May Day Weight Loss Challenge Weigh-In #4

This morning's weigh-in results for the May Day Weight Loss Challenge were surprisingly good and completely undeserved, considering that I made a conscious decision to abandon ship over the weekend. This past week has been a struggle on many levels, so I'm definitely surprised at the forward progress.

My current weight is now 244.0 lbs. That's down 0.4 lbs since last Tuesday, and down 1.6 lbs since Friday's discouraging weigh-in. I've lost a total of 5.8 lbs during the May Day Challenge, and a total of 13 lbs since I started my diet. If I lose another 12 lbs, I will have lost 10% of my original body weight.

Surprisingly, I still haven't noticed any change in the way my clothes fit or how I feel. Mostly, I just feel tired, hungry and discouraged.

Yesterday, FatBlokeThin made the following comment:

Looking at the weight stats on the RH sidebar of your blog I notice that it says 'IF' rather than 'WHEN' you lose weight...

I know it is WHEN. You can make it happen, don't cheat, be true to yourself and you will get the success you want.

FatBlokeThin definitely has a point here. A positive attitude helps breed success, but I have to admit that I'm really struggling in that area right now. I'm having a hard time visualizing myself as ever being thin. I was once, in college, but I can't even remember what it was like. I still have most of my clothing from that era, and when I dig my teeny-tiny jeans out of the boxes in the garage, I shake my head and can't imagine ever being able to wear them.

On some level, I guess I think I might get there someday, simply because I've hung on to all that clothing for all these years. I've carted that junk through multiple moves, and even placed it in long-term storage when I was living in a place so small I didn't even have room for my photo albums or my video collection.

But I still do very much think of it as an if and not a when. I know that it's not the right attitude to have, but I simply can't visualize anything else. When I look at old pictures of myself, I don't even recognize the person in them. I know it's me, but I feel so disconnected that it's like looking at pictures of a stranger.

I suspect that feeling of disconnectedness from myself has a lot to do with why I got so fat in the first place. Just like I can't really feel myself losing weight, I never felt myself gaining weight. During the period where I gained the most weight, I had to shut myself off from my feelings, simply because I was being overwhelmed by life events. During the time, I went through several really tough things. I got divorced, my business went under, I found and lost a succession of jobs, and ended up a hair's breadth away from being completely homeless. I wasn't eating to comfort myself, because I didn't have the money to buy lots of food, but rather I gained a lot of weight because I was broke and making inexpensive (and poor) food choices and not getting any exercise because my job had me sitting behind a desk or in the car commuting for 12 hours a day.

My life is measurably better since then. I own a home now, and I'm getting paid more than I've ever been paid before. I'm just having a hard time re-engaging in my life, partly out of habit because things were so bad for so long, and partly because there are still huge parts of my life that are unsatisfying. Although I have a decent job and I work with good people, I stopped liking my career field years ago, and work is a real struggle. It's hard to feel positive, empowered and motivated when the bulk of my day is spent doing work that I don't enjoy, but that I have to keep doing because I need the money.

So I'll keep plugging away at everything, and hopefully things will change enough that I'll be able to see my diet success as a possible future. I still have 126 lbs left to lose, and it's very hard for me to see it as possible. For now, my diet success feels very much like an if and not a when.