Dealing with the Emotions of Losing Weight…

While I’ve been on hiatus from my blog, I grew a mustache. I thought it complimented my face pretty well, and I’m hoping it sticks around…

Okay, beautiful mustache aside, this has been the longest hiatus from my blog ever. I just haven’t wanted to write in here. What prompted me to finally make a little comeback was a conversation I had with Matt last night about losing weight and people’s reactions to it. While most of it I don’t really want to talk about on here, because it’d probably make me look like a raging ungrateful asshole, I don’t mind talking about some other things I’ve noticed… Plus, I’m having one of those days where I started nagging Matt while he was driving about dealing with traffic, and in turn I just made myself feel like a huge jerkface, when combined with my current issues I’m dealing with… It resulted in a not-so-fun start to my morning of basically feeling like the worst human being/wife ever. I’m fine now, or well, at least a lot better than I was before, but I still want to talk about the emotions I’ve been feeling lately. I’m not sure anyone will be able to understand this, and I’m a little concerned I’ll either come off as a wackadoo or being jerk, but MAYBE, just maybe, there’s someone else out there going through weight loss and will understand where this is all coming from.

I’m way too hard on myself. I always knew that losing weight would result in some emotions coming up and me having to deal with them head-to-head. I knew this day would come. I would have a serious battle with myself, and I think that’s been happening and festering inside of me for awhile now. I’ve lost close to 60 pounds (57 to be exact), and while everyone around me is really happy for me, cheering me on, telling me what an amazing accomplishment it is, I’m sitting over here not being able to enjoy it. Why? Because I still have so much more to lose to even be considered healthy. It’s gotten better, in terms of being proud of what I have done. I swear to God it has, but it’s definitely not 100% positive on my side of things.

It’s hard to look at myself in the mirror and feel proud of how I look right now. Well actually, that’s only half true. Half the time I look in the mirror when I’m wearing something I really like, I feel really good about myself and feel how I SHOULD be feeling right now. But then, half the time I look at myself in something, or after I’ve gotten out of the shower, and I feel terrible. I’ve still got fat arms, and honestly, I could go on here, but basically, I’m not happy with what I see. So it’s a 50/50 chance right now of me looking in the mirror and either seeing one of the following:

“OH HEY GIRL YOU LOOK SO GOOD! SO MUCH SMALLER THAN BEFORE!” (See in this photo I was feelin’ good!)

OR

“OMG WHYYYY AM I NOT GETTING ANY SMALLER? WHY AM I STILL A FAT BLOB?” (And thus I find myself making this face in the mirror.)

So friends, it’s been a battle. It really has been. Half the time I feel proud of myself, the other half of the time I feel like I need to be losing more weight on a weekly basis and that this whole weight loss thing that my body seems to be resisting against is the most frustrating thing I’ve ever dealt with and that I’m just a failure.

It’s funny because as I’m sitting here writing this, I KNOW that I’m not a failure. I really do! But then something just triggers inside my head, perhaps old demons from my past, I don’t really freakin’ know, but something sets off in my mind and starts telling me that I am a failure and that my numbers should be way bigger than 1-2 pounds (or sometimes a big fat zero). I do think the scale is a big part of it. Which is why I am declaring no weigh-ins until maybe, I don’t know, for a month? I said before I’d do every other week or whatever, but even that was frustrating. This will hopefully help prevent the thing that triggers my mind to basically verbally abuse myself, like some bootcamp instructor, telling me I shouldn’t be proud and I’m always going to be fat.

So it has been difficult to stop and smell the roses, which is honestly quite unfortunate. I SHOULD be stopping to smell the roses, because what I’ve done over the past 7 months is fabulous. I GET THAT. And I get that right now while I’m writing this. But I would be totally lying to you if I said that this is my mindset all the time. Because it’s not. I spend time just being mad that I am not losing weight quicker. I’m working on this, on improving myself and my brain, in telling myself that I am doing well, I’m on an excellent path. I think a lot of this stems from being younger and constantly being teased about being fat (especially by my brother, but most kids tend to torture their siblings and I know I had my fair share of pot shots at him), but that’s MY problem and nobody else’s. I chose to eat what I ate, even after I graduated from high school and after I moved to Seattle (when I put on the most weight). This is nobody’s fault but my own, and so I need to figure out how to get past the self-destructive thoughts.

What I will say though, is through all of these negative thoughts I have had, not once have I wanted to totally binge on shitty food (or at least not BECAUSE I feel upset). It used to be that I would stuff my face when I felt negative emotions. Someone called me fat? Oh, let me eat some cookies or greasy food to make myself better. But now, I don’t do that. If anything I just beat myself up for a little bit and then eat something healthy. Or use that negative emotion to make myself work out when I really don’t want to. This is the part I’m really proud of myself for and I feel like I’m finally taking the negative feelings and turning them into something positive, instead of shutting down and stuffing my emotions.

I think talking about how I feel, talking about how yes, sometimes I feel shitty about myself and my weight loss, and not denying any of that is really really important on this journey, or whatever you want to call it. If I’m not honest with myself, honest in how I sometimes compare myself to Matt and his weight loss (ugh I know, it’s bad and I try to make myself not do that) and can get jealous, honest in how I sometimes get annoyed when I feel like people are telling me I look “skinny” not because they genuinely think that, but just because they’re trying to be nice (this sounds ridiculously harsh and terrible but I can tell when someone is genuinely impressed with my weight loss vs. just being nice)…

Sometimes I need to be honest about these emotions in dealing with my weight loss and just SAY IT OUT LOUD. For the longest time I held in my negative feelings by stuffing them down with bad food. But I refuse to do that anymore and will be honest whenever I can be about how I truly feel.

So no, weight loss is not a 100% positive or glamorous experience. In fact, it’s really fucking difficult. Not so much in trying not stuffing my emotions away with food, but rather dealing with these negative thoughts that come up time and time again. I know it’s only going to continue as I lose more weight, but at least I am ready to deal with this all head on and not pretend that everything is perfect all the time. Because it isn’t, and this is me being honest and open about it.