It's gotten easy to make crappy food choices on a daily basis. Cheat meals have slowly turned into cheat days, and now that has kind of morphed into cheat weeks. I'm slowly being sucked back into my old food habits. There haven't been enough veggies on my plate in weeks.
It's gotten easy to skip workouts. I used to feel antsy and uneasy if I missed one day a week in the gym. Lately, I'm lucky if I get there one day a week. I haven't been to a class in weeks. I have been doing some at home workouts on the Wii, but they are sporadic and my body is really missing the tough weight training.
It's gotten easy to not step on the scale everyday, to not be too worried by the fact that my weekly weigh ins have be +'s for weeks.
I've fallen off of the wagon and been run over by it. And gained about 10 lbs in the process.
The actively losing part of this weight battle was easy for me. I knew where I wanted to get to, along the way I learned what I needed to do to get there, and I just did it. I never felt deprived food wise, because I still allowed myself treats. And the end goal was far more important to me than the cookies, or ice cream or junk food. The weight came off of my body fairly quickly. The problem is that I don't feel like my brain could keep up.
It's a hard feeling to explain though. Since I hit my goal weight last September (holy crap….that's almost a year ago!) I've been waiting for an "ah ha" moment, some epiphany that would some how make everything easy, but in a positive way. I had no idea while I was losing the weight that maintaining would be such a struggle. I have never thought about my weight and worried about the scale so much in my entire life as I have since I got to goal. I thought that the habits that I created while I was losing would be firm enough to just kind of carry me along and that I would just live life at my healthy weight kind of mindlessly.
Boy, was I wrong. My obesity is still a monster that lurks behind me everyday. And 19 months of good habits apparently aren't enough to write over 20-some years of bad ones. Imagine that.
A lot of my mental struggle is fairly childish, and of the "it's not fair" variety. It's not fair that I still have to work so hard to maintain a healthy weight. It's not fair that I can't have a metabolism that let's me eat whatever I want. And maybe the biggest one….it's not fair that after all this time and hard work, that I still have body image issues. My skin is too stretched and loose to have the flat stomach that I've worked for and 'deserve'. I still don't see an accurate version of myself when I look in the mirror.
That's the biggest epiphany I've been waiting for…to someday be ok with my body. I expected it before now but honestly don't see it coming any time soon. I feel stuck in kind of an endless circle right now. I worked really hard and did everything right, but I still wasn't really content with my body. So why work so hard and not eat the muffins and cookies and hamburgers and fries? If I'm not going to be content anyway, I'll just eat whatever I want.
All of this sounds very 'poor me'. And honestly it is. But I do know that I am not the only one that has this struggle or these feelings. I also know that there is no going back to the way I was. I'm afraid enough of the obesity monster to keep it from ever catching me. I just need to trust that some day my brain might catch up with me body and that things will get easy in a good way.
Until then, I'll wrap up my little pity party, remember to be kind to myself and get back to doing what I need to do.
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