Being a Happy, Healthy Me

I wrote this post in response to a message posted on my weight loss support group boards. Sometimes, I need my own reminders, so I saved it here.

Someone who came up right below your post said it best - "the easiest way to lose weight is to love yourself first" (thanks, Tyrone!). From experience, I so, so, so know this to be true. I know the exact feelings that you are talking about - self-loathing, completely powerless, a complete and utter failure. The thing is, though, I *did* lose the weight -- and felt the exact same way after. I kept it off for 3 years and a whole new set of problems crept up. I eventually gained it all back, plus 30 more. With the help of this site, I lost that extra 30, and then realized I was on the road to the same place -- thinner and healthier physically, but still a mental mess. Those feelings do a real number on us, and we end up thinking, "If I could ONLY be thin, I would be happy. If I could just lose some weight, I could go out and have fun. If I could JUST get to X number of pounds, I can start to live my life."

Don't wait. Start living your life right now, and do it by accepting yourself as you are, forgiving yourself for "letting yourself get like this", and making little tiny changes each day to both increase your physical activity, choose healthier options to eat and, what I think is most important, start convincing yourself that you're amazing no matter how much you weigh on a given day - you aren't "good" for kicking you butt at the gym and eating a salad for lunch, and you aren't "bad" for eating something unhealthy or skipping a workout -- you're amazing for your commitment to being the best you that you can be, one second at a time. Eventually, those seconds will pile into minutes, hours, days and weeks -- and before you know it, you will be a healthy, happy individual again :)

Pride

Today, Christy from the LWD group (my weight loss group) asked the group a question -- "what are you most proud of?" At first, I was flooded with a bunch of achievements, like losing 40 pounds and working out more regularly -- so I hit "reply" and started typing. Then something stopped me. I realized I wasn't sure exactly how to put what I am  most proud of. In fact, a bunch of NEGATIVE thoughts had started trickling in for every achievement I could come up with; instead of simply, "Yay, I lost 40 lbs!", there was a nagging little voice in the back saying, "Yeah, but you gained 12 back already, slacker." 

Not cool, self. Not cool.

These are the thoughts that I think a lot of us deal with on a daily, if not hourly, or even minutely, basis. The little, niggling background voice that weedles its way into any positive thought or happiness that manage to be created. I'm working on getting that little voice to just, well... shut up. It's a conscious effort these days, but I'm waiting for the day that the positive self-talk replaces the negative self-talk all on it's own. So, after thinking about all of that, I wrote my response:

"Hmm.. I'm proud of a lot of things, from tracking for the past 3 years consistently, to coming to terms with the fact I have a disordered relationship with food and a food addiction, to losing almost 40 pounds and only gaining back 12 of it when I decided to stop tracking and try to "find my hunger" again, to making a commitment to exercise for at least 45 minutes only 5 days a week, rather than all 7, to not feeling like a failure when life happens -- and for letting what I eat get in the way of living my life, rather than letting my life get in the way of my diet.

But really, I think the thing I'm most proud of is realizing that my starting weight did not make me a bad or any less of a person, and for forgiving myself for "allowing" my weight to get that high in the first place. I'm proud of becoming my own very best friend, and for trying to treat myself as such when I look in the mirror. :)"

And that is that!