What is Thinsanity?

With the upcoming release of my new book on the horizon, a lot of people are asking me this very reasonable question.

And, now that the book is finally written, I thought I’d share the answer with an excerpt from it …

An obsession with thinness is driving us crazy. And the only tangible result most of us see from endlessly battling our bodies is the number on the scales rising over time. Even the few who achieve the ‘ideal’ aren’t immune to the madness, and live in fear of weight gain. We are suffering from a pervasive type of insanity around the size and shape of our bodies that I call thinsanity.

So what exactly is thinsanity? It’s:

• wasting ten years trying to lose the last 5 kg
• walking into a room and checking to see if you’re the fattest person
• eating everything in sight before your diet starts Monday
• pining over old photos, thinking, If only I still looked like that – nostalgic thinsanity
• twelve-week challenges (thinsanity parading as a health kick)
• compromising on dating because of your size – romantic thinsanity
• feeling embarrassed to exercise in public – court of weight-biased-opinion thinsanity
• feeling ashamed to eat in front of others – supreme court of weight-biased-opinion thinsanity
• feeling too fat to go to the beach – high court of weight-biased-opinion thinsanity
• cutting out whole food groups – dieting thinsanity (introductory)
• obsessing about forbidden foods until you binge on them – dieting thinsanity (intermediate)
• feeling guilty for bingeing and eating even more – dieting thinsanity (advanced)
• anorexia, bulimia and Binge Eating Disorder – clinically diagnosable thinsanity
• body dysmorphia – rare type of body image thinsanity
• body dissatisfaction – normal body image thinsanity
• keeping thin clothes from decades ago – ‘Marie Kondo is crying somewhere’ thinsanity
• yoyo dieting – a highly popular form of thinsanity.

Although you may not have had a word for it, you must have asked yourself why you have remained stuck in your personal version of thinsanity. Maybe you questioned:

• ‘Do I not know enough about food?’ Unlikely … most of my clients know enough about food to write a book on it!
• ‘Am I just lazy?’  Maybe, but every day I see clients who struggle with these issues while taking wonderful care of their families, working in really difficult environments and enjoying success in other areas of life … Are they lazy? I don’t think so.
• ‘Have I not found the right approach?’ Getting warmer. Most people wanting to lose weight do some type of diet and exercise plan. While they all claim to be different, science suggests they all tend to fail in the long term. This means, in essence, that they are not different.

Albert Einstein said, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ And this is exactly what we are doing in our pursuit of thinness. The most problematic element of thinsanity is our refusal to escape it. Despite all the psychological, physical, social, financial and spiritual costs of repeatedly trying to lose weight without lasting success, we are still unwilling to do anything truly different.

And we’ve been making it worse. We ‘experts’ have been making you feel the way you do when Mum says you can’t have a second piece of cake but Dad tells you it’s okay.

‘What the hell do I do?’

One ‘guru’ is promoting the benefits of intermittent fasting, another high fat/low carb, and another keto – all claiming theirs is the only one that really works.

Medical professionals are institutionally taught weight bias. They may believe you have to lose weight if you have a BMI above 25! (This, of course, is not true.)

Fitness experts are really into health and wellness (naturally – it’s their job!). They’re often young and haven’t yet experienced the changes their bodies will undergo. From their perspective, you can lose weight and look like them if you just ‘put the work in’.

Health at Every Size^® advocates want you to forget about weight loss completely and learn to love the skin you’re in. But the absolute rule of weight neutrality may favour an ideology over what is best for you personally if there is a reason why losing weight would significantly improve your health or quality of life.

Bariatric surgeons believe weight loss surgery is your only option, but surgery has risks that may outweigh the benefits – especially if you don’t actually need it in the first place!

Practitioners of alterative interventions* can get carried away when purporting their benefits. The reality is that the weight losses that result from them are quite small compared with what most people are looking for, and longer-term research is still on its way.

‘So now I’m confused and depressed – what is the answer?’

We’d both love this to be the part where I tie up everything nicely in a neat little bow (really, we would), but the reality is that this is an imperfect puzzle. And the puzzle is being complicated by a massive war going on between the experts – a war for power, money, and your custom. I won’t be doing my job if I help you pick a side. My job is to help you find a path through that is right for you without getting caught in the crossfire. Rather than giving you a one-size-fits-all answer, I will walk you step by step through how to find exactly what works for you as a unique individual. In this way you’ll be working with yourself rather than against yourself, and that will make all the difference in the long run. After working through this very problem with thousands of clients, I know we can always find the solution together.

Without further ado, let’s get started on the Thinsanity antidotes, so you can stop the madness and get on with living the great life you are meant to live …

Now you have a better idea what thinsanity is (and why it is so important for us to overcome it**). In my next email I’m going to share part of the first step, so you can start making the changes that will help free you from thinsanity forever. (The next blog has been released, read it now!)

And if you want to take all the steps with me, why not pre-order your copy of Thinsanity: 7 Steps to Transform Your Mindset and Say Goodbye to Dieting Forever NOW with our special:

Yours in freedom from thinsanity,

Glenn

*Like tapping and hypnosis.
**In the book I talk about my struggles with thinsanity, and how I overcame them.