Strong, confident, intelligent, fun, goofy, geeky, are just a few of the words I would choose to describe myself. No matter what has gone on in my life I have always known who I am, what I want and have trusted myself. That is probably why I’m struggling right now because I have been feeling a little lost. The confidence I had in myself feels a little shaken. I know that the process of losing weight is a process and I think the fact that I’m trying to work through a lot of changes is what is creating this shaky feeling. I know that there are a lot of pieces that go into losing weight and one of those pieces is an emotional piece. I know that without working through the emotions and rewriting myself for a new me I won’t be able to maintain the changes. Knowing it and doing it are two very different things though.
Having grown up heavy and never knowing anything different has meant that I don’t have a reset point. A lot of people that I talk to that are working to lose weight put the weight on after. They have memories of what it is like to be smaller. They know what it feels like to be smaller. I don’t have memories of being thin and have never had to know who I am as someone that is at a healthy weight. The only knowledge I have is of being bigger than everyone else and feeling different from everyone else. As I make more and more changes in my life to become the healthiest me that I can be, I find that it makes me question everything else as well. I’m entering a world of the unknown.
It is a strange and almost overwhelming sensation to question everything you believe and have held to be true. I will admit that especially in the last few weeks this feeling has been following me a lot and it is a scary place to be in. For the first time in my adult life I feel completely insecure and it causes me to second guess everything. I am spending way too much time analyzing the things I say, the things I do, friendships, family – basically everything that I experience in my daily life. I even think that might be part of the problem with the writer’s block I’m currently experiencing. That is why I wanted to write this blog entry. I’m hoping in opening up about this, it will help me move past it. I also don’t think I can be the only person that is struggling with completely changing who they are.
Logically I know that this is a journey I need to take. I know that as I lose weight I will continue to have to redefine myself because I am changing. I am rewriting habits that I have had for 33 years. They are things I have never really thought about and probably things most people don’t need to think about but that play a big part in my life. Everything from popcorn at the movies, or dinners out with friends and don’t even get me started on the idea of dating. (I have no clue how I will tackle that when it happens because so much of my dating life has revolved around dinners or movies…hehe)
I accept that it is part of the process I need to go through to be able to make the lifelong changes I want to make. Part of me wishes it was easier and that I didn’t have to go through the self-doubt, redefining and rediscovering the person I am. I know that the words I listed above will still apply (or at least I think that they still will) but until I’m done there is a part of me that is scared of how it will all turn out. It is hard to put some of the questions in my mind to rest. Things like ‘Will I still be me when I’m smaller?’ or ‘Will my friends still accept me?’ or even ‘Will it change things in my connections to my family?’. Each of these questions and so many more float around in my brain and none of them really have answers. Most of them don’t even have ideas of what I want the answers to be. Not knowing the answers or being able to control the outcome is probably what is causing me the greatest anxiety. There is no question that I like to have the answers and if I can have control over something generally I take it (maybe with a few exceptions).
The good news in everything though is that most of the time I can focus on the positive things. The confidence that comes with knowing that I’m doing the right thing has made it possible for me to have faith that in the end everything will work out. I also count myself lucky that I can turn to my writing to help calm my fears. The pages of my journal are filled with writing and musings that help me to find some peace with all the changes that I have been making. I know that the challenges I’m facing are going to help make me a stronger version of myself when I’m at a healthy weight. I am excited to see the outcome. When I close my eyes and picture myself thin I see a happy active woman with nothing standing in her way. I know that she is inside me and I know that the future me is the person that I want to be. It is what carries me along this hard journey to lose weight.
