Mirror, mirror, on the wall…

I wake up every morn­ing and weigh myself. It’s hard not to attach too much impor­tance to the num­bers on the scale — when the num­ber goes up, even by as lit­tle as .2 lbs, I really have to stop myself from freak­ing out and exam­in­ing every moment of my pre­vi­ous day under a micro­scope to see where I went wrong. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: patience is not, and has never been my strong suit. There are times where I feel like I should be los­ing 2 lbs a day rather than 2 lbs a week. I won­der whether I should be eat­ing less or exer­cis­ing more, and it can be a real chal­lenge to keep myself on my cur­rent track, to main­tain, as it were.

I look at myself in the mir­ror and I can’t believe what a dif­fer­ence los­ing 40 lbs has made. To me, I look so incred­i­bly thin — I have a waist, I’m tall, I’m slen­der.  I can’t even begin to imag­ine what I will look like when I lose the rest of the weight. Another part of me can’t believe how far I had let myself go. I see the imper­fec­tions of my cur­rent body and see room for improve­ment, and I think to myself how much worse it must have been 40 lbs ago. How did I let myself get so heavy, get so fat? And yet another part of me can’t believe how easy (and at the same time, how hard) it was to lose all that weight. Eat­ing bet­ter, count­ing calo­ries, forc­ing myself to get up and be more active, doing a min­i­mum of 30 min­utes of aer­o­bic exer­cise a day — how did I ever let myself get so seden­tary when exer­cis­ing feels so good?

Two years ago, I bought this gor­geous white dress — deep V-neck, light­weight white linen, a touch of embroi­dery. I didn’t try it on at the time — it was the right size, I thought, of course it would fit. But it didn’t. The zip­per up the side wouldn’t close — it wouldn’t even come close. I blamed my large breasts, but I know now that I was delud­ing myself. I wasn’t that size — I don’t think I was any­where close, and the rea­son that zip­per wouldn’t close? My torso was too big — I was car­ry­ing too much bulk on my body. Yes­ter­day, I took that dress out of stor­age and tried it on. I was so ner­vous, still con­vinced that it wouldn’t fit, that the zip­per wouldn’t zip. Maybe my waist was still too big, my breasts still too large… It fits. It fits like a dreams. It fits like it was made for me. And I look so tall and so amaz­ingly fit — some­times, I can’t believe that girl in the mir­ror is me.

The sen­si­ble girl inside me says, well of course that dress fits. After all, I have lost 5 inches off my hips and 4 inches off my waist. But the rest of me doesn’t believe in life by the num­bers. Because when I look in the mir­ror, I still look like…me. Sure, maybe I look a lit­tle thin­ner, but maybe that’s because my pos­ture is bet­ter, and these days I stand up straight. But it’s still just me, and I still look like silly old me. True, my back fat is com­pletely gone, and my thighs and upper arms are slimming…it’s just that, other than a gen­eral feel­ing of bet­ter being, I don’t actu­ally feel any dif­fer­ent, though I know I am.

Some­times I look in the mir­ror and think to myself, I can’t wait until I’m beau­ti­ful again. Then I real­ize, I’m beau­ti­ful now, I was beau­ti­ful then, and I’ll be beau­ti­ful no mat­ter how much I weigh. It’s some­thing that’s going to take some get­ting used to… this sense of feel­ing beau­ti­ful, but I have the rest of my life to get to it.