291 - Contemplating the Ups and Downs

I saw this and it hit home. Made sense.

PRIORFATGIRL:

One moment, I’m holding my head high, confident that healthiness is about how I feel. Healthiness is about balance, about life. Healthiness is about how I feel, not what I weigh.

And then, the next moment, I find myself struggling to embrace who I am in my own body. Struggling to love myself for who I am, not the weight I gained.

What is healthy living and living healthy?

When you’re up, you’re up and when you’re down, you’re down.

When you’re up, you feel like you have figured it out.

When you’re down, you feel like you’ll never get there.

When you’re up, you make eye contact and stand proud.

When you’re down, you compare and retreat.

What is an up without a down.

 Very true. Right now, today, this moment, I'm on an UP. I feel good, I'm motivated. I'm tired of how my clothes feel. I've had 3 good days of eating and tracking. My weigh-in says I've lost 2 pounds. Great. Good. Love it.

One thing I know though, is that no matter if I'm UP or DOWN, I'm thinking about food. My life revolves around it. Does that ever change? If you're an emotional eater, does life ever stop revolving around your (addiction to) food? Right now I have some simple go-to foods that I've eating on a rotating basis, basically just to keep my calories where I want them. Even though they aren't special or spectacular, I'm still finding I'm thinking about the food. Not obsessively, but probably more than I should. I'm forced to think because I'm tracking it, too.

As I read the above blog, though, I had a two-sided reaction.


My first reaction was ahead hanging knowledge of the roller coaster, the ups and downs and in betweens. How when you're UP you can't imagine being anything but, and when you're DOWN you so badly want the magic, the feeling of being UP. I don't know what it is that triggers those times when I'm motivated and all is going well, and what is missing when I'm not.

Find that, and I bet you've got the golden ticket for a LOT of fat people. How many people have you seen lose weight, perform complete transformations on their body, only to gain it back again. How can you go from 400 pounds to 190 and then back to 400+ pounds? I mean, it's slow. It happens, you have to notice, right?

Seems almost akin to fighting a cancer that just wants to be in your body. If your body just wants to get fat again, it will trick your every being into getting there. It will cut you at the soul, remove resistance, and push you back where you were. No matter the humiliation, no matter the tears, no matter how bad you want it - it WILL get you there (see WLS patients who have gone back to their HW and then some... what gives?).

My second reaction was the realization that I can have joy at 294 pounds. I truly can. Maybe I can't have the activities and the body in clothes that other people have, but I can have joy. I've found ways to be happy that come from other sources besides my physical being. That is truly important. Disconnecting the failure and success of my life and its joy source to the state of my body. Praise God for that. People with less mobility than myself are happy. Truly happy. People larger than myself are happy -- just as happy as the 105 pound marathon-running triathlete. Some even more so.

There are people that would look at my fat, happy newlywed friends and think, if only they were healthier and thinner. But if they shut off their own inner stigma, they might notice they ARE HAPPY, and having the TIME OF THEIR LIFE.

In no way am I disputing that having a smaller body can't or won't increase my joy base. I'm sure it would. But I'm also encouraged by people who find joy no matter their circumstance. Love the body you are in, accepting it.

My personal comfort in my body isn't where I'd like it to be right now. I'm at about 60% capacity. I think, with some weight loss, I could be at 80%, and that would bring me 20% more joy.