I tried on my goal pants last Friday and today; they are close — this close — to fitting.  The last two fits were approximately the same.  There’s only one spot where they really need improvement before I can call them a fit. That would be in the upper thighs/crotch area, where they don’t quite go up all the way.

I’ve been working on these same jeans since November. Yeah, over three months, now.  Enough already, I want them to fit! Like I’ve said before, though: this was my fault for choosing  jeans that were so far removed in fit from the previous pair. Yet, when they do fit, I will truly know I’ve accomplished something big.

I’ve been thinking about this for the past few weeks… I will be at this diet for a year at the beginning of April, just over a month away. I’m really hoping I can call these goal pants a fit by then, so I can claim the loss. I have been sorely tempted to weigh, lately; partly because I know I’ve lost since the last time I weighed (which was in November! Did I mention that?), and partly because I keep looking at my current number and cringing, like I should have done better.

I keep telling myself that losing slowly this time is to my benefit; as far as I can tell, I haven’t stalled, I have felt good, and while I’ve fought the occasional “why am I bothering?” demon, I’ve been satisfied with my cycling and level of restriction. What I’m also hoping is that by losing slowly, my body isn’t freaking out and I won’t hit a point where my body just screams and puts on the brakes, and won’t let me lose further. I don’t think that I’ve dropped into starvation mode at any time.

But the loss has been absolutely and painfully slow. The first time I was on Atkins, I dropped 140 pounds in probably 1.5 years or so, maybe less, and after that, it was a struggle for every ounce lost. It was about 10 pounds a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. I loved being able to lose it that fast, but in retrospect, I’m not so sure it was the best thing for my body.

Still. My brain keeps asking me if losing this slow is a good thing, or I’m just making excuses for slow weight loss and should be trying harder. Thanks to a lifetime of yoyo dieting and the constant insinuation that if I haven’t gotten my weight under control, I’m doing something w-r-o-n-g, this is a constant mental battle. I’ve been fighting the weight loss battle since I was a kid, when I really wasn’t all that overweight, but my father constantly called me “chubby” and other less endearing terms. Hell, I cringe when I hear people call babies “chubby” — I just don’t think it’s a nice term *at all*. (I also don’t like “plump”, for the record, or any other term that is supposed to be a cute way to mask “OMG are you ever FAT!”.)

For right now, I’m shooting for *not* being the fattest person in the room on a consistent basis. Then, I’ll be happy to just be counted among the normal distribution of women my age; just getting out of plus size clothes will do that for me. Would I love to be a size 8? Oh, hayell, YES, but for right now, I’d be happy to be able to walk into any clothing store and find at least *something* that will fit without having to look at the end of the plus-size rack. At size 22 for jeans, I’m pretty firmly entrenched right in the middle of the plus sizes, but I prefer that to being at the end of them.

Related to this, my mother was going through photos and throwing a bunch out. She said she found one where I was in it, and she said I must have weighed at least 400 pounds. Was I ever over 400? Yeah, maybe, I guess that’s possible. I was busting out of size 26 when I started this latest effort at 334 pounds and size 3X. I have, in a chest, a jacket and jeans I wore at my largest; the jacket was 4X (I think?) and the pants were size 32.  So yeah, I guess when I wore that size, it’s possible I was over 400. I just don’t know what I weighed at my largest. Most scales don’t go over 300, and besides that, I don’t think anyone *wants* to see what they weigh when they’re tipping the scales by that much.

Anyway… Mom said that right now, I look *terrific* compared to that pic, that I’m doing good at this and she was happy for me. In some ways, I wish I’d seen the pic. I think she was being very complimentary, but the weird part of this was that I was a little bit dismayed by it, as well, as if I felt slightly chastised for ever having been that weight. It’s foolish to feel bad about it, now, because I’m no longer that weight, but I was still a person with feelings, even at that weight, and I think what really sticks with me is the judgment people make when you’re that fat.

I actually had someone tell me, when I was at my lowest weight, that I looked really good and they were proud of me… and then they told me they were glad I lost weight because I sure was ugly when I was that fat. The guy who said it to me said it jokingly, but you know, I don’t think he was really kidding all that much; that was his opinion of me as a fat person. And that judgment hurt. It hurts, now that I’ve gained a lot of the weight back, because I sometimes wonder what people think about me inside. I wonder if they see the fat, or they see *me*.

It just seems that often, people think that being fat is an indictment of a person’s whole ethic. That they don’t try hard enough, that they’re weak, that they’re lazy. Are they at least partly right? After being faced with that judgment pretty much my whole life, some of it was bound to sink into my own brain, where *I* think that my efforts aren’t enough, no matter what the results are.

No, I’m not in a mental place where I’m at risk of tossing in the towel. Not at all. I’m just voicing some of the things that have been rolling around in my mind. I want to flog myself for not losing at the rate I did years ago, and yet, I know that this way is better for me. As long as I am getting healthier and smaller, I’m doing it right.