I'm feeling fat today, I'm not feeling "clinically overweight", or "slightly over sized", I feel FAT. In fact, I've been feeling fat quite a bit lately. Thing is, my weight IS up by 2 lbs, big deal! right? I'm still well within my healthy weight range, and maintaining quite easily, and yet... I feel fat!
Here's where it gets weird: I've been shopping a lot lately, and having a hard time finding clothes that fit. "AH HA!" you tell me, the common "nothing fits me right thus I'm fat" syndrome. Not so, nothing fits because everything is too big. I've been going from store to store and trying on medium sized clothes and being exasperated at how huge clothes have become.
See, it can't be me who's smaller, cause I feel fat, so the clothes are getting bigger. Mind you, until a few days ago I was not really trying on small sized clothes either because I cannot feel this fat and fit in a small size right? So the mediums are getting huge, there's no way I can fit in a small, so whoever makes clothes sizes have no clue what they are doing.
Am I the only one having such thoughts? I've worked hard to lose weight, 70+ lbs, I've maintained my weight loss for well over 7 years now. You'd think that I'd be happy with my body right? When I do voice my concerns I'm rarely met with sympathy to be honest, people see my "small sized" body and think sarcastically "oh booo hoo, you're breaking my heart". Thing is, body image has nothing to do with size. I have felt hot and sexy while being overweight, and I have felt huge and disgusting well below my healthy weight range.
It's interesting to see how prejudice has no weight. When I was overweight, I faced all sort of odd looks and comments from the "naturally thin people" having to do with my over sized body. People could not see beyond how big I was. In many people's mind, I could not be intelligent, strong willed, competent even, and be that big. I had to be weak to let myself get to that point. I was even told that by a few people when looking for a job. That more than anything else fueled my resolve to get myself in shape and prove to the world that they had misread me.
Now that I've won that battle, those people look at me differently, but there's no way they can grasp what it's like learning to live with a new body, to learn to look at yourself in a different light. In a way, I'm still not part of "their world" because in some ways, I feel like a fake thin person. I'm in a sort of twilight zone really. To some I'm a whiny skinny bitch, to others I'm a fake, and impostor. Now I'm very well aware that all that is in my head, that's the whole point, people are not telling me these things, I'm making them up. Again I ask: Am I the only one?
Of course this too shall pass, it's just another fence to cross, but sometimes I wonder if I will ever get completely past this, if one day I will be completely happy with myself and my body. I know that on paper, in numbers, my body is fine. I also know that I'm intelligent, competent, that I am a good wife, and a good friend. I know these things, but some days...
"Be your own best friend"
I'm learning, sometimes I run backward a little bit, but I learn and start forward again. Maybe it'll never be completely resolved, but as long as I'm learning and moving forward, it's worth it. Right?
Changing your self-image is hard and takes time. I wore old jeans and T-shirts all the time in high school, and even won "Most Casually Dressed" in the yearbook.
ReplyDeleteWhile I was in college I had a part-time job in an office in San Francisco, so I had to dress up in business clothes and I felt like a big fake every day I went to work.
Then, one day there was some casual work event and I was finally able to "be myself" and come in blue jeans. The first thing one of my co-workers said when she saw me was something along the lines of, "Wow, you're always dressed so nicely, I didn't even think you owned a pair of blue jeans!" She thought the "dressed up" me was the "real" me.
Which just proves how you see yourself can be the opposite of how others see you.