It’s About Making Babies!

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A segment of today’s Rachel Ray show focused on the cost of change. In today’s example, a lady lost a lot of weight, and also her friends. And I think men and women in bad relationships need to plan when they decide to leave bad choices behind.

On Rachel Ray’s program today she featured a poignant story about Hallie. Hallie dropped 200 pounds - and lost her friends. A life coach checked into what happened, and found a familiar story. Hallie’s family had been overweight, and many of her friends were obese. I wondered when the segment opened and showed Hallie’s ‘before’ pictures, that she chose overweight friends, pretty exclusively. When she rapidly dropped, after stomach bypass surgery, from 345 pounds to 140 or size 26 pants to size 4, she was no longer fat. Hallie related that she chose the surgery because she was so heavy she couldn’t do many things and her health was at risk.

After reaching a healthy size, Hallie was shocked that she had no friends left. They had faded away, one by one. Her family considered her an outsider.

Relationships. I enjoy NML’s good work on Baggage Reclaim. NML focuses on women that pick a particular class of loser, which she calls EUM - emotionally unavailable men. Baggage Reclaim attempts to help women identify EUM’s, to recognize that a relationship with an EUM is unhealthy, and to help women overcome resistance to leaving, and to help recover from a pattern of picking EUM’s.

I think of relationships as addictive behavior. I think all people are hard-wired for addictive behavior. Why? Look at work ethics - punctual, dependable, desire to continue (getting a paycheck, performing the assigned work, working with certain people, etc.) Look at smoking, problem drinking, and tell me these are fundamentally different. The difference is the impact on our lives and health, not on whether we seek comfort and resist changing.

Eating to excess is one such addictive behavior.

Rachel paired Hallie with an experience life coach. The life coach sat down with Hallie, on camera, and showed a clip to Hallie. Hallie’s mother was angry. Hallie’s mother explained that Hallie, while losing weight, continued to focus on losing weight and what it did to her. Her mother brought up clothes. Hallie threw out all of her old ‘fat clothes’ as she called them. Remember that Hallie chose to lose weight - these clothes reminded her of her fat days, and she wanted symbolic space. But her mother felt that everything Hallie said and did was a taunt, a criticism of her mother and her family, for not losing weight. Her mother contended Hallie had been selfish, not to hand her un-needed clothes on to other family members that could have worn them.

Hallie’s friends experienced much the same disillusionment with their former friend. Where Hallie was exuberant about her success in achieving a healthier size/weight, her friends felt she was criticizing them, by her example, for choosing to stay fat. They were uncomfortable with the implied, hurtful accusation, and the apparent thoughtlessness. They withdrew.

What the life coach told Rachel was that Hallie never intended to hurt anyone, she wanted those around her to be happy for her. But in her focus on her own success, she overlooked the emotional change that occurred to all her relationships. When something major changes in our life, such as dramatic weight change, we need to plan the emotional transition. And that often takes professional help.

NML points out that there are major self image problems with women that choose to stay with abusive, neglectful, or disrespectful relationships. Because most often the women that will stay with an EUM or otherwise hurtful guy will usually pick guys that give them similar relationships again and again. To live a healthier life, they have to choose a different set of life values. To change. Not just to drop one bad apple, but to live with different values, to use different criteria to think, “This guy might be worth a try.”

Change is a ‘little death’. A clearing away of the old life to make way for the new. Hallie didn’t know this, and many of the women wanting away from their current relationship don’t know this. That change has to be managed. The change has to be complete enough that the changed person on the other side of the transition won’t repeat the same mistakes of picking the wrong type of guy - instead, they will evaluate character, honesty, and respect before they ever consider an easy smile or easy pickup line.

On the one hand, those in abusive and neglectful relationships don’t often have many good friends. They may have been ostracized by their family for the kind of people they choose. So losing that old life might go mostly unnoticed as they build a new life.

I have always described the change of leaving a lover as a form of grief, and recommended professional, trusted assistance. But what about the happiness on the other side, as better people and better things enter the lady’s new life? That transition continues.

Like Hallie, women choosing to make better choices in relationships make dramatic value changes in their lives - that affect all their relationships. If they have friends from the old life that make the same old choices - she would have to plan that emotional change, to be able to hang onto bits of the past that she still values.

Hallie’s stomach bypass cannot be readily undone, and she would not choose to change her mind today about the surgery. Women that recover from choosing EUM guys find a new contentment and joy in life that they would never give up. But what Hallie’s life coach calls “an emotional plan” can reduce the unexpected costs of friends, family, and opportunities.