The fat girl inside me I never let eat
March 23, 2008 – 10:31 pmWhy is it that some girls never see how fat they really are and then, other girls never embrace or accept how much weight they have lost and how great they now look? I think girls who have spent an indefinite amount of time being heavier than they wanted to be learn to adjust their thinking to that size ( both in positive and negative ways) but there doesn’t seem to be any diet that really helps with the mental angle of accepting that you are no longer fat. Perhaps it is something touching close in the brain to what affects anorexics and bulemics. They look in the mirror and see something disorted from what is the truth. Its never good enough, it’s never thin enough. I think, often, women (and men) trying to lose weight can fall prey to a similar mentality.
For about two months, we were attending WW meetings on Wednesday evenings and one of our local success stories was attending the same meetings as us. In a year, he had dropped nearly half his body weight and now he is a tall, lanky runner who last I had heard, had run five marathons. A year. November of 2006, he was over 300 pounds and now you’d never know it. But one night, at one of the meetings, even he said that he struggled at times with realizing and accepting that he was no longer that big guy who hadn’t eaten a piece of fruit in over six months.
It’s nice right now because I constantly have something to focus on - getting to that smaller weight. Whether it is two pounds, twelve or twenty, I have my eye on the prize and hardly let it wander elsewhere. But will I really see myself the weight I am when I reach my goal? Will I accept that when I look in the mirror, I have actually reached the destination that I was looking for? I try not to compare my weight to anyone else’s. I attend school with a girl who this week was struggling with her appearance in general. But one of the days, she kept asking us if she really looked like she weighed 160. She’s shorter than me and more round then me in general, but its strange to think she only weighs less than 10 pounds less than I do. I can’t gauge where I am with my own personal weight by looking at her, can I?
Of course, another side to this entire mental breakthrough for those who have finally lost the weight is the judgemental side. You finally lose the weight and find that it was easier than you had dreaded it would be. Suddenly, you start to notice all the other people around you who could stand to lose their extra weight buy don’t and you judge them. You feel this sense of superiority, because you are no longer them. I am not saying everyone who loses the weight becomes that kind of a person, but sadly, it is easier to fall into that mentality than one would like to admit. Several years ago, someone even sent a postcard into Postsecret about it:
I don’t feel as thin this time around at my current weight then I did last time, or even the first time I really lost weight. You lose and gain weight differently each time, from where it goes on to how it comes off. So how do I go about convincing myself that when I reach my goal weight that I actually am that thin, or even acknowledging now that I am not where I was twenty pounds or even two months ago?
