Breakdown

Buck up, younguns.

cholloway88 wrote: »

Yes, surgery keeps me from exercising for right now until I'm cleared by my doctor.

Reasons I would like to lose weight:
1. My health! I want to live a long life and being healthy is part of that. It will be easier on my joints and my body.
2. I want to learn to love myself. I am my own worst critic and my weight plays a big part in that.
3. I want to be able to feel comfortable in my own skin. I dread going places because my friends love to take pictures together and it gives me anxiety.
4. I want to get past feeling so self conscious all the time.

@cholloway88, as @stepmill_jack said, you look gorgeous in your profile photo.

Your photo seems to have captured a moment when you were happy and were sharing that happiness with those around you. Seeing photos like that helps to remind me that beauty isn't about what a person weighs. Beauty seems to be more about believing that you are beautiful; or, at least, forgetting for the moment of the photograph that you think you might not be beautiful. (Because we all have beauty, we are all in possession of it. It's befriending that beauty within ourselves, and finding our own way of expressing it outwardly, that seems to be the part that is so difficult to do.)

Okay, moving away from the deep philosophical thoughts, at least for a little while:

I have health problems that make it extremely difficult to exercise, and I am losing weight. I lost a lot of "water weight" at first, and now I seem to have settled into losing about a pound per week, which is what I set my MFP goal at. I'm taking in fewer calories than I'm using up, and proving that math, science and CI<CO really do work.

And if I can do it, you can very probably do it, too.


As to the reasons why you would like to lose weight:

1. My health! I want to live a long life and being healthy is part of that. It will be easier on my joints and my body.

I've only lost 15 of the 125 lbs I need to lose, but I'm already feeling better. My feet don't hurt so much when I've been on them for a while; and I'm now much better than I was at catching up to my cat and bending down to scoop her up whenever she runs out into the hallway like she's not supposed to.

Losing weight - in a slow and healthy way, of course - is better for your joints, your body, your heart, your pancreas, your liver, your kidneys, your gallbladder... it's good for the whole corporeal kit-&-kaboodle, when it come right down to it.

2. I want to learn to love myself. I am my own worst critic and my weight plays a big part in that.

That one's a toughie. I'm not sure that losing weight, in and of itself, will necessarily help with that. But proving to yourself than you can lose weight, and seeing your successes on the scale and in the mirror and in so many other places, can help you shout down the skeptical and negative part of of yourself. If your weight is what your inner critic has been basing most of his/her/its criticism on; once you take that away, it will be easier to look at any other self-criticisms with a skeptical eye (e.g. "So what if I never became a ballerina? Ballerinas have miserably demanding lifestyles, and their careers are generally over by the time they're 30").

For me at least, losing weight has involved making friends with my body, and being kind to it, in ways that are helping me to learn to love it and the rest of myself. I hope it works like that for you, too.

3. I want to be able to feel comfortable in my own skin. I dread going places because my friends love to take pictures together and it gives me anxiety.

My nephew got married this last summer, and of course there are wedding pictures, and of course all his aunts had to be in some of them. I wish I had been thinking of my above advice about feeling and expressing my internal beauty, but I wasn't - the pictures make it pretty clear that I was thinking was "Try not to look too horrible. OMG, these pictures are going to come out looking terrible, aren't they? Geez, I hope I don't look too fat and awful."

Next time I'm roped into having my picture taken, I hope that I will remember to think about the people I'm with and what I enjoy about being with them. (Oh, and the weight I've lost; and the various small improvements I've made to my hair, makeup and wardrobe since last summer. )

4. I want to get past feeling so self conscious all the time.

The good news is that confidence, unlike knowledge or love or equanimity, is something that can be created out of being faked. Pretending to be confident can result in feeling confident, or at least in getting involved enough with what's going around you to forget about how self-conscious you feel. Weight loss can play a part in this because the better you feel about how you look, the easier confidence is to fake - or sometimes even to genuinely have and feel.

I guess I just feel like it's never going to happen for me. I'm going to be this way forever and i'll never lose the weight.

This can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you let it. Or you can decide not to, and to fulfill your own self-prophecy.*

(*No, I'm not really sure what "self-prophecy" means, either. I guess we get to define it for ourselves. )

Now that you’ve got the reasons you want to lose weight, make a list of the reasons why you don’t. That’s right, why you don’t.

If you didn’t have reasons not to lose, you would have done it by now. Now take the two lists and see what kind of deals or compromises you can make to get some accommodations for both sides. Avoid the temptation to just try to throw the don’t side under the bus. Both points of view are valid.

But this- hope. There’s reason for hope. CICO backed up with a food diary and some patience works. It really does.