Hi! So this is my first post on Reddit, ever. I've been at odds about posting this all week, because I'm embarrassed.
I'm trying really hard to find the motivation/ discipline for my second weight loss journey. (Yes, my second one, unfortunately.) Any motivation I have is fleeting and short lived. I'm 5'4, 205 lbs, and have been overweight 90% of my life. My weight is almost like my...protection of sorts. My invisibility cloak. The only time in my life I was thin, ever, was after my first weight loss journey, and that was short lived because I never figured out how to handle my stress without binging, and how to co-exist with junk food. (I've struggled with EDs in the past, and have always had a unhealthy relationship with food, using it for comfort from abusive and stressful situations.)
My first journey was in 2006. I had no idea what I was doing back then, to tell you the truth. I grew up in a family full of women who were miserable, had EDs themselves, and thought you weren't shit unless you were thin, thin equals happiness, thin is everything. As the only fat kid in that house, well, you can imagine how my life was, I was bullied relentlessly. My mom is someone who's on a new cringe starvation diet every other week, refuses to change her lifestyle, refuses to exercise. I was a fat kid, teen, and adult, to the dismay of my family.
As an adult, I was the biggest of my group. I was 230 lbs. My bf was tall and thin and ate crap all day, never overweight a day in his life, and all my friends at the time were smaller, but also ate unhealthily and drank alcohol on the weekends, so I had nobody to ask for advice on healthy, sustainable weight loss.
I didn't know what to eat to lose back then, (there's so many eating plans), so for the first 50 lbs I lost, I just winged it, and did CICO and walked on my bike path. In the beginning, I drank water nonstop, was eating cheap processed garbage foods (but thought it was healthy at the time), like Yoplait light yogurts (60 cents a piece, I lived on those and had a whole fridge full of them!), rice cakes, wheat bread, bags of frozen broccoli that I'd steam, and those boxes of frozen battered fish (Van DeCamps), and I thought I was SOOO healthy, lol! I never let my calories go over 800 a day. I kept a food journal, if I went over 850, it was a bad day. Obviously, I couldn't stick to it, and didn't know at the time I was starving myself and needed more calories. For the second 50 lbs the next year, I started doing low carb, and between that and my cheapo elliptical, holy hell, the weigh just FLEW off! I became addicted to the comments on how tiny I got, and I got REAL admiration from my toxic family for the first time ever who hated me fat, but now worshipped me bone thin. This made me feel great, because before I felt like a failure in their eyes, and now I suddenly was somebody important, somebody worthwhile who accomplished something they never could.
With my 100 lb weight loss came newfound confidence. My relationship with my family may have "improved", but my other relationships were failing, because my longtime bf, who was supportive at first, became very insecure and jealous because other men were noticing me for the first time in my life, and he hated it. We would fight everyday about my weight once I got around 130. I wasn't a ghost anymore, I suddenly got positive attention from people. My female friends, suddenly were turning on me. There comments ranged from "You aren't the same person you used to be, you used to be so cool", "You need to slow down, you're getting TOO small" to "You really think you're better than us, don't you?" They'd sneak in any passive aggressive comments they could, and I'm not sure why. Jealousy? To put me in my place? Who knows, but back then, I thought they were my friends.
What should have been one of the happiest times in my life kind of took a dark turn. I lost over 100 lbs, but I also lost my bf of 10 years, and most of my friends left with him, siting "you changed, we don't know you anymore." When me and my bf broke up, he immediately started dating someone new, (who was bigger,) and my life fell apart. I was forced to move back into my toxic childhood home because I had nowhere to go at the time, and suddenly my family wasn't so buddy buddy. Shortly afterwards, I was attacked by a male acquaintance, who attempted to harm me in a really bad way. I made it out alive, but it all put me in a bad place mentally, and I began to question on if being thin was so great, and if I would have still been almost killed if I was bigger. I suddenly despised any attention I got, and started regaining. I just wanted to be a ghost again.
I realized a small part of me didn't want to lose weight again for a long time, because even though positive things did happen, my life fell apart, and I guess on some subconscious level, I associated being thin and attractive with bad things happening to me. I'm over that slump, and ready to kick ass again.
Some days, I'm super motivated, eat well, workout, lose a few pounds, and will be so INCREDIBLY PROUD of myself, and then I'll get so stressed again, and fight hard not to give into my old bingeing demons. Lately, they've been winning. Sometimes I wonder, what's the use? But I know I can do this, I did it before, I can do it again.
Thoughts? Sorry this is so long, and thank you for the advice.
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