A horrifyingly long winter saw me gaining back 10 or so pounds, but I've finally crossed over my 50lb loss mark for good. 51lbs and 29lbs left to go :) So I thought I'd repost this again: http://losingbaggage.ca/2013/03/a-reflection-on-a-50lb-loss/ _________________________________
When I started losing weight, my intention was not to change the way my body looked. I had an occasional day of hatred for the pudge on my fingers, the rolls on my stomach, but the majority of my days were spent feeling comfortable with the softness of my body. When I started losing weight it was to help the air enter my lungs when I lay stationary in my bed, it was to calm the tightening in my chest, soothe the aches in my back, settle the hard rock forming in my stomach.
When I started losing weight, I did not realize that I would be trading in one type of comfort for another, that I would be learning a new type of confidence, that I would be showing myself “a new kindness”.
Weight loss is gradual, your pants start to feel loose and then they start to fall down your hips. Sometimes you feel like you’re buying a new bra every week. These are the “big” changes – the ones everyone knows about.
“They” don’t tell you about that day, when you look down at your hands while you’re typing and they are not your own hands. Your wrists look small, your knuckles jut out, your fingers are long. “They” don’t tell you about that night, when you’re laying in bed, naked, and you look down at yourself and the body that you see is not your body. When your hands take over and they re-learn, feeling parts of yourself that you’ve never felt; feeling collarbones, hip bones, feeling less than what was there before. Is that… a rib?
“They” don’t tell you about the way it feels to run into that coffee table for the thousandth time. The moment of confusion when the table connects with bone, like you’ve never felt before, because the cushion is gone. “They” don’t tell you that something you’ve done a thousand times can feel brand new. And not because you’re a new you, but because 50 pounds of you is simply gone.
“They” don’t tell you that the attention comes seemingly overnight. You think, “I’ve been losing weight since July, why is this an all-of-a-sudden kind of thing?”. It comes from everywhere. Bombarded with exclamations, compliments, expectations, complications. It is flattering, overwhelming, and sometimes, it’s scary.
It is interesting, to find yourself feeling more “fat” than you have ever felt, when the impact of your loss hits you in a way you were not expecting. 50 pounds ago, most men would not look twice. 30 pounds ago, every day was not filled with exclamations of my “wonderful self-improvement”. It is a strange thing, to become a socially accepted weight and consider that you had always felt accepted even when you were not.
“Shedding” weight has never been an appealing phrase to me. But that’s what this is. You shed a skin, you become a version of yourself that is the same, but different. You become aware of things you did not know and you mourn the loss of parts of you that you knew well. You find a different love for your body, you wrap yourself in a different blanket of comfort.
And I am proud of myself, but there are days that I am not. There are days when I miss the oblivion. There are days where I question whether or not it was “the right thing”. When a man stares just a bit too long, when a girl who wears a different size glares at the dress I am trying on, when a family member asks why I waited so long. Because sometimes it feels wrong.