Going through old pictures sometimes brings some realizations that I didn´t have when first looking at them. Namely, how much I was in denial about what my body looked like, even though these pictures also tell the story of clothes I grew out of, jewellery that didn´t fit around my fingers and wrists any more, belts that refused to close around my belly and went into disuse, and chairs I didn´t use any more because I was afraid of crashing through them, or having the chair wedged to my thighs when trying to get up again.
By now, at about half my excess weight gone, my facial structure has begun to reemerge from the blubber it was hidden under for years, and so has my waist. Just being able to put my hands on my hips again, instead of sinking into a roll of fat, is an achievement. Having most of the too-tight rings fit me again, too.
I have, these last weeks, been losing rather steadily at a rate of about a pound a week, and it seems that I am by now in the zone where that leads to results I can notice, in contrast to the start of my weight loss journey when losing a pound hardly made a difference in how I looked and felt.
Besides, I think my body is once more rearranging itself, meaning that my pants size ( and the size of my posterior) has been rather stable while my torso and my legs seem to be the places I am losing right now. Not that I am overly sad about that, as the stable pants size means I didn´t have to replace the size 22 pants yet, and the slimmer thighs mean that they take a lot longer to wear through.
At my top weight, I had to replace my pants about once every three months because the material between my legs was getting holey and worn-through. The pants I have now I´ve had for about nine months, and they show hardly a trace of wear at all.
Being back at a weight I haven´t had for over ten years still takes some getting used to. I still hesitate in front of every tight spot (as in restaurant booths or doorways) that I wouldn´t have been able to navigate, and putting laundry on the clothes line I marvel at the fact that those diminutive-looking panties are in fact mine.Seeing the size M in my smallest fitting sweater is nothing short of a miracle. And I still glance at my reflection in every full-legth mirror I pass, every time almost expecting to see The Blob again.
Knowing that the third-degree morbidly obese version of me is a thing of the past feels great.
But I know that I will have to be careful of my food intake for the rest of my life if I never again want to go back to that place.
And I´m glad that this time, I have obviously found out what I had to change about what I eat in order to go to a healthier weight.
Describing the difference between what my body feels like now and what it used to feel like would probably sound like unabashed boasting. For me, it´s the difference between being handicapped and stuck inside a straitjacket of fat that kept me from more and more activities, and being free.
And if I managed to get out of that straitjacket, so can everyone out there who has been handicapped by their fat bodies. Just never ever ever give up trying. If what you do doesn´t work, try something else. But keep trying. Perhaps you, too, will find something that works for you, the same way I did. It has been taking me twelve years to find it, but in the end, I have, by exclusion of the things that didn´t work, found a way out of my fat prison.
Being morbidly obese doesn´t have to be a life sentence. Nor do the limitations it places on what you can do.
Even if I know (to stay with he legal imagery) that I will for the rest of my life be on parole and have to stick to being good, else I get back into that prison I never want to see the inside of again.
Julia
Julia
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