After my parents and I watched the Oprah special that changed their thinking about obesity as well as mine, I must have watched this particular clip a hundred times.
Oprah is interviewing Amy Kane, aka @amyinhalf on Instagram and TikTok. I think I watch Amy's content every day of my life. I feel like two years ago, she was me. Prior to losing 160 pounds with the help of the GLP-1 medication Monjauro, Amy weighed around the same weight that I did when I started Wegovy.
But Amy, without my even knowing her IRL, has educated me about food noise. I felt like she knew me without knowing me. She could explain what was going on in my brain with regard to food obsessions and compulsions better than I could at the beginning of 2024. She discussed how she never imagined that she would actually open about "those noises" in her head, and I never imagined that I would be talking about "those noises" publicly, on the internet! Where anyone could find it! But without inspiration from Amy, I'm not sure I would be. Amy is brave, vulnerable, and is motivating this experience for me from afar. Oh, and her recipes are to die for -- you'll see more on those and on Amy, I promise. No gatekeeping here.
However, Oprah herself delivered a line that nearly brought me to my knees. She indicated that she spent so much of her life wondering why she was defective. (I know, why would a multimillionaire with a television empire like Oprah feel defective? That's the disease of obesity for you.) Why so many people appeared to her to possess "will power," and she didn't possess it herself. With medical developments regarding food noise and the disease of obesity, Oprah had the following epiphany...
"Y'all weren't even thinking about the food! It's not that you had the will power, you weren't thinking about it! You weren't obsessing about it!"
Believe me when I tell you that many people in my life, who are both alive and no longer with us, are and were thinking about the food the same as I was. Some of those people even have gone to extreme lengths to lose weight and are still thinking about the food. But... many aren't thinking about it. There really are people who live without food noise, and don't need medical intervention to keep it quiet. It's not will power; it the privilege to live without the genetic and environmental factors that contribute to the disease of obesity and food noise.
This epiphany was an epiphany for me too. Now I knew why, all of those years ago, my peers would look at me sideways when I enjoyed school lunch. Why I was the last one to still be sitting at the kids' table -- with seconds and sometimes thirds -- at family events. Why I would feel like every time I said that I couldn't control myself and just stop eating, people didn't believe me. Why some kids asked for new clothes as their reward for straight As... and when my straight As came in, I wanted takeout from California Pizza Kitchen as my prize from my parents.
MY PEERS WEREN'T THINKING ABOUT THE FOOD!
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