After going from 83 kilos and BMI obese for my height of 5'4" to 66 kilos and juuust on the borderline of BMI "normal" (I'm still dubious about the BMI), and feeling really happy with my body and my relationship with food, I thought I had entered maintenance mode basically permanently, and also thought I would probably be counting calories basically permanently. Then, life happened to me - apparently during big breakups I lose weight, only a little, in the process of processing that grief and loss. It really sort of startled me at the time, and I don't recommend it as a form of weight loss, but in the process of getting more joyful afterward and less miserable, and in the process of staying with some friends who've been really good to me in the process ... long story short, intuitive eating has started feeling possible, and I'm a long-time artist/illustrator, and I became kind of curious about seeing what it would be like to have the kind of body that I like to draw. So I've started losing again, and as my new tentative goal weight, I've chosen the weight that my mother says her body was happiest at when she was my age. Anyway, on to the NSVs:
The physical: all my life, I've had excruciating period pain. This month? None. None at all. I don't know if I can attribute it to the weight or to being happier or to eating differently or what, but my skin seems to be clearer and I seem to want to run more, and just generally there are all these things that I hoped might happen when I lost weight and I seem, through a combination of happiness in my body and reaching a right weight for my body, to be just feeling better in it.
The existential NSV is that post-breakup, I've started having to face the question of how other people feel about my body. One of the reasons I stayed heavier once I knew I was capable of losing weight was that I was really scared of inviting people into my life who would see me first as a body. I've always gotten on really really well with my dude friends and I didn't want to suddenly be unable to make new friends without fearing that they saw me as a body. But it turns out that when I really really like myself and the physical version of myself that I'm creating, I feel less reliant on other people's compliments, and because of that, it's gotten easier to tell which people are sincere and to discern who is seeing me as a body and who is seeing me as a person. It's gotten so that I can trust myself instead of using my body as a filter to protect myself. Plus, I chopped off all my hair, because I am a breakup cliche and because I've gotten way less worried about looking appealing to other people, and way more into the idea of looking appealing to myself.
This probably sounds very woo and self-helpy, but it actually feels true, which is also, in its way, new and shocking to me. And really really nice.
[link] [comments]
from loseit - Lose the Fat http://ift.tt/1VsyhFF
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment