Hey, I wanted to share some unsorted reflections on how my weight loss journey has affected me emotionally.
This is because, after 5 years of obesity I am finding a life that is very different from what I had gotten used to and it's honestly intimidating.
In short my story is, that I was skinny all my life, then developed an unhealthy relationship with food and gained weight fast. I went from 5"11 at 180 pounds to 250 pounds in two years when I started college.
This changed everything for me, I had intense body dysmorphia and detached myself emotionally for everyone around me. It was like the continuity of myself throughout my life was broken and there was suddenly this fat apathetic guy in the mirror, that I didn't recognize.
Even when I got out of the circumstances that we're causing my depression and moved to a different town, I still felt very detached from my own life. I was caught up in self loathing and had a lot of trouble making friends over it. I hurt other people emotionally and started to be excluded socially, which made me feel horrible.
I had tried a lot of different weight loss strategies over the time, lost like 45 pounds doing keto, that I gained back and tried CICO, which just made me even more sedentary due to fatigue.
The first thing that actually worked for me was starting to go bouldering at 110 pounds, because it gave me very actionable goals. I started going many times a week and made a lot of new friends over it.
For the first time I felt like I was changing my lifestyle rather than temporarily changing my eating habits. I'm now at 198 pounds with a much improved body composition and the last 5 years feel a bit like a bad dream.
Which leads me to the headline. There is so many positive things about losing weight, I feel more attractive (which is huge) and my emotional wellbeing was improved a lot. But there is still the aftermath, yes stretch marks suck I have them everywhere, but I feel like I lost 5 years and that really hurts. There is people I could have had a romantic relationship with, that I didn't notice because I was too bitter about myself.
At the same time nothing is lost of course. There is only one way, and it's forward.
I guess my point and opinion is, treat overweight as a symptom of a hurt relationship with yourself. Yes you can lose weight by itself, but lasting changes are the results of treating overweight holistically and working on all aspects of your emotional well being.
For me eating to I lose weight, became an automatism once my entire life surrounding it set me up to remove my emotions from food. The hardest part for me was to strike a balance between being aware of my eating and but not always having food on my mind, which made me snack constantly.
Honestly my overweight was/is a symptom of a long existing negative relationship with myself that only fully manifested when I was truly on my own with all safeguards removed.
Hope this helps someone be more at ease with themselves. Take care of yourself :)
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