103 pounds down, now!

Last week was quite the week for me, dealing with the mental changes necessary to keep strong on my journey.

No sooner had I rejoiced in passing a major weight goal, than I got cut down at the knees. This was one of those unforeseen circumstances I hadn’t mentally prepared myself for; you can’t possibly be prepared for everything life throws at you.

Mind you, most of the photos people see of me, online at least, are ones I took myself. I take great pains at every weight to make myself look as good as possible, especially with head shots that I use for profile pics in social media. Like most people, I have a little bit of vanity, and if I feel like I look my best at every weight, there’s a little more lift to my step. Mind you, I don’t do any magic to the photos; I just want to look and feel the best I can be at every stage of the way.

Last week, though, someone took a pic of me and posted it online — and it was a horrible pic. A group of us were out together, and one of our friends said that since it had been a long time since we’d been out like that, she wanted a group photo. She asked someone to take it, and he took it down the length of our long table; I was closest to the camera. Consequently, it made me look disproportionately huge.

My immediate response, when I saw it online, was anger — not at the one who took the photo, but at myself. All those self-critical comments took up arms in my brain; I lost 100 pounds to end up looking like THAT? I look horrible! I look as big as I did when I started! Disgusting!

Those were my first responses… not gee, what a lousy photo angle; no one ends up looking good at that angle! No, I couldn’t consider for a moment that it was just a bad photo. Bad photos happen all the time. No, my brain jumped on beating myself up and making me feel like I hadn’t accomplished a thing, for all the work I’ve put in these last couple of years.

This is a dangerous thing. Back in 2012, we went on vacation to Mexico with friends; before vacation, I worked hard on losing weight and regaining some of my ability to walk. I took very short walks around the neighborhood; I worked out at the gym in the pool, in hopes of being able to walk better once on vacation. I lost a bit over 60 pounds in that effort — my low weight, then, was slightly above what I weigh right now. I felt like I was in a great frame of mind when we left for that vacation, ready for fun and sunshine.

I learned, quickly, that I wasn’t as prepared as I’d hoped. I couldn’t get around as well as I thought I would, and felt like I was holding other people back, because of my inability to walk any sort of distance. I felt defeated and disappointed that the hard work I’d put in hadn’t created the intended result. When we returned home and I went through all our travel photos, I saw the photos of me… and wanted to crawl into a hole, never to come out. I was absolutely mortified how horrible I looked in the majority of the photos. I was physically sick over looking at them; all I could see was my own ugliness, and not the beauty around me or the memorable times we created.

I let those things tip the balance toward defeat. I’d already been off my diet for vacation, and I never went back on it. Over the next 14 or so months, I gained 100 pounds; yes, there was the occasional shove-food-in-my-face-fest, but I was not binging. I gained that weight simply by eating fairly normally, with no restrictions on what I could eat; if I wanted pizza or cake, I had it. If you’re envisioning a sad girl scarfing down an entire bag of Oreos in the closet, that wasn’t me; despite the common misconceptions about why people become morbidly obese, I wasn’t having a free-for-all of food.

It has taken me over two years to take off what I put on when I went into decline after that vacation, triggered by photos, and by inability to produce the result I wanted, with the work I put in. I was already on the bubble, anyway; my low weight was a couple months before I went on vacation, and I was already on a slippery slope.  I had put back on about ten pounds or so. The mental sucker punch sealed the deal, and I didn’t go back on my weight loss plan.

That’s the power of emotional triggers when you’re in a bad mental place to begin with. That’s why I must be careful about how I choose to react to triggers when they unexpectedly pounce. The good news is that when I saw the photo last week, my response, after berating myself, wasn’t to give up.

No, I got pissed off. I was, and am, angry. It’s a very different response, and I’m glad for it. I’m a fighter. I’m not giving up.

First of all, it’s a bad pic. All of us have had a bad photo taken of us.

Second, I am still very overweight. I know this. I am nowhere near my stopping point. I’m fat, but I’m in the process of changing; this is a fact. I will stumble mentally on occasion, but when I do, it’s important that I pick myself up, brush myself off, and be realistic about the matter. I’ve let unexpected external information defeat me before, because a part of me was looking for a reason to give up. I cannot and will not do that, again.

Third, and perhaps most important: when choosing a response to a stressful situation, especially if that situation involves my weight, the worst possible reaction is to give up. What does that solve? Seeing myself in a photo as fat, regardless of whether it’s deadly accurate or simply a bad angle, will not be solved by giving up. The proper reaction is to keep up the good fight, no matter what. I vowed to change when I took the first step; every once in a while, situations will force me to recommit myself to that change.

I’ve since taken progress pics. Before I did, I accepted that the trigger wasn’t valid; I didn’t take the progress pics to disprove it, but that was the end result. One look tells me the truth; I’ve come an amazingly long way, and even if the progress pics didn’t tell that story, how I feel, these days, certainly does.

I am changing — for the better.