**370 Pounds and Plans That Never Stick**
It's 2:47 AM and you're standing in your kitchen, empty pizza box on the counter, crumbs scattered across your shirt. The fluorescent light hums overhead, casting that harsh glow that makes everything look worse than it already is. You catch your reflection in the microwave door – distorted, but not distorted enough to hide what you've become. Tomorrow was supposed to be different. Tomorrow has been supposed to be different for the last 247 tomorrows.
You know exactly what comes next. The mental spiral. The inventory of failures. The disgust that starts in your gut and spreads outward until it's coating everything – your body, your choices, your complete inability to follow through on the simplest promise to yourself. You'll go to bed feeling like a fraud, wake up with renewed determination, maybe even throw out the junk food and download a new app. By Thursday, you'll be back here again.
This is self-disgust. Not just disappointment or frustration – those emotions at least carry some hope for change. This is the bone-deep revulsion that comes when you've let yourself down so many times that you start to believe you're fundamentally broken. When you look at your body and feel like you're wearing a costume of all your failures.
Here's what nobody talks about: self-disgust isn't actually about your weight. It's about trust. Every time you make a plan and abandon it, you're breaking a promise to the most important person in your life – yourself. At 370 pounds, you're not just carrying extra weight; you're carrying the accumulated evidence of every time you said you'd change and didn't. Every abandoned gym membership, every meal plan that lasted three days, every mirror you've learned to avoid.
The worst part? You're smart enough to see through every bullshit motivational quote and transformation story. You've read the studies on willpower depletion. You understand that most diets fail. You know the statistics on long-term weight loss, and they're not encouraging. So you're trapped between knowing what you need to do and knowing how rarely it actually works. That's not weakness – that's intelligence meeting a genuinely difficult problem.
Society has convinced you that the solution is more motivation, bigger changes, dramatic transformations. Join a CrossFit gym. Go keto. Eliminate sugar completely. The bigger the gesture, the more serious you are, right? Wrong. Those dramatic moves are actually feeding the disgust cycle. You're setting yourself up for failures that feel so significant they validate your worst beliefs about yourself.
The truth about self-disgust is that it's self-protective. Your brain has decided that if you feel disgusted enough with yourself, maybe you'll finally change. But disgust isn't a motivational emotion – it's a rejecting emotion. It makes you want to turn away, avoid, escape. When you're disgusted with your body, you don't take care of it. You punish it. And punishment isn't a strategy for long-term change; it's just another way to hurt yourself.
Here's the reframe that might save your life: You're not broken. You're overwhelmed. The gap between where you are and where you want to be feels so massive that your brain shuts down rather than face it. That shutdown isn't moral failure – it's biological. When a challenge feels impossible, we avoid it. When we avoid it long enough, the shame becomes its own problem, bigger than the original issue.
You don't need more motivation. You need less pressure. You don't need a bigger plan. You need a smaller target. Most importantly, you don't need to fix your disgust by changing your body immediately. You need to interrupt the disgust cycle by proving to yourself that you can be trusted with small things.
But first, you need to sit with this feeling without trying to fix it. That's the work of stillness – learning to be present with discomfort without immediately reaching for solutions or escapes. The next time that familiar wave of self-disgust hits, don't run from it. Don't try to motivate your way out of it. Just notice it. Say to yourself: "I'm feeling disgusted with my body right now. This is painful, but it's not permanent."
Start documenting when the disgust hits hardest. Not to judge it, but to understand it. Does it come after eating? In the morning when you're getting dressed? When you see old photos? You're gathering intelligence, not evidence for your prosecution.
Finally, identify the smallest possible thing you could do that would feel like keeping faith with yourself. Not something that will change your body – something that will change your relationship with commitment. Maybe it's drinking one glass of water when you wake up. Maybe it's taking your vitamins. Maybe it's walking to the mailbox every day for a week. The goal isn't transformation; it's demonstrating to yourself that you can do what you say you're going to do.
The path out of self-disgust doesn't start with your body. It starts with your integrity. One small promise kept at a time.