I’ve deliberately avoided using denoiseit to clean the background noise because it would feel wrong to remove the birds singing. I hope you’ll enjoy my off-the-cuff walking monologue about my ongoing journey. I’ve had a difficult start to Spring, but I’m really beginning to rebound. I’m looking forward to making the best of May.
Progress update
Unfortunately, April is definitely not as successful as March was. Last month I was down 20lbs and this month I’m only down 11 so far. I can think of quite a few reasons why that was the case. I’ve been pretty stressed, and I’ve been finding it more difficult to control portions. Some good progress has been made correcting these mistakes. Spending time focusing on improving my rest and stress management has made a significant difference on my mood, motivation and drive.
It is clear that I need to re-balance my energies to continue to push hard in a balanced and reasonable way. I am facing significant life challenges outside of this journey at the moment, so my ability to withstand pressures is absolutely being put to the test.
Losing the spark
I recently wrote about hitting a wall of soreness that kept me down quite a bit. It was quite the challenge to learn to rebound from a funk of disappointment and difficulties. Beyond unrelated stressors, a lot of my frustrations have been centered around feeling disappointed in myself. While I’ve made massive strides in strength, mobility, and weight loss, many things I want to do feel out of reach. I’ve vastly underestimated how much difficulties still remain in this difficult road.
I can walk for a decent amount of time and do many things I couldn’t before, but I struggle to properly appreciate these smaller wins. I am so fixated on what I still can’t do that it’s very difficult to have the required gratitude for the situation I’m in. When I really think about it my quality of life has been transformed in many ways since last Summer, but that’s not the same as being finished. While I certainly understood I would still have weight to lose by this point, I fully expected to be able to move better in this body by now.
I’ve seriously underestimated the challenges of being 400lbs while also overestimated the mobility and strength progress that could be made over the last few months. These mismatched expectations have had me languishing in frustration and despair. As shocking as it may seem to those who follow these updates, I am regularly feeling like I may never escape these troubles. It is clear to me that the important progress that remains is going to take quite some time. Day to day, I have an arduous struggle of trying to constantly remind myself that things are changing and real progress is taking place. With the understanding that I haven’t given myself enough time to grow, I really need to practice patience and gratitude to keep my head in the game.
Body image troubles
In addition to all that, I’ve been having very extreme swings in my body image feelings. Some moments I’m feeling like things are all coming together and I just need to be patient, and other moments I feel like nothing has changed at all. Despite losing over 150lbs in total, it is still often quite difficult to recognize the progress. I think part of it is that it’s only a quarter of my highest body weight, and less than half of what I need to lose in total. Again, it seems that my mismatched expectations were the driving cause of my frustration over the last few weeks.
I can definitely say the difficulties of this journey make it immensely difficult to have a positive self-image. Many of the wide variety of things that are still out of reach for me are all very quick reasons for me to feel useless or like a waste. I have found that working on stress management and getting better sleep does make a big difference. It absolutely makes how hard all this is crystal clear to me. It is very easy to spiral into a typhoon of terror, denial, and self-loathing when things aren’t going well.
Something that helped a lot recently was being able to comfortably fit into 4XL clothes, down from 6XL. I effectively ‘skipped’ 5XL because I don’t really intend on buying every size down to whatever I end up at. I underestimated how staying in the clothes I started in for so long would make it harder to appreciate the change. I’ve noticed that feeling comfortable in the smaller sizes does quite a lot for physical and even mental comfort.
Learning to reignite the passion and drive
One advantage to doing this as long as I have is that I’m beginning to recognize some patterns and cycles. I always get nervous when my weight trends closer to my 2-week moving average. This is because I essentially take it as a sign I’m losing momentum. For the last few days, I’ve met and gone above the moving average. One of the patterns I need to resolve is stressing out about stress. Whenever my weight isn’t comfortably below the moving average, I begin to worry and then worry about worrying which makes things so much harder.
Thankfully this time around, I’ve noticed that this exact scenario has happened before. At the start of Winter I can see a very similar pattern where I poke above the average for a brief time. It is reassuring to know that I have faced this before and it does not need to be an unbearable crisis. I guess the transition between seasons is just always a tricky thing for me in this process.
It was really helpful to remind myself that as awful as this all is, it’s not permanent. By rediscovering the gratitude for the fact that I can change this situation I am feeling better about this difficult time. I’m trying to really put my problem back into perspective so that I can be happy about incremental progress again.
A question for you!
I’d really like to know what active hobbies you enjoy! I’ve been thinking about how it’s difficult for many people to stay active with busy lives so I’m very curious to hear about how people overcome this.