I was always a bit chubby as a young girl though I slimmed down some during my wild teenage years. I started getting pretty fat in my late 20’s and by the time I was in my early 30’s I was bouncing around 200, give or take 20 pounds. Giving birth to 3 kids didn’t help.
In 2006, at 217 pounds, I started Weight Watchers and got down to a very fit 147 pounds. I was hitting the gym 4-5x a week, 2 hours at a time. It wasn’t sustainable. My boyfriend moved in from across the country, we started going out a lot for beer and dinner, we stopped going to the gym, etc. I put about 50 pounds back on. A couple of years later I lost 30. Gained them back. Lost 20. Gained them back. Etc. etc.
In January 2018 I was 196 pounds and decided to try again and just see where I could get. This time I decided to do it differently. I wasn’t going to the gym, because I know I won’t keep going. I wasn’t going to track calories, because that just starts to fuck with my head after a while and I know I won’t sustain that either. So I decided I would try to “retrain” my body. I started eating less while still making good choices. I stopped drinking and started smoking weed (which actually suppresses my appetite rather than giving me the munchies). I weigh myself daily, once in the morning, and that is the only tracking I do. If my weight trends up, I eat less for a few days. If it’s trending down past my arbitrary range (120-123), I eat more (those are exciting days lol).
My initial goal was 145 and I reached it in about 10 months (late October ‘18). I decided to go for 135, then 130, then 125, then 120, which I reached in March. My rate throughout the process was about a pound a week.
I’ve been able to maintain this weight for the last 6 months and I really like being small. :D I feel actually tiny. I feel petite. It turns out I have a great waist-hip ratio and a thigh gap, who knew? I have the body I always admired in other women! I’m a size 4, wtf?
But underneath the tight skinny jeans I can finally look good in, and the close-fitting clothes... I am a mess. My upper arms are very muscular, but they’re covered in crepey, flabby loose skin. My ass is literally wrinkly old lady ass. My boobs are gone. Like, almost gone. From a 44 full C to a 34 small A. Too low, the wrong shape. I have vertical folds from my sternum to my belly, like drapes. My inner thighs are water ballons. If I lean forward or bend over, my stomach skin hangs down like an iguana’s dewlap. There’s a six-pack under there, but I only know that because I can move the skin to one side and see it. Surprisingly, my “apron” isn’t as bad as I thought it would be so that’s a blessing I guess. It’s not pretty, but it’s small, all things considered (obesity, 3 kids).
Most of this I can cover, but it’s summer, it’s hot, and every time I catch my gross, crepey, wrinkled, saggy upper arms out of the corner of my eye I’m repulsed by my own body. I’m so ashamed of the way my skin moves and looks that sex is becoming a problem (for me). No more getting on top, that dewlap just kills my mood, as an example). I can’t just bulk up for the rest of my life to fill it out, I’m already pretty fit and there’s WAY too much to fill. I just don’t think at my age that it’s going to spring back. I can’t afford and will never be able to afford surgery and even if I could, I couldn’t spend that kind of money on my own vanity when there are so many other uses for it.
I’m not really looking for advice, I’ve done the googling, I just wonder if anyone else is in this position and how you coped. I go back and forth between trying to cut myself some slack and be proud of the weight loss and just hating myself for being this way. I get down on myself for being vain but I just can’t seem to shake the shame and repulsion when I see my body and all the damage I did to it.
How do you cope?
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