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.