The Fun House Mirror

I feel fat.  Why do I feel fat?  Because I'm losing weight.  Backwards, I know right?  But that always seems to be the way.  When I actually am fat, I never feel fat and that's when I need to feel fat the most.  But I don't.  I eat cookies instead.  When I make up my mind to lose weight and really put my heart and soul into it, week after week my brain says "I don't think you lost any weight this week".  I look in the mirror and I try to see if I can see any difference and all I ever see is fat.  I have an internal funhouse mirror that lies to me whenever I start to lose weight, or worse yet when I get down to an ideal weight it doesn't let me believe that I really am not fat anymore.  Let's be clear, I started at 205 pounds and I'm down 12.6 pounds in four weeks.  That's like 3 pounds a week average.  But even so, that means I'm still 193 pounds  Still fat.  But the mere fact the critic in my head tells me I've gained weight or not lost anything when I have in fact done well, well that's just not fair.  

When I was in my 20's, I weighed like 125 pounds.  I thought I was fat.  Oh to be fat like that again.  I was able to maintain my weight into my early 30's but then somewhere it all went South.  Well, since South is down, maybe it went North....or maybe it just expanded into North, East, South AND West.    Anyway, as I gained the weight over the years I'm not even sure how cognizant I was of it other than I had to keep buying clothes that fit.  Of course I would fool myself and say "This is the highest I'll go in size, I have to cut this out".  Well, yeah.  that bombed too.  That time I stopped weighing myself at 204 though I'm sure I got to be much more than that.  As I am known to say, at that point, I could have smuggled drugs into another country in my back fat and no one would know.  Not to worry, I say no to drugs, but not cookies.  Hence the hidden folds in my back.  And my chin.  And my, well, everywhere.  You get the picture.

I know people might think I'm being a little too self derogatory.  However, there's something so demoralizing about losing 70 pounds and keeping it off for three years only to slowly put it back on and be more than when you started the first time.  It's majorly discouraging and that makes you feel badly about yourself and so you start saying some not so nice thing.  Who wouldn't when they were a size 5 a few years ago and now they're a size not so 5.  But at this point I'm doing the right thing, and I have to just keep moving forward.  After all, I posted my weight on Facebook for all to see.  I did that as the action to start my motivation.  Let's face it no one in their right mind is going to want to go back to social media and be like "Hey guys...remember when I said I was 205 and that was my call to lose weight?  Well I hung up on myself and now I weigh 210.".  Yeah, no one wants to do that so I'm not giving up.  It's just that fun house mirrors are relentless.  No one likes to see them at the fair (unless you're really confident about your body) so having one reside in your head on a permanent basis makes body image a daily fight.  I have done this before.  I know I can do it again because I sure as hell am not going back to Facebook to say 210 is the new 205.  That doesn't work for me and if you're in a battle of your own to lose weight, don't let it work for you either.