Overcoming More Than The Scale

Oh no!  What have I gotten myself into?  I really wanted to encourage a coworker to succeed in her weight loss journey while getting started on my own reclaiming of my goals.  So, when Sport & Health promoted a "Lighten Up" challenge, I agreed to join her team to keep us both accountable and on point.  This required weighing in at the front desk where I work, and making those numbers known to more than just me and my bathroom scale. 

So, I stepped on the scale Wednesday evening, feeling uneasy about others seeing that very high weight number.  Those mean, horrible numbers---146.6 (heavier than my 9-months-pregnant weight).  Before my hysterectomy, I was much lighter.  I'd even lost some weight due to loss of appetite.  But I increased my macros a bit too quickly after the vocal chord surgery.  Upon seeing those numbers, the self-soothing silly thoughts started playing in my head, "Well, I've been up for 16 hours, I just worked out, am dressed...  This morning I was 142 on my scale...  Maybe the scale is broken--perhaps I should go pee and come back to weigh in again." 

Regardless of the tough journey my health has taken me through, regardless of what anyone may say, 146.6 is a big set of numbers for me.  To some readers, the numbers seem like a ridiculous thing to get worked up over.  But to me, those numbers represented something very scary, intimidating, and upsetting to me.  This is the first time that I'm admitting that I cried as soon as I found solitude.  The positive me wanted to be strong and act confident in front of others but the vulnerable me could not wait to be alone to take it all in.  It took days to admit it, but it is true.  Part of me felt ashamed for the sadness I felt over the whole ordeal and another part of me felt ashamed of the numbers themselves.   This is my heaviest non-pregnant weight since I was struggling with my max-allowed weight in the Air Force when I was only 18 years old (over twenty years ago).  Did you know that I gained so much weight in the Air Force that I had to work hard to lose it so that I would not be in a position of getting kicked out?  Back then, I was a homesick kid binging on donuts, pizza, candy bars, Mountain Dew, and whatever else I found empty comfort in.  I hated the chow hall food and I loved my junk (in large quantities). This time, the weight gain wasn't from binging, carelessness, or throwing all caution into the wind....  It was from a whacked out few months of surgeries, loss of appetite, and then too quickly increasing my macros after a long-lasting severely diminished appetite--not to mention the liquid diet after the vocal chord surgery.  Logic told me that I should slowly reintroduce more food but I ignored it thinking somehow I could immediately return to those high macro numbers I was taking in (while losing weight) before my hysterectomy.  My metabolism is pretty healthy, but now I find myself tempted to return to old habits of hours-long cardio, quickly dropping foods from my diets.  Of course, I don't give into those temptations, but I can't help but think that I'm not the only IIFYM follower who occasionally gets tempted to return to the self-destructive past behaviors (from before they knew better).

Why am I sharing this?  Well, selfishly I think it's going to help me if I admit to others just how insecure I am feeling right now.  There is another reason too.  Even though I am experiencing this whole screwed up, miserable feeling of self doubt and am petrified to see the cellulite staring me down in my bathroom mirror, I am going to beat this!  There is no quitting!  No backing out!  Time to believe in me the way that I believe in my clients.