Five Pounds
You may recall the “incident” when I went to a new doctor in Boston in mid-May, and peeked at my weight. I felt relieved at that time, because it wasn’t as high as my catastrophic-thinking-mind had thought it’d be.
Now a little less than four months later it was time to go back to the doctor yesterday morning and check in. And as much as I tried not to look at the scale, I caught a glimpse of my weight on the computer screen after the physician’s assistant had typed it in – and I felt my heart drop into my stomach.
Five pounds. That is how much higher the weight was, after a little less than four months.
The doctor came in and, while looking over my vitals, commented that my weight looked good. I gave a little snort and she looked at me inquisitively. I said I didn’t feel that it looked that good and she said to me, “Well, you gained weight. Now you’re at the low end of normal BMI. And to be honest, you look better now than you did when I first saw you.”
But I didn’t really care about any of that and none of it made me feel better. The thoughts in my mind told me that the best looking people are not a normal BMI, they are a lower BMI. They have less body fat than what is “healthy”. It’s often hard for me to take compliments that I look “better” or “healthy” or “good” because to me that just screams “NOT SKINNY”.
I felt down on myself all day yesterday, and it didn’t help that I was coming off a big eating-and-drinking holiday weekend. I put on my pants this morning and they felt so much tighter than they had at the start of the summer. Yesterday I went for what was supposed to be a 5 or 6 mile run, but my legs felt so tired and dead that I only ended up going 3.84 miles.
I guess I’m supposed to end this blog post with some encouraging reminders to myself. I have done a lot of fun stuff this summer, I am training for a half marathon, and I’ve started taking better care of myself.
But that wouldn’t be that honest because none of that is encouraging me right now. All I feel is shame that I am back at the weight that I was before the summer that I lost a ton of weight, and fear that I’m going to keep gaining weight at a rate of five pounds over less than four months. All I really want is to be able to say I’m going on a diet without it being a bad thing.
I’m just not in the mood to be very ra-ra right now. I just want to lose weight – there I said it. I’m not saying it’s what I should want but it’s how I feel, so there it is.
Have you ever struggled with how you feel about a situation vs how you “should” feel?
