“None but ourselves can free our minds” — Bob Marley’s song “Redemption Song” is in the back of my mind, this week; a song of freedom, and I truly believe that’s where I’m at, in this moment… as well as being down yet another 4.2 pounds this week.
67 pound catfish — that’s a lot of dinners, right there!
It’s been another amazing week for weight loss; the kind of week where I wake up excited every morning, ready to jump on the scale and knowing I’m going to see a loss of some kind. I don’t always have days like this, but when they happen, it reinforces my belief that I have finally found the right combination for losing weight at this point in my journey.
The reality is that at some point, my body will likely adapt and I will not see these kinds of losses; this is the nature of weight loss, unfortunately. Our bodies are designed to adapt, so when there’s a great amount of weight to be lost, it can result in periods of frustration, trial, experiments, more frustration, plateaus, rises in weight, but persistence and a willingness to be a scientist on your own behalf is necessary to break through all this to the next stretch of loss.
I am there. I feel redeemed (and hence the song) — quite often, when I’m guessing and trying to change things, that small voice that dooms me to failure likes to whisper in my ear and tell me that I’m bound to fail again, bound to live fat and die fatter. And while that voice is always present, and I’d do well to remember that, it’s subdued right now. I’m going strong.
That mental change and boost helps immensely. Yes, seeing a lower number on the scale gives me a mental boost that tells me what I’m doing is paying off, but inevitably, it’s a number. It’s a tool that helps us gauge success, but it’s not the end-all, be-all of measurement. It’s everyday life that’s the ultimate reflection of success.
It’s sitting in a movie theater seat, like I did on Wednesday, and realizing that not only did I not have to uncomfortably squeeze my large butt into the seat (and suffer through two hours with the seat pinching me), but I actually had a little room for comfort. It’s realizing that my ankles are starting to look more like normal people’s ankles. It’s the small things, friends.
It’s also about finally reaching a weight where the difference between clothing sizes doesn’t take as large a span of weight to move between them. For small sizes (let’s say sizes 10 and under), it takes but a few pounds to move between sizes; my thin friends notice their clothes fitting tightly with as little as a five pound gain. In larger plus sizes, it takes much more to move between sizes — sometimes in the neighborhood of forty to fifty pounds, depending on the clothing item — and for each size down, it takes less weight to reach the lower size.
As I’m losing more rapidly, I’m finding that the clothes I’ve lived the summer in are getting to a point where they’re uncomfortable to wear because they’re baggy. I’m not about to worry about them because the summer is almost over, except for swim suits; I don’t care for wardrobe malfunctions. I’ll leave those to Janet Jackson and Nikki Minaj.
My head is firmly in the right place, and at this moment, I feel indestructible. It’s a revolution, friends, and I’m winning.