Are you comfortable in your own skin? The French have a similar expression for it: "être bien dans sa peau" which literally translates as "to be well in one's skin". In either language, it's that sense of genuinely LIKING yourself, inside and out. Of being happy with the person you are, and with the way your body looks and functions, even if you aren't perfect by someone else's standards.
For most of my life, I have not been bien dans ma peau at all. While I'm very happy with the person I am on the inside, as long as I can remember I have struggled to reconcile the outer me with the inner me. If I tried, I could count on one hand the number of occasions when I have actually felt good about my body and the way I look. For a woman of 45, that's not a great average.
Weight loss experts tell us that there is a difference between self image and body image. For a long time I confused one with the other. It took me a while to realize that I really do have a positive image of my SELF: my spirituality, my humanity, my brains, my perspective on life. Maybe that was a long time in coming but right now, I completely LOVE my self.
Loving my body has been a lot harder to come by. In some ways, I think I have been emotionally detached from my body, which is the only way I can justify why I allowed myself to become 100 lbs overweight, bit by bit, over the past 25-plus years. No one gets that fat just because they like food; they get that fat because they are not associating, in the moment, the fact that they are feeding an emotional void with food that will later turn to pure cellulite and artery-clogging gobs. The food is really incidental for an emotional eater.
In the past few months, I've begun to re-associate what I'm putting in my mouth with its impact on my body. I'm becoming more conscious about what I eat, how I eat, when and why I eat. I realized that my eating on auto-pilot and the spare tires around my mid-section are directly related, and I've stopped kidding myself about that. I think permanent weight loss absolutely requires brutal honesty with one's self.
As the weight has come off (21 lbs as of today), I'm coming back to that zone of feeling much better in my skin again. It started after the first 10 lbs came off; I stopped wheezing for air after climbing just one flight of stairs, and sitting for long periods of time was more comfortable (I carry most of my weight around the middle -- no "holster-hips" here). Bending over to pick something up got easy again. I could exercise longer and with more intensity.
As I said to a friend the other day, I feel like I've crossed back over into "the land of the living" where I am no longer afraid I will end up a diabetic (I have a horrible fear of needles) or dead before age 50 from an early heart attack. While I have 79 more pounds to go (and perhaps a bit more), I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. I believe that this time I WILL conquer this (as Kerstin calls it) "diet monster"; there is no question in my mind that by my 46th birthday in May, I will be the fittest and leanest I have ever been since the age of 16. Even with moving to the land of 246 varieties of cheese.
While I'm sad when I think that I wasted 30 years of emotional energy mired down in my bad body image and feeling badly about myself because of it, I'm more happy to know that I have a much better, healthier future ahead of me while I'm still young enough to enjoy my life. And I'm choosing to focus on the positive future rather than the negative past.
Especially when today, for the first time in almost 10 years, I went clothes shopping and discovered that the PLUS size blue jeans were ALL TOO BIG. So I went over to the regular sizes and found that I fit into a pair of DKNY jeans. They were the biggest size, and they are skin tight, too tight for comfort just now, but they fit, and I could zip and button them! I guess I can leave the plus sizes behind for good now!
When you buy your first pair of designer jeans in years, you KNOW you are feeling good in your skin.
Thanks to Sunday Scribblings for another great writing prompt. I don't know how you do it but it's like you're reading my mind when you choose your topics.
