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Weight Loss for Everyone: I didn't realize losing weight would cause me to have a mini identity crisis

Thursday, February 25, 2021

I didn't realize losing weight would cause me to have a mini identity crisis

The background story: I've been overweight to obese pretty much my entire life. I realized I was a chubby kid in fourth grade thanks to my peers, and I spent my childhood/early teens wanting to do something about it but never having the ambition to follow through. I'd go on diet kicks for a week or so, not see results, then give up. I know, I know. At 17 I had my gallbladder removed and lost quite a bit of weight; went from 208 to 144 within four months. I spent the last months of my senior year somewhat slim, even though I still saw myself as overweight (thanks body dysmorphia). That didn't last long, and to make a long story short: I gained weight back, lost some, gained it back, lost some, had two children over two years, which ended with my weight topped out at 245 at 25 years of age last year. I decided to make a change last summer after the birth of my second child.

Since then I've lost around 80 pounds. I'm not to my goal yet, but it feels a lot more obtainable now that I'm well over halfway there. It didn't really occur to me just how much I've lost, since I still see myself as the size I was just after I had my baby. It hadn't really hit me how different I must look until a couple weeks ago when we visited my boyfriend's grandmother for the first time in over a year and she gushed about how much weight I've lost. It felt weird and slightly uncomfortable to be in the spotlight like that, and that moment seemingly acted as a reality check because now I CAN see all the changes in my body and honestly, I've got mixed feelings about them.

One of the main things I've noticed is my fingers. I've always had chubby fingers, and I had just assumed that was how I was built. Now that I'm paying attention, I can see that my fingers are no longer chubby; they're much more slender and even my hands themselves are slimmer as well. I knew that'd I'd gone down two ring sizes but I never noticed the actual difference in my hands. That fact alone has sent me on a mental tailspin. I've got wide feet, and I've always had to get extra wide shoes or go up half a size to accommodate. Now I'm wondering if I even have wide feet or if they've just been "wide" because they were actually just fat because I was.

I've always defaulted to basic, drab baggy clothing because, well, that's how I hid the body I was ashamed of. I told myself that it was because the popular clothing brands weren't my style, but deep down I knew it was because I would not fit into their clothing, and even if by some miracle I did manage to squeeze myself into it I was not getting out of it without a sharp pair of scissors. Since the realization, I've ordered a few items of said clothing online and I actually love them. They're comfortable and they look good on me. That's where the mixed feelings come into play though, and I'm constantly torn between "wow, this is awesome" and "this has never been my style, eww, where's the sweatshirt that's three sizes too big" mindset. It's like I've literally rewired my brain over the years to not appreciate form fitting clothing, and now that I'm starting to wear it there's a subconscious mental back and forth.

I wasn't expecting all these weird feelings. I (naively) assumed that once I got closer to my goal weight that I'd just.....adjust. I didn't realize that I would literally have to internally argue with myself like "it's okay, you can wear the shirt, it fits you, you don't need to hide your body". I still find myself wearing oversized clothing, or gravitating to it. I've gotten rid of all my 2X and 3X from when I was pregnant, but I still have quite a bit of 1X that I can't quite give up yet, even though I'm in large and medium now. I'm hoping these feelings pass with time, and I'm sure they will. It's just a foreign concept to me that I'm sitting here, 30lbs off my goal weight, wondering just how many little, every day things in my life have been affected simply because I was obese most of it.

Obligatory apology for formatting, grammar, and any misspelled/incorrect words. It's 2am here and I really need to get some sleep, but I needed to get this off my chest first.

submitted by /u/iced-archer66
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/lss8tf/i_didnt_realize_losing_weight_would_cause_me_to/

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