The P.J. Weight Reduction Challenge Update 4
For those of you who’ve enjoyed–or at least tolerated–following along with my weight loss efforts, another update.
It’s upsetting to be a skinny person all your life, whether a bona fide in shape skinny person or a skinny-fat skinny person, and then suddenly be fat. And to have your doctor tell you that you are, in fact, obese! When this happened, denial set in. I didn’t realize, until I’d gotten over my denial (which was brought about by seeing some extremely unfortunate pictures of myself just, you know, standing there and doing nothing), how bad it was. Or how much I’d let myself go, simply by refusing to acknowledge the fact that this was a real problem for me. That I wasn’t 18 anymore and size 18 clothing on a 5’9 person weren’t all that glamorous.
Which isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with being any size–there isn’t. The right size for you is the size where you’re healthy, and confident in yourself. Screw what the magazines say, and screw unrealistic expectations–of beauty, and of everything else. But for me, this was never about thigh gaps or convincing myself that I was worthy. It was about feeling good about myself, both inside and out.
And that, because our culture is so image obsessed, is a sadly overlooked aspect of weight loss and of health in general: it’s not about looking good according to some arbitrary standard, or even about living longer, but about enjoying the time you are alive. I used to be fairly athletic; when I stopped moving around all the time, I started to feel…gross. And the more gross I felt, the easier it was not to move. The health conditions I do have started getting worse, and I developed a couple of new ones. Nothing major, but still unpleasant. I was exhausted all the time, and for no good reason. I could have been a size 5X or a size zero, and it wouldn’t have mattered: the point was that I wasn’t myself.
A couple of friends of mine have commented on my dedication to exercise, and how they find it both inspiring and vaguely intimidating. My response is that motivating yourself to get out there and work it every day is easiest when you focus on the immediate benefits of exercise: not of losing weight, or of regaining your health, because those are long term benefits, but of banishing stress. Banishing (for me, along with medication) anxiety and depression. Banishing the afternoon “I need a nap” slump. Feeling like a wrung-out towel but also like a goddess.
Losing weight and regaining your health are awesome, and I’m trying to do both, but those are arenas where you see only the slowest of changes–and only over a very long timeline. It’s not like you’re going to hop on the TreadClimber, hop off, and have lost an inch around your waist. But after an hour on that baby, I’ve busted stress like nobody’s business. Give yourself a reason to do something every day, that has immediate benefits on that day, and you’ll want to do it every day–just like you formerly wanted to eat cupcakes every day. Oh, wait, that was me.
Stress is a huge part of my life, for a lot of different reasons, and I used to cope with that stress by eating. Which doesn’t make me proud to admit. Now, I cope with it by killing it in our home gym.
Have I lost weight? Yes. I was an 18; now I’m a 14/16. You can’t spot reduce, but most people’s bodies drop fat from different places in–for lack of a better term–a preferential order. Mine loses from the top down. Hello, reduced bat wings! Being in the in-between phase makes finding clothes hard, because some things get tighter as you both build muscle and lose fat, and some things are suddenly so loose that they’re falling off. But really, it’s not about the clothing size, or the scale. It’s about finding out who you are under the layer of apathy, denial, and inactivity.
Is anyone else on a similar journey?
How’s it going?
