I might be a bit slow off the mark with this one, but I decided to watch Katie Hopkins' documentary 'My Fat Story' in the early hour of this morning (bloody insomnia). She is an outrageous woman who has made a career out of being incredibly outspoken and has taken the spot of the 2nd most hated person in the world, second only to Vladamir Putin. It's safe to say that next to no-one sympathises with this woman for purposefully undertaking an unhealthy experiment to put on at least 3 stone in 3 months and to then lose that weight through exercise and healthy eating on her own without any expensive personal trainers in the 3 months after her weight gain.
Throughout the programme she expresses her frustration that "fat people have forced me to do this". I understand her concern that in modern society more and more children are becoming obese, a fact which reduced her to tears because she believes their parents are feeding their children to death. I could bang on about all of the sociological reasons behind why this is occurring but something she revealed during the documentary was of more interest to me. She confessed that her need to be healthy and fit, restricting her diet and running like a machine is due to her need for control. She is able to control what her body looks like, but she is unable to control a disability she has, which is epilepsy. And in that I can sympathise with her, I am incredibly frustrated by how little I can do due to my illness, mental illnesses also have physical effects on the body which have hindered my attempts to gain some control over my body through exercise, weight loss and healthy eating.
The cold hard truth is that its not enjoyable to be in bed all day for many days of the month, its not a duvet day surrounded by snacks and binge watching TV. Being confined to bed because of an illness is soul crushing, people can criticise me for this all they want if they believe I don't have enough willpower to get myself up and going for the day, and to those people I say you haven't got a leg to stand on if you haven't lived through it yourself. I'm unable to control my illness, I have desperately tried various medications, therapies, diets, vitamins and I've read enough books and articles to wallpaper an entire house with. I'm not saying that I've surrendered to this illness, I'm simply expressing that these approaches don't work for everyone and unfortunately I seem to have been classed as having an incredibly hard to treat form of depression. If it were easy to fix it wouldn't be called an illness, and it certainly wouldn't be called the illness of the strong. Some days I can have every intention to kickstart a healthy eating and fitness regime in attempts to make myself feel stronger and to try to boost my flat lining self confidence. However, it feels as if whenever I air out these intentions to anyone I'm knocked down by a cold or some awful side effect of my medication or debilitating insomnia. It's relentless and I feel powerless. What really got under my skin when watching Katie Hopkins' documentary was that she is quite happy to dole out her opinions on that which she doesn't understand and hasn't personally experienced. Although she did eventually relent and admit that during this project she experienced how hard it is living as an overweight person and as such was forced to eat her own words. However, once she started to lose the weight she continued on to preach her mantra, and her methods because they were successful for her. However, much the same as treating depression, attempting to lose weight and exercise is a process that is unique to everyone and can be harder for some and not for others. RANT over.
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