losing it

It's been almost exactly a month since I worked out, and just made it to the gym today.  This is no way to sustain a habit. I went on two different work-related trips, each for a week. It was very hard to keep up with my c25k program during my trips. Then I came back to piles of work, feeling overwhelmed, and a little bit of feeling generally run down.

However, there is a positive side:
1. During my trips I kept my meals reasonable, didn't gain any weight, and even lost a tiny tiny bit.
2. I had some bad days but didn't throw all my progress out the window.
3. I've stuck with my Weight Watchers meetings, am still tracking my food, and have been down every week, if only a little bit.
4. Today I went back to the gym, got on the treadmill, and did almost as good as I did in my last workout.

The treadmill was tougher today. My heart rate didn't recover as fast.  Running 90 seconds straight was more difficult than I remembered.  I scaled back to Week 2 (I was week 3 last time I worked out) and it was tough.  But I did it- my whole 45 minute routine.

At my last weigh in, I was at 246.6 on the WW scale, which is down about 23 lbs since I started all of this.

I have a lot of different things brewing in my head, and wrote some blog posts in my mind over the last several weeks since my last post.  One of the things I've been thinking a lot about is my mixed feelings about people commenting on my weight loss.

I am working hard and it is sort of nice that people are noticing. Several people at work have commented on how "great" I am looking. Some people have asked how many pounds.  I appreciate the well-intended support. The other side of that is the icky feeling that people are looking at me, judging my body, and that thinner= better, great, is something to celebrate. What if I don't keep it off? What about the fact that my body is still so far away from "greatness"?  What about me being great no matter my size?

Even though I work in a place of highly educated folks (most of my coworkers have graduate degrees/PhD's) in a helping profession, lots of them have their own food issues. There are a lot of women fretting about their weight in my workplace. When I told my program director that I am enjoying my Skinny Cow ice cream, she shared that she didn't like them ever since she came home after a hard day of work and finished off a whole box of them. Made her sick.  Food issues.  The idea that thin women have it figured out, are healthy, don't have food issues is not true.

Women with 20 lbs to lose often comment on their grotesqueness in front of me with little thought about how that might make me feel. Perhaps it is supposed to be some kind of bonding ritual, but it gives me a sinking feeling. If they hate their bodies, what must they think about mine? It happens constantly, and has my whole life in every workplace I've ever spent time in. Maybe they think I will relate. I don't want to hear it though. I am doing my own work- have been to counseling, used trainers, and throughout my life been on every diet. I have taken extreme measures to try to escape my fat. Now I have switched gears, am trying to be kind to myself. I don't want anything to do with their body hate.

I stay silent when this happens. Perhaps I should speak up. I am also scared of being an outsider though, and don't know if I really want people to stop commenting on how "great" I am looking. Cue internal conflict.

I guess what I want is for people to cheer me toward my goals without judgement. As if I were rebuilding a car instead of becoming less hideous.  "Go you!" without the judgement. "How great of you to be healthy" without the "I need to get off my fat ass too! Good thing you're finally doing something about your fat ass!"

In one of my classes last week we were talking about eating disorders. Although we talk about this as a clinical issue, nowhere in our program are issues of body image and women dismantled. I gave it a few minutes because the students were engaged. They began sharing their own stories. One woman talked about her friends giving her a hard time for looking too thin "and sickly." She said she was at a healthy weight when this happened. Perhaps it is coming from a place of concern, but that everyone feels such permission to comment on our bodies with judgement seems so invasive. Why is it such a public exercise? I would not comment on a co-workers breast size (unless we were pretty close) or make public critical comments about where they got their degrees.  That we can talk so much about our own weight and the weight of others speaks to the way that women's bodies are commodified in the media and society, valued by some ideal shape-- it is normal to dish and diss. And we internalize it in such a way to believe it- whether we like to think we do or not.

Perhaps I needed to process some of my internal conflict about this here, and say to someone- whoever is reading this- that I value my body. I love that it is allowing me to move, to gain speed, to pick me up every day and carry me around. It is doing this even though I am still 100 lbs overweight. It works pretty well for me. I don't hate my fat. I am glad to be working toward my own definition health, but I will never have a figure that is prized by the media. I refuse to sit in the break room and talk about how fat I am. I am a whole person, a good person, no matter my shape. I am taking care of myself. I like who I am.  Not some future version of myself, but who I am today, right now.
(/internalconflict)

There's a 5k at the end of April. I am going to sign up. I don't really have a time goal or a run goal or anything else. I'd like to finish it. I did a 5k a few years ago, walked the whole thing, and finished that. I'll try to jog a little bit of this next one.

That's all for tonight. Thanks for sticking with me.