Worth the Weight - Part 2

In August of 2015 I was preparing to fly to Utah to meet my nephew. This should have been a most joyous time but it was so hard! There had been some conflicts I was dealing with that weren’t helping the situation at all, but my internal struggle had come to a breaking point…and it was me who was breaking.

I’m an anxious/excited traveler; I like to pack a week (or at least several days) in advance. For this trip, it was the morning I was supposed to leave and I was still debating on whether to pull my suitcase out and actually leave. I had recently discovered the show “Girl Meets World”, the remake/spin off of “Boy Meets World”. I don’t know if it was simply because I loved BMW growing up, or if it was really as cute as I thought at the time, but I fell in love with this show.  On this day in particular I watched the episode where Riley had a bully. I laid on my bed watching this episode, bawling my eyes out as I listened to Riley repeat to Maya the things her bully had said to her. The tears weren’t for her…they were for me. Those were the things I had been telling myself. I was my own worst bully!

The things I was telling myself I would never say to anyone else. Then why was it okay for me? As I laid there in shocked realization, I made a decision that I would try to become my own biggest fan, rather than my own worst bully.

Knowing what I needed to do, and doing what I needed to do were two very different things. I would attempt to tell myself something positive, then follow it up with a negative behavior (enter binge eating…another side of the eating disorder spectrum). It would go something like this: “Your hair looks nice today” (something simple and that didn’t happen often), then I’d eat something and be out of control and berate myself for not doing better. It felt like every step forward I tried to make I’d sling shot backwards (forget the simple two steps back idea).

I felt trapped in my life, like the quest to find myself was wrapped only in appearance. I knew that wasn’t true, that the size of my waist or the number on the scale somehow defined who I was. So I set myself on a mission to discover the real me again. I tried setting myself up where I was when I started this journey – with a lot of positive, non-weight related goals. Really, when 2013 started I just wanted to walk 500 miles…losing weight, though I joined Weight Watchers and worked for it, was almost an accident. I tried this in both 2016 and already in 2017.

If you remember, I had a goal wall set up. I wanted a very visual way to track my accomplishments that year. Turns out, that isn’t me either, and I took the 2017 goal wall down.