. But we also don't want to become so full of ourselves that we lose sight of the issue we all came here to work on.

@ thanks for your comment - I totally agree. What a challenge to focus on this WLS process to be healthy and yet not overinvest self-worth in our physical image at the same time.