Always Something There To Remind Me

And then, after yesterday’s mope session, I found this site surfing through blogs.  Besides being in your face, bluntly honest, and truthful, it reminded me of something important.

I used to weigh 265 lbs.  I don’t think I’ve posted one of my worst pictures yet on here, so let me refrain from better judgment and go ahead and paste more fat pictures of myself around the internet.

It’s hard to remember a typical day but let me go ahead and try.  I would wake up in the morning, tired as all get out, because I snored really badly and didn’t sleep well.  My back and ankles and knees often hurt.  I would look in the mirror and not really recognize who was there.  I’d grab a huge energy drink and drag myself off to work.  People knew not to really bug me until after lunch because I was barely coherent (which wasn’t at all a detriment to my job, because I worked until ungodly hours of the night to make up for it).  I’d duck out of the office around noon STARVING because I hadn’t eaten yet, and ingest typically 1000+ calorie lunches that made me sleepy.  I’d work the rest of the afternoon into the night, drinking coffee and caffeinated diet soda all day to keep me going and ingesting another 1000+ calorie infusion around dinner time, plus a drink or 3 or 10 almost nightly while playing games/working from home/watching TV.  A successful weekend was one where I didn’t leave the house or have to get dressed.

Just plodding around on my feet was tiring.  I didn’t like doing anything active because it was just exhausting.  I missed out on a lot of awesome San Diego things simply because I was too fat and lazy to enjoy them.   The only exercise I really enjoyed was DDR, because I could do it in my “uniform” (skirt and tank top).  Changing into pants to go to the gym or walk around was uncomfortable.  I enjoyed cruise vacations because everything else involved too much walking.  I didn’t want to admit it, but my life was governed by the fact that I wasn’t in great shape.  I had convinced myself I had just grown out of enjoying physically active things, but the truth was, they were just painful and scary because I was so big.

I went between wanting to change (and falling asleep crying because I felt so powerless) and deciding I didn’t care, I was going to put my career first and deal with it later, but I was never HAPPY with my appearance.  I’d have my feeling cute days, but they were few and far between.  I tried a few times, but nothing ever stuck.  I didn’t approach it sensibly, with the attitude that I had to have a whole mental paradigm shift.  I would decide it was salads and celery for me, and back to the gym I went.  It would last for a few days and I’d be so sick of it and have a bad day and eat a cheeseburger and fries and skip the gym and then get so guilt ridden and angry at myself that I was weak and didn’t deserve to be skinny and just give up.

The Anti-Jared said that the movie Click brought him to tears.  It also elicited a very emotional response, that while it wasn’t tied to my weight per se, it did start me moving in the right direction and headspace to move away from 100% focus on work to actually tending to other aspects of my life.  I try to make sure I have fun and eventful things to do often enough that I don’t feel like I’m fast forwarding to some cool thing in the future.  I can list at least a half dozen things I did in the last week that weren’t “just what I do every night”.  We used to have to really try to do one of those a month.  Not weight-related again per se, but it’s easier to go to dance lessons and roller skating and biking and swimming when you’re in shape.

Now, this is how I roll.  Small difference in 2.5 years, eh?

Yeah, so I might have indulged a little bit this weekend.  Yeah, the scale might have shown a scary number yesterday.  Yeah, I might be a little angry at myself for twisting my ankle so I have to lay off the poundypoundy.  However, I am no longer obese.  This body has taken me through a 13.1 mile race (as well as other shorter faster ones).  It can skate and climb and dance and bike and swim and springboard dive and – well, other things I’m sure I have yet to try and can’t wait to discover.  It has energy for days and days.  I can walk into any store and pick something up and it will fit me.  I look hot in a wedding dress (and even a REAL wedding dress, which I had no confidence in at all), which was the first motivation behind starting the weight loss THEN and having a goal.  I was not going to bother having a wedding if I looked fat in all the pictures.

So the last 15-20 lbs – it will come off when it’s time.  I’m feeling a bit like I did during those times when I had all those false starts before 2007, but it’s different.  This weight is not effecting my quality of life, it’s totally vanity (unless my doctor tells me to lose weight, I don’t think being less than 5 lbs overweight by BMI is a big deal).  Also, I’m not giving in like I have in the past.  How can I?  I can either continue to eat the way I do and maintain my weight which does not suck at all, or I can give a little extra and start chipping away.  Giving up before meant going back to living the way I did, and that isn’t gonna happen.

These are all the thoughts I had last night, and after a nice, healthy day of eating under my belt and a good night’s sleep, I woke up to 153.4.  Not my low weight, yeah, but somehow my body saw fit to shed 3.4 lbs.  I’ll take it, and continue to see what progress I can make with the rest of my week.  I’m sure I’ll get crazy again in the future, but it’s always nice to be reminded how far I’ve come, because it puts into perspective how little I have left to go, and how much less significant it is to even get there.