Mirror blindness

In our flat, we have a full-size mirror right beside the exit door. It is there so we can check our appearance before venturing outside. So, it gets looked into by me at least once a day.
And, for many fat years, I had almost perfectioned the art of twisting myself so I would not have to see my body as it was.
I knew what my "chocolate side" (ironically that is what they really call the most photogenic side of a person hereabouts) was, and I somehow manged to turn that side towards any reflective surface or any camera in the vicinity.
Only rarely did DH catch me unawares, and those were the pix I quickly zapped by when looking at photographs.
The result was that I *knew* intellectually how heavy I was, but I managed to convince myself I was "carrying it well".
That conviction was shattered on a hot day last year.
I had, the evening before, slipped a disk in my back and was, consequently, almost unable to move at all.
So, I was coming out of the shower and wanted to pick up my crutches from the umbrella stand beside the door. To get there, I had to pass that mirror. This time I was unable to perform the usual twisting maneuvre, and so found myself, unpreparedly, face to face with the bare reality of what almost 110 pounds of excess weight look like on me. Suffice it to say it wasn´t a pleasant surprise.
And that was the day I started on my weight loss journey.With a vengeance.

What I still have trouble accepting for myself  is how much and how long I managed to ignore the reality of what my body had become.
Even the loss of one physical ability after another didn´t get through that screen of denial I had built.
Not being able to climb the stairs without stopping several times and pulling myself up on the handrails? Not being able to bend over to pick up something, having to get down on my knees and stand back up every time? Not being able to stand up from sitting without leaning on something?
Every one of these should have started me frantically trying to get my body back into a more functional shape.
And, every one of these, if it had happened overnight, would have made me desperately seek for a cure.
The insidious thing is that the loss of my physical abilities came slowly. So slowly that the avoidance maneuvres could become habits without my becoming conscious of them. 
I was acting like the proverbial frog sitting in a pot of water that is slowly heated up, not reacting until things really get to a boil. I am, to this day, grateful for that slipped disk (which stopped hurting two days afterwards and hasn´t recurred that badly since), because it woke me up to something that was hurting myself much more, namely, my weight.

And I keep reminding myself to be grateful for every physical ability that returns with weightloss.
Getting up three flights of stairs without pausing, or just bending over to pick up  a dropped tool.
That´s what condensing myself is about, not some beauty ideal.
Getting back to the point where my body functions again the way the Lord constructed it.
I am grateful that this time, it seems like I´ll manage to do it. Finally.



Julia