Losing Weight is Mental, Too

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Hi Fellow Bloggers- My name is Lori Lynn, and I’ve been blogging over at Sunflowerdaisies for about three years now about my daily life, which includes a lot of ups and downs! This is my first time doing a guest post before, so we’ll see how it goes!

Two Years Ago…

For me, turning 30 was a bit scary. I’m single, unmarried, unattached, but not necessarily by choice. But I have to say, the two-and-a-half years of my 30′s have been ten times better than any of my twenties! Why, you may ask? I guess the saying is true, Wisdom comes with age. There’s a lot of decisions and choices I’ve made in the past I wouldn’t make again.

One thing about me is, I’ve always been a “dweller,” reliving the past, and having extremely vivid recollections of them. I grew up going to a one-room school house from K-3rd grade living in the country till I was nine. Then we moved into town and remember pretty well what it felt like to move to a new school where I had to make new friends. I can remember starting to have feelings of self-hatred and embarrassment of the way that I looked, partially from feedback I was getting from my classmates in my small school (and my mom who was being overly protective of my appearance). When I was in 5^th grade I got a diary for Christmas from one of my relatives. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I do remember tearing the pages, because I was embarrassed about what I wrote.

Since this time I’ve struggled with my weight; getting to my highest of about 220-ish in college. In my past, I struggled with low self-esteem, self-doubt, suicidal thoughts, besides the emotional binge-eating. I won’t say I don’t struggle with these things, because I still do; just not nearly to the extent as I did, in the past.

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Fast forward to today, and even though I have lost quite a bit of weight, there are times I feel like I’m still a size 18+. I should feel proud of my weight loss, because it’s a big accomplishment. I’m working on living a healthy lifestyle, not focusing on the weight, but the lifestyle. I went a year without weighing myself, but based my progress on clothing sizes. It was strange not to know how much I weighed, but I felt great about the weight I was losing.

There were/are still times I look in the mirror expecting to see the heavier me. There are also times I still want skinnier hips or thighs. Shopping now is somewhat foreign; I’m still expecting to struggle finding clothes to fit. If there is a struggle, it’s only on my part- I have the expectation that I want to fit into that size 6 pair of pants, and if I don’t, I LET it upset me. My heavier self would be absolutely thrilled to fit in a size 8! I’ve left, feeling worse about myself than when I started, but I chose to let it bother me.

So how does one forget the past? My older-self would tell my younger-self that you can’t, well, not entirely. But, I’m sure you’ve heard before, you can learn from it. There are many times I’ve felt I needed a collar to “shock” me into to breaking the cycle of guilt and regret. I keep doing the same things over, and over, and over.

So my advice and what I’ve learned? Take your thoughts captive. When those sneaky little thoughts of “Ugh,” “Why?,” “I want…” , “I hate…” slip into your mind, you have to push them aside. Don’t let them take over. It’s something that you can’t just do once, but each and EVERY time. I’d like to tell my younger-self that it gets easier, and maybe in some extent it does, but like everything else, it’s a work in progress