I wish I had a t-shirt that read: "I said no to a lot of cheeseburgers to get this skinny." At present, I'm 3.8 pounds away from my goal weight. When I started, I didn't have a certain weight or size I was hoping to achieve. In fact, I was shocked when those first 20 pounds actually came off. All I knew was that I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to get on the scale and be presented with a number that didn't make me cringe. And now that I'm pretty much there, at a size 4, I'm not quite sure what to do with myself.
Being on the Weight Watchers program and successfully losing weight using the app on my iPhone was, yes, sometimes a challenge—but sometimes it didn't feel like one at all. I have incredible discipline (don't ask me how), and I've been very conscious of every single food and drink that's crossed my lips over the past seven months. Most of the time, I didn't feel like I needed any outside encouragement to keep going. I'll admit that it would have been nice, but even so, I was able to do it on my own. It's only now, that I'm wearing jeans I never thought possible and looking in the mirror at a beautiful woman I've never really known before, that I wish I'd had that support. Victories can be lonely when you feel like you have no one to share them with.
I started blogging about weight loss in attempt to deal with how it's affected me emotionally—the stuff I feel I can't always talk about without sounding like a bitch. Do my friends, who aren't dieting, want to hear about how excited I was when those size 4 jeans finally fit? Probably not. Will people who haven't been on this journey with me understand what it's like to sometimes forget that I'm thin until I look down at my lap and think: Where did my legs go? I've always been sensitive to the feelings of others, maybe too sensitive, and I'm terrified of my success being misconstrued as bragging. I think any reasonable person would be.
What you might see when you look at me is a woman who's fortunate to now be thin, and who's probably forgotten what it was like to be overweight. What I see is that my risk for obesity-related diseases—certain forms of cancer, high blood pressure, pre-diabetes—have all been washed away because of the lifestyle I've chosen to lead. I see thousands of dollars in possible weight-related medical expenses that I'll never have to pay. I see a woman who didn't necessarily like herself for 34 years, but now can finally look in the mirror and think she's beautiful. But I didn't get here without a hell of a lot of hard work, no matter how cavalier I may seem about the process.
If you're with me at a restaurant and I'm eating a salad with fat-free ranch, rest assured that I'd rather be eating a cheeseburger and fries. I don't always like the choices I've had to make to lose weight, but I've made them in spite of myself, and I'm glad that I did. I'm the only one who has to live inside of this body, and it's a hell of a lot easier for me now than it ever has been before.
I'm not sure where I'm really going with this one. I'm sometimes concerned that people will look at me and see a thin girl who has it easy because she's never really known how hard it is to feel ugly. Or that people might think that now that I am thin, conceit has gotten the best of me. Really, the most important thing for me to remember is that it doesn't matter what other people think—it only matters what I think. And for now and always, I'm choosing to love myself.
