Accepting the Physical Changes

I have been overweight most of my life... ok all of my life if you don't include birth! I have heard every possible story and belief there is about weight loss throughout my life.

I've heard the "Your face is beautiful" complement. Which is probably worse than saying nothing at all.

So with the huge weight loss I've started to deal with the changes of my physical appearence. I feel great and I have moments of looking great (almost always in clothes), but I'm a girl I want to look great naked! When I look in the mirror I still see the big me. I still see the fully stretched out skin, where my stomach is larger than my boobs and my arms don't fall straight but instead fall off to the side at an angle. Its what I looked at for so long, what I grew used too.

But as the weight started coming off I would get the complements of "You look Great" "Your skinnier now" and so forth, but I will be honest I have a very hard time seeing it. So when I do finally see it I take pride in it. I take note of how my stomach is flatter, how my abs are more pronounced or how you can see definition in my arms.

I think "Melissa you're doing amazing, you're look great keep it up!" then I start noticing more of my physical discomforts. This morning after waking up and hopping out the shower I looked into the mirror and noticed my skin. My dried up prune like skin. It's been stretched for so long that people think it will go back to normal with exercise. I'm here to tell you WRONG!!!!

Stretch marks are scars they don't just go away. My skin is not smooth, it is not tight, it sags in areas I hate & looks gross. Honestly just thinking about it makes me want to cry. But I'm determined to hold nothing back when it comes to this weight loss journey. My skin will not go back to normal, it will shrink back some, but it will never hang as if I weighted 130lbs my whole life. And the after thought scares me.

How will I look? What will I do? Will anyone find me attractive? How will I fix this? All questions running rampant in my head as I stared into the mirror. Then I thought are these fears worth what I'm going through? Full on answer... YES!!!

I'm not going to lie I'm scared to death of what I will look like in my final results. I'm scared of needing surgery & having scars. I'm scared of having all this excess skin. I'm scared of looking just like everyone else.

But my health is more important. Without these changes I would or could be dead. My health has improved ten fold so why should I care so much about the outside? Because I'm human! Accepting the physical changes is harder than deciding to pickup my weights each night. I force myself to look at these changes, to learn to accept them because they are now a part of me. I think of them as a scar, a very large scar. Of not only shedding the weight, but gaining freedom, gaining a feeling of self and letting go of the pain from my past.

Weight loss isn't just about the physical, it's also about the emotional, but you must know that both are connected. To accept your physical changes you must accept the emotional changes that coincide with them. I will cry in front of the mirror if needed, or laugh at the love handles, or jump for joy at the new shape of my butt. But I have to stay in tune with myself to understand and accept them. So embrace the physical changes, love them and hate them. If you hate them figure out how to change them.

I know my end result will land me on a surgical table, but I'm ok with that. I'm scared, but ok because I didn't start this journey on the table. I started it with my own free will, my own determination. (I'm not discrediting weight loss surgery because I have looked into it, but it was just not something for me.) I'm ok with the idea that I will have a scar across my stomach and a new belly button (ok that's kind of hard to accept because honestly I love my belly button) but I know that its my final reward to the long journey of becoming healthy again.

New Year New...

I have spent the last 4 years on a weight loss journey. I'm not near my goal, but I'm closer than I have ever been before. In the last few weeks I have reached my 100lb weight loss mark and have many friends and family privately message me about my "secret".

I figured since its a new year and people have been watching me slowly shed pounds that I would start to let everyone in on it.

I guess a little background would help!

In 2007 I started getting really sick, sleeping all the time, hair was falling out, etc etc... I had actually started to loss weight because everything I ate made me sick. But suddenly after finding that I had PCOS and Hypothyroidism and was put on a combination of drugs to help I reached a weight of 287lbs (holy shit my mother was the only person to ever know that until now). I got the you're going to die speech from my doctors etc. I didn't listen because I didn't see it. It wasn't until a nasty horse back riding fall (stop the laughing now!) in which I broke my back, I realized I needed to do something, but I didn't really do it for my weight, I did it for my pain.

After I recovered I vowed everyday after class I would hit the gym for at least 20mins. I started biking for 20mins a day and felt more energized. I slowly started going to the gym and lifting weights. I lost 10lbs in my last semester of college and felt great. I spent that summer traveling where I lost 25lbs while living abroad. I felt even better. But I came home and life went back to normal & so did the weight. I gained everything I had lost. I started swimming every night and I started to feel better with my pain. Again not seeing the advantage of my weight loss at all.

After returning home for a second time I joined a gym and vowed to swim daily. I did that for a good year losing up to 50lbs. Then came my knee injury. I had started running in the winter/spring of 2011. I felt great, started out slow and even ran a 5K.

Three weeks after the 5K I felt a sudden pop in my knee and knew that everything was going to change. I had devastating knee injury with 90% of the cartilage being torn on my knee cap. My recovery was slow and painful. I gained almost all of the weight back because I couldn't workout as much with my work schedule and PT schedule. Once I was off my crutches I hit the pool again. And I started to loss again. By the end of 2011 I had gained 40 lbs and lost about 30 lbs.

2012 hit and I was still having issues with my knee, but I was feeling more and more energized. I had a tonsillectomy (I'm not recommending surgery what so ever) and after not being able to eat for a good two weeks I lost 20lbs. (They say average is 10 lbs) This was amazing. I felt amazing. So I kept up with my workouts. I kept swimming and added in a vigorous weight training program to help strengthen my knee.

By the summer of 2012 I had hit the ever dreaded plateau. I had lost 70lbs by then and felt I would never be able to keep going. Then I started with one step and I was running again. Alright I cried the whole time because I was told I would never be able too again. I gained 20lbs that summer. I was so mad at myself. How could I do that? How could I allow it to happen?

I became extremely busy with school and work that my workouts dropped off. I started running again and added my weight lifting again to find myself by Thanksgiving reaching my year end goal of 100lbs off 6 weeks early.

I cried, I jumped up and down, I felt everything at once honestly. But the holidays have hit and well I gain 7lbs. What I've learned is I'm ok with it because I haven't given up. So here I am going to let everyone in on the last 60-70lb journey of what I call finding the healthy me. I don't have any expectations or time frame set. While I do set foreseeable goals I don't see one at this moment expect to continue to get healthy. Until I find my next goal I'm just going to keep moving.

So here it is here's my "secret" I don't have one!!! Alright maybe I do, but I haven't really pinned it down to one thing.

I'm not perfect, but I just keep trying. Many people have said I'm an inspiration, but I don't feel that way. I'm just me, just working on living the best life I can possible. I hope you join me on this awesome, hard work, devastating, emotionally challenging journey to figure out what my "secret" is.

If you don't believe me here's me in 2008 at my biggest.

 

Here is my latest picture November 2012.