Hi everyone. Back in 2011 this subreddit inspired me to start trying, really trying, to lost weight. I was 15 years old, 5'4 and 180 pounds, and had been fat (or called fat, at least) my entire life. It certainly wasn't the most straightforward trajectory downward, but from my sophomore year of high school to the end of my second year of university, I eventually reached 115 pounds. I was 20 years old and suddenly my life was so fundamentally different: I was independent, living in across the world from where I grew up, starting to fall in love with the man who'd become my husband.
I was in control of my life, my relationship with food, my body.
I wasn't obese. Then I wasn't overweight.
I was thin.
But. Somewhere around 130 pounds I started to suspect that I wasn't going to look like I hoped I would look. I lost weight through calorie counting, I didn't overly worry about what the food I was eating was. I relied on cardio. Between those habits and my natural fat dispersion, I didn't know if I would look, well, good at the end of this. I started to compulsively look at progress pics, trying to find pictures of people who lost weight and looked like me: with my flabby belly, uneven, like candle-wax melting. My chunky thighs, my big calves.
I continued to cut. I surpassed my goal (set at 15, with no real concept of what being that small would be like). I weighed between 118 and 115, and maintaining it for the next year left me an anxious, sick wreck. I obsessed over the concept of skinny-fat, creating this reality where even though I had achieved my goal I still wasn't good enough. After all, I still hated myself naked. I still could feel and grab these fistfuls of subcutaneous fat and loose skin. I got smaller, knowing there was still fat to lose. I tried to lift weights, never eating enough to make any meaningful progress.
I started my masters, exhausted. And so was everyone else-- despite my obsession with my fat stomach I was gaunt everywhere else. I gave in, my masters was hard and miserable, and I indulged. I sought out therapy for my disordered eating. I got rid of my scale, at the end.
Another year passed and I had to get on a scale at the GP. I weighed 130 pounds. I couldn't bear it. I bought a scale, logged into lose it and started again. I was unemployed, steadily losing, back to 118. I moved home, got a job, moved my fiancé across the world to be with me. "Settled" in: trying to get through each day of work while trying to cope with how my life is going to be for...the foreseeable future.
This morning I'm back up to 126. A completely reasonable, healthy weight. I crave a healthy life, where I exercise for joy and because I am strong and able. Where I use my love of cooking to eat fresh, unprocessed and healthy meals that I am proud to eat. But instead I feel my stomach's heft, I see its roundness. I feel incapable of sustaining healthy habits because I am so exhausted with how my body makes me feel, even at it's thinnest. And I cannot bear the work and stress it took to maintain that thinneness, when I was still so unhappy.
I feel so lost: at one point weight loss, exercise and health made me feel empowered and capable. Now I'm consumed with disappointment and guilt, and cannot appreciate how far I have come, the health I now have. I don't know what to do.
TL;DR: I lost 65 pounds between through high school and university but ended up so disappointed with what I ended up looking like that I've ended up with a worse relationship with food and my body than I had before I lost the weight. Has anyone else ever felt this way?
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/30Ttm7h
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