Starting weight: 240
Current weight: 234
Change this week: +2
Total change: -6
Sigh. Well, I’d love to tell myself that my two pound gain this week is attributable to the fact that my period is due soon, but I think it’s more likely due to the completely uncontrolled way I’ve been eating. Oh, and the not exercising. That too.
The small bit of good news is that I continue to be able to keep my weekly resolutions about taking my lunch to work and taking the stairs. This feels like it means relatively little in the grand scheme of things, but it’s something.
It’s been a very pretty weekend here, and I’ve spent quite a bit of it outside. I was in a crowd of people at an outdoor music event on Friday night, and I found myself looking around to see if I was the biggest one in the immediate vicinity. Here’s the weird thing: I often do that—check around to see if I stand out as the largest one around—but I am pretty much unable to compare myself to others with any accuracy. I mean, I am aware of certain facts about myself: I have brown, wavy hair, brown eyes and pale skin, I am 5’8” tall, I wear size 18-20 tops and 20-22 pants, size 10 shoes…I have the numbers down. But if you lined up 10 overweight women, I’d have no idea who was closest to me in size, whose body shape was similar to mine, etc. It’s a strange deficit.
I think the hope and fear tension I wrote about yesterday is in play here as well. I am so afraid that the first impression I give people is “Fat Girl,” and that my fat is the most immediately remarkable thing about my appearance. But I simultaneously hold out hope that the whole situation is really somehow much less dire than I fear it is…that I’m going to suddenly realize one day that I’m being much too hard on myself, and really I’m just a wee bit above average in size. I think I’m held hostage in the tension between those two opposites, and the result is that I’m just completely confused about what I really look like.
I found, during my lard-busting adventures of a few years ago, that I got to be a little bit better about actually being able to see myself as I lost weight. I got so that I could appreciate when certain things looked good on me, and that was nice. Even so, though, the easiest way for me to tell that I’d lost weight was by touch. I got so that, laying in bed before a weekly weigh in, I could put my hand on my belly flab and tell whether it had gone down or not. The visual thing has just never worked for me.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. I’ve read on many of your blogs about how your internal body-image is a smaller person, and you’re shocked to see pictures or videos that make it obvious what you really look like. I’ve certainly had that experience as well. And yet I’ve had the opposite experience too. I took some digital pics of my body to use as a baseline so I could track my progress visually (in the event that there’s some progress to record…). I looked at them and thought “Really? That’s all?” It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. I mean, not great, but not as tragic as I’d thought.
Confusing. I’d really like to just have a realistic visual representation of my body in my head. I think it would motivate me to stick to this weight-loss adventure, and maybe it would also help me at times when I’m convinced that I’m too fugly to leave the house ever again.
4 comments:
Lately when I'm out and about I find myself looking at the others in the crowd to compare size. I tend to do this most often when we're at Disneyland for some reason, maybe it's worry over cramming myself into rides or something. Unfortunately for me I am always the biggest person around lately, even in comparison to many of the men. Being nearly 300 lbs. moves you WELL out of the range where you feel you can squeak by as just another "normally" fat person :(. Back in my home state of Missouri, even at my highest weight which was actually 25 lbs more than it is now, I could usually find a half dozen men and at least a few women that were equal or larger to my size but here in southern california there are almost never any people even close to my size. Either they hide in their homes or they just don't exist because of the strong body conciousness of the beach culture here. Either way, I feel like a freak most of the time. Luckily for me though, Californians are also pretty self absorbed. They are so concerned with how THEY look that they rarely seem to notice anyone else, but I notice and that's enough :(.
In my head I am a much slimmer, healthier person but when I look at others I am made very aware of how large I actually am.
Oi, achei teu blog pelo google tá bem interessante gostei desse post. Quando der dá uma passada pelo meu blog, é sobre camisetas personalizadas, mostra passo a passo como criar uma camiseta personalizada bem maneira. Até mais.
Hehe! - I went to an outdoor music thing on Friday night too and, although I didn't compare myself to too many there (I was too busy with my friends) I later saw a photo of myself that had been taken. It shocked the hell out of me. Guaranteed it was at a pretty bad angle but I looked HIDEOUS! The jowls! The jowls! My pudgy chipmunky face! Was that really me? I am just glad that when I saw it I was already at home and so could go and hide in the bathroom until I talked myself around. I don't know if it spurred me on or sent me back to square one but it made me realise that I am definitely not well affected by the sight of myself these days. Heh! - hence the beginning of 'the adventure', I suppose.
Onwards, comrades. :D XXXXX
My DH had this kind of revelation earlier this week when we were out at a café. On our way home, he said, "You know, I never used to notice your size, esp. relative to others, but since you've lost weight, it's different. Now I notice, you aren't usually the largest person in the group."
The problem is that no one I've met is really built like me, and more specifically like I was, which makes it hard for me to give away my old clothes - many of which were pretty nice.
It's odd. I wear about an 18 top and a 20 bottom, but weigh a good 20 lbs more than you. Maybe I'm an inch or so taller than you are - and have a slightly bigger foot. But even as close as we are numerically, color-wise, etc., I'll bet we don't look that much alike, even though we'd come out with a high statistical congruence.
*S*
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