FYI: This is going to be a new section of the blog. It’s going to be the question of the week. Sometimes I’ll take questions from what people ask me or sometimes I’ll talk about some questions that have come to my attention through reading and just normal life.
This week I took the question from almost every person I’ve met in the past 2 years. This is tricky for me because I really don’t know if people want to know the real answer. You may not like the truth that I’m about to lay out here…or it may not be a big deal at all. Keep in mind this is going to be different for everyone when you read this.
Yes changing my eating habits was hard but it soon became easier, unless it was time to eat out. Making time to work out was a struggle (and sometimes still is) but it’s manageable. My biggest weight loss struggles came emotionally in not knowing where I fit in and trusting myself.
Emotionally because sometimes I don’t know where I fit in. I’ve changed a lot due to the weight loss. I’m more adventurous. I’m more active. I’m more “I’ll try it” and “gotta get my workout in” than I was before. I sometimes feel lost or stuck between two worlds. I was always the overweight girl and didn’t care about what I ate or what I did before. When I say I didn’t care, I mean there was really no thought behind it. If I was hungry, I drove to McDonalds. If I thought I needed to be active, I went shopping to move around. Less thought went into things. My biggest social activity was eating.
I’m not that person anymore. I struggle because for so long people knew me one way and I’m not that way any more. I carry around guilt for it sometimes too. I struggle now with trying to live my life with my husband the way we want to live it now and not trying to hurt or offend the people who have known us for so long.
The change has been hard for me. Maybe change is just something that I struggle with in general.
When I finally hit my goal weight, I struggled with going back to “normal” life. Life after goal was the hardest part. Switching your mindset from weight loss mode to maintenance mode was not easy. Anyone who has lost any weight always has that fear of the scale creeping back up, right? It’s like I had to train myself again. But what I really needed to do was learn to trust myself.
Trust that I wouldn’t allow myself to go back into bad habits like emotionally eat or eat junk. I needed to trust that I learned a lot of great and healthy things along the way. I needed to believe that I was capable of living a healthy life even though I led a relatively unhealthy life for so long.
So here I am today, 17 months after my reaching my goal weight. I’ve gained some of the weight back but I honestly think I had lost too much weight. The biggest thing about losing weight is being fixated on the numbers. There’s no way around that. To track your progress you have to log your calories/points and weigh yourself. It was hard not to be fixated on those numbers when I reached my destination. I had to step away from it for awhile because I found myself being consumed with the numbers.
To make a long story short, the hardest thing about losing weight was trusting myself along the way. I don’t really think that is something most people thing about when they think about losing weight. But I’m here to tell everyone who is thinking or is on their own journey, trusting and believing in yourself will take you a long way! You just have to learn how to do it!
So that was heavy. Do you have a question you want to be considered?
