Fears

My worst fear was (and still is) that I'd be a failure. That somehow I will screw this up. That I will lose my focus and determination and not see this through to the end. Because well, let's be honest here... I've never followed through on any plans related to weight loss before. I feel a lot of pressure, mostly from myself, to make this work. To break out of my fat girl shell and leave it behind permanently. But it's hard. It's really, really hard.

We all identify ourselves in some way or the other. The athletic girl, the girly girl, the gymnast, the scholar, the funny one, the fat one, the thin one, the sarcastic one. The list goes on and on and on. It's an identity that we wrap ourselves up in. It becomes part of who we are. We see the world through that and it colors everything. Now, I need to change that lens I'm looking through. And I'm not really sure I know how.

How do you change your whole mindset? How do you stop using food as a crutch to deal with emotions? I've already noticed that if I'm eating in a social setting, I'm not as careful as usual. That I let talking and socializing take over and slip back into old habits. People think having the surgery makes it easy to do this and I will swear to you it doesn't. It still requires A LOT of hard work and determination. It requires finding a way to change your entire relationship with food. Food that has always been a comfort, a pick-me up, a way to celebrate, a way to mourn has to become something different. It's a fuel source, nothing less and nothing more.

I'm still struggling with this daily. When I have a bad day, I still want to eat ice cream or chips or well, anything and lots of it. I crave pizza. I drool over soda. My body does NOT want those things, but my brain does and it wants them badly. I have to really, really think about each bite I put in mouth. Am I really hungry? Or is it "head hunger"?

The truth of things is that right now and I'm depressed and I've never, ever dealt with depression without using food to comfort myself. That's not an option for me now and it's bewildering. Emotions feel stronger now than they did before surgery. I've spent entire days in bed crying because I just can't do anything else. Are the emotions really stronger now? Probably not. I just don't have a way to numb them anymore. I'm trying to break this cycle of addiction. You know the one where you feel bad, so you eat a ton of food to feel better, then you feel worse because you ate a ton of food. Then you spiral out of control for days or weeks before you get it back together. You eat healthy for a few days or weeks, then start the spiral again. I'm tired of that cycle. I'm tired of feeling bad about myself.

So, yeah, it's hard. It's real damn hard. The emotional journey is 100 times harder than I expected. I never realized how much I was using food as a crutch. Now, I'm learning to stand on my own two feet. I can't accurately describe how hard it is or how rewarding it is. It's about so much more than losing weight at this point. It's about changing so much inside me as well. I hope that I become a better person for it. A more stable person, a more caring person, a less self-absorbed person. A happier person who isn't weighed down by the baggage of my past. The past is done and can't be changed. It's time to forgive those who have wronged me and to forgive myself for everything. I would never hold a grudge against someone the way I do against myself. It's time to embrace the future and all that it holds, whatever that may be.