So here I am. Back to where I was when I started working out at Living Lean. But that's actually not at all true. The number on the scale is back to where it was when I started at Living Lean. But when I started at LL I can guarantee you that I was not lifting the amount of weight I am lifting now. I am so much stronger than I was 2.5 years ago and that means something.
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| 2019 vs. 2020. There is a 30+ pound difference in these pics. But honestly, I don't see it and that's a good thing. |
You all know that throughout my entire journey I have struggled with feeling like what I'm doing is not "good enough". I have done so much soul searching over the last 6+ months that I feel like I am finally starting to get somewhere. I never felt good enough because that number on the scale wasn't where it's "supposed" to be. I didn't feel good enough because I never got down to a "small" size. I never felt good enough because my stomach was never (nor will it ever be) flat. The fact of the matter is that we live in an incredibly "fat-phobic" world. We live in world where people think they can LOOK at you and determine if you are healthy or not. They assume that if you're thin you are healthy and if you are fat you are not. So what I really wanted was to finally feel like I looked like I was "healthy". The problem with that is I was never going to reach that goal. If my goal was to actually BE as healthy as possible I was already there.
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| Pic from April 2019 |
Like I said in my last post, I was already struggling before this stupid pandemic with my weight loss. Maybe the real issue was that I was really in a great place, but I was reaching for something that wasn't going to be attainable. I saw myself as not doing something right because I was up about 10-15 pounds from my lowest weight that I had hit in May 2019. What I didn't see, is that between the end of May and January 2020 I had basically maintained my weight. I felt great. My behaviors were healthy. I was working out 6 days a week. I was eating mostly healthy while living my best life. BUT, the thing that was missing was me realizing that where I was was good enough. I felt great. I was increasing my strength all the time in the gym. In May I had run my fastest 10k. But all I saw was that I still wasn't 150 pounds. I still couldn't even get back down to the 175 I had hit in early May, so therefore it wasn't enough. When you're feeling like what you're doing and have done isn't enough it gets tiring.
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| Running my fastest 10k - May 2019 |
These last 6 months have been spent with me really trying to figure out what I WANT in this life. The problem is, I honestly don't know what I truly want. There is a part of me that really just wants to LIVE. I want to accept myself and my body and know that my worth is not equal to some number on the scale or what my body looks like. I just want to do the best that I can do. I don't want to have to overthink what and when I'm eating. I want to just listen to my body and eat when I'm hungry and stop using food as anything else.
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| And realize that I can still do amazing things |
But then, I miss how I felt and (especially) what I looked like last year. But, I'm starting to realize that losing weight is never going to fix my own body image issues and it's not going to help my relationship with food. The only thing that is going to help that is for me to work on accepting myself wherever I am and realizing that what I want is to be as healthy as I can possibly be - and that means my MENTAL health as much as my physical health. Weight does not equal health. Now, I'm not saying that where I sit currently is healthy. It's not. But, I would say right now I'm not healthy because my mental health is not in a great place and therefore, my behaviors are not ones that support a healthy life. My health not being great right now has the LEAST to do with that number on the scale. And, it is possible that I can increase my healthy behaviors with little to no weight loss and that has got to be OK. If my only motivation to have healthy habits is to lose weight than what happens when my body stops losing?
I've really been working on accepting myself as I am right now. I still go back and forth between what I really want to do, so sometimes I still track my food and sometimes I don't and just try to be more mindful about what I'm eating. I am working on not having wine every single weekend. Sometimes I feel like I'm making great strides. For example, in the first picture in this blog I honestly do not see a 30+ pound weight gain between those 2 pictures. And when Mary wanted to take pictures last night before our fancy dinner out to celebrate our anniversary; I didn't hate what I saw. Actually, I was able to look at the pictures and think they were really good pics.
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