Tag: weight loss

Lost… again.

~ Jody Piper ~ 1 Comment

I once walked into my hair salon for an appointment, dressed in slim dress slacks and sky-high heels, and my stylist told me I looked like a super model walking in. I once walked across the floor of a casino and a friend told me later that he’d seen me from a distance and thought I was Gwyneth Paltrow. Those were good days – it felt good to hear things like that. Those were the days when I most vehemently believed I would never go back to being overweight.

This morning, I spent a full minute tugging and adjusting the top of my pants and the bottom of my shirt in the bathroom mirror at work, trying desperately to mask or camouflage my ballooning body. I never wanted to be here again. In my arrogance, I never thought it was possible. It’s really convenient to tout the idea of focusing on health and dismissing calorie-counting; it’s really enticing to shirk off the responsibility of making a concentrated effort to lose weight. All that I wrote two months ago wasn’t written from a place of acceptance or celebration or joy. It was written from a place of fatigue, a place of debilitating depression, a place of cowardly surrender.

I never wanted to be here again, but here I am. Most of my clothes are too tight (except for the larger stretch pants I practically live in), I am popping Pepcid like Smarties to combat near-constant acid reflux, I have plantar fasciitis in my left foot and my tailbone throbs from sitting with the extra weight. I never again wanted to be picking out clothes based on what best hides by body ­– clothes that made me feel dumpy. I never again wanted to wish I could be invisible most of the waking hours of my day. I never again wanted to feel subjugated by food and my addiction to it. I never again wanted to be the big girl with the pretty face. I never again wanted to try to figure out how to take pictures of myself, stretching my neck to hide my chin, adjusting angles and layering on the filters, all to look less like myself. I never again wanted to feel tired and cranky, lazy and uninspired. I never again wanted to be ashamed of myself.

I want to be proud of myself again. I want to pick out clothes that accentuate my body, show off all my hard work – clothes that made me feel confident. I want to be in control of my eating, seeing food as the fuel it is and nothing more. I want that feeling of fighting and sweating and sacrificing all week then getting that compliment – the one that comes without the insulting qualifications (for a fat girl, you’re kind of cute). I want my energy and my drive back, my focus and determination. I want to eat healthy and work out like it’s my damned job. I want to respond to invitations the phrase, “sure… right after I go to the gym.”

I can’t stay here. I can’t go back any further than I already have. Somehow, whatever it takes, I have to fight this woman I fought so hard to escape before. She’s breathing down my neck, she’s picking out my clothes and feeding me ice cream and dragging me to the couch and telling me how disgusting I am every god damned morning in the mirror. I have to find myself again.

 

Mistakes & Lessons

~ Jody Piper ~ Leave a comment

There are no mistakes in life, only lessons. A lesson will be repeated until it is learned.

I have two kinds of pants. Maybe you can relate. I have pants that are slightly too large and pants that fit correctly. The latter are what I wear most days; the former are for really just there for days I need to wear something a little more loose, a little more comfy, a little confidence-building when I look down and see them sagging a bit. I put a pair of these slightly too large pants on Monday morning and was distressed to see them cinching the cellulite on my upper thighs, too snug for the first time since I purchased them. I was distraught.

As I wrote in my last post, I need to move on from a place of strict calorie counting and obsessive weigh-ins for my mental health. I struggle with finding balance between my weight loss efforts and being able to enjoy life and this struggle always culminates with weight gain, depression and despair.  While my mental state lately has been vastly improved, my physical one has deteriorated in-kind. Balance simply doesn’t seem to exist, rather, I careen wildly between two extremes.

Yesterday, still reeling a bit from Monday’s big, tight pants, I was talking with a coworker and I remembered a phrase I’d learned years ago while undergoing treatment for my eating disorder. The quote originated in Robin S. Sharma’s book “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari” and was expanded upon by my therapist. She said, “There are no mistakes in life, only lessons. A lesson will be repeated until it is learned.” Remembering this phrase, speaking it to my coworker, I suddenly felt awash with nervous energy – the quote was resonating with me like it never had before.

Is that why I lose and regain weight this way? Is that why I feel doomed to repeat myself, to start over time and time again? Is that why I get on a roll, get so close to my goal only to start sabotaging myself an backtracking? Is it because I haven’t learned whatever lesson lies within my obesity? I’m not writing this entry because I’ve had some epiphany, I’ve stumbled across long-elusive, profound answers to my questions. Quite the contrary – all I have found are questions. And, yet, I feel that finding these questions may be a beginning. My questions go something like this:

Did I learn the lessons at some point? Did I forget the knowledge gleaned?

Did I never learn the lesson at all?

I feel, on one hand, that I may know what the lessons to be learned from my weight gain are: lessons in empathy for others, lessons in loving oneself and caring for oneself, lessons in making yourself happy above all others. Then again, I don’t know that I have ever actually learned those lessons or if I have just faked it – like when you know the answer a teacher is looking for, regardless of whether or not you truly understand the material. Was I winging it, bull-shitting my way through life?  When I think to the moments of self-righteousness I have felt amidst my weight loss success; the judgement I’ve felt when I saw someone who was in exactly the same situation that I was once in and I thinking about slapping the Venti Caramel Frappuccino with extra Whip out of their hands “for their own good”; when I have regained 30 pounds but still find that voice in my head being preachy to others on what they should eat, how they should exercise; when I internally smugly relish in the weight gain of someone I don’t particularly like  … when I think of all these things, I think it is quite impossible that I have actually learned a damned thing other than how to be a conceited, holy-than-thou bitch.

Then again, maybe the lesson is something completely different from the one I’ve assumed it to be. Maybe it is more about finding the balance I so blatantly lack. Maybe it’s something I haven’t yet thought of. Maybe it’s all of the above. I don’t know. I feel like I don’t know anything – but I suspect that I am repeating this lesson once again, like having to take college math for the third time after dropping and failing twice in the past. A lesson will be repeated until it is learned.