I'm not poetic, everyone knows this. I'm blunt as can be with my words, and I don't usually know how to figure out flowery metaphors.
But there's something poetic, isn't there, about how the numbers on the scale aren't as low as I'd hoped they'd be at the end of this year, yet there's 5 kinks in my leather belt and I'm considering buying a smaller one. I can wrap my hand around my wrists, and touch my thumb to my ring fingers. When I shake my hand, my rings fall off. When I lift my arms, you can see the muscle. I have stripes of stretch marks, I've had them since I was 13 years old and its took decades to love them, and now I love them even more because when I pinch them and pull, the skin comes loose. I can wrap my fingers around my hip bones, they've never stuck out before.
6 months ago, if you asked me to run a small distance, I'd groan. Now I look for every opportunity to use my legs like that. The drinking fountain is a minute away, and by the time I get there, my heart rate hasn't even raised much.
I look forward to going to the mall and seeing if the numbers on my jeans are smaller. My mindset when shopping online has moved from "maybe I'm a large or extra large?" To "maybe I'm a medium or large?".
Yet the numbers aren't as down as I'd expected them to be, and I'm okay with that.
I'm not poetic, but this feels poetic to me. There's no way I can truly express how this feels, how good it feels to take my health into my own hands and understand my body and love every step of the way. Maybe I could write a fic pushing these feelings onto a character, or maybe I should keep it to myself.
But I hope I'm eventually an inspiring story. I hope someday people can ask me how I did it, and I can tell them it was easy. Slow, incredibly slow, sometimes frustrating, but easy. Because I didn't give up pizza, or cake, or ice cream. I didn't obsess over the gym, or exercise, or try those weird little trends that change every other day. I hope someday people can look at me and say "woah, I had no idea you used to be 40 pounds heavier, how'd you do that?" And I could say, "I never gave up."