It was 1 degree Celcius outside, and there I was in a sports bra and booty shorts, striking a pose in front of a metal container in a deserted shipping yard. “I don’t want you to lean against it; it’s too cold,” the photographer told me.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I have plenty of insulation!”
“Actually, you don’t,” she replied. “I know you still feel like it’s there, but it’s not. It takes longer to get rid of the weight in your head than it does to shed it from your body.”
She was right. And you know, I know the weight is gone. I do. I mean, that’s why I was there – I booked that photo shoot for a bunch of reasons, but one is that I reached my goal weight. The weight I was at when I finished high school. The weight where I promised myself I’d stop the weight loss mindfuckery and just learn to maintain.
Except…except that since that photo shoot I’ve dropped five pounds. I didn’t do it on purpose; in fact since CPU Westerns (the first week of September) I have put zero effort into losing weight. I stopped tracking, I stopped weighing myself regularly, I stopped being careful about what I was putting into my mouth…I just, you know, kept on eating the same way I was used to eating, and training the way I was used to training. And the other day I was driving home from the gym and pondering life, and a strange thought hit me:
I could try and drop to the next (powerlifting) weight class down. It’s not that far away.
NOPE, I told myself. I’m not playing that game anymore.
See, I’ve been either dieting or letting my weight spiral out of control since I was 13 years old. The last four months of paying zero attention and maintaining have been a major anomaly, although if I’m honest I have to confess that the last year or so of tracking macros and training hard has been a labour of love. I actually enjoyed the process – it wasn’t about control and self-loathing anymore. It wasn’t punishment for letting myself go; I was driven purely by my big-ass crush on strength sports.
But there’s always the next goal. The next opportunity for improvement. The next mountain peak….actually fuck mountain climbing. The next set of plates on the bar! That’s how I roll, yo.
So the real question is, how do you learn to trust yourself after 25+ years of bungee-cord dieting?
We are the sum of our habits – how we live dictates who we are. And if the outside of us doesn’t match what’s inside, you’ve got a great recipe for shame and unhappiness brewing.
Because weight loss is never just about carrying around less fat. The number on the scale, while it can seem all-encompassing when it doesn’t jive with how we see ourselves, doesn’t matter – not really. The real battleground is inside our braincase – whether you think have 5lbs to lose or 50lbs to lose, the feelings are the same when you look in the mirror and think, “ugh.”
Every weight loss program out there teaches you (in whatever roundabout way) to eat less calories, but a big piece of the puzzle that most of them miss is that you have to learn to stop defining yourself as an overweight person and start thinking like the person you want to become. Otherwise, no matter how much success you have on whatever plan you’re using, that phantom flesh hangs on and keeps messing with you – and if you ask me, THAT is the reason why most people fail at weight loss. That’s certainly why I failed, over and over and over again – it took a massive shift in how I saw myself to lose the weight and keep it off…and I clearly still have work to do in that department.
I might still have work to do in the weight loss department, too. Because do I stop here? I could. For the first time in my life I feel at home in my body; like my meat suit reflects what I value, and the past few months have taught me that that I actually can trust myself to maintain; at least over the short term. Or I could keep pushing for a few more months and see what happens. Either way we’re in uncharted territory.