It's been just over a year now since my last post when I was just shy of weighing 200 lbs, and struggling to stay optimistic and hopeful at a turnaround to my former healthier and happier days. One year and thirty additional pounds later, it's safe to say that I got over this initial shyness and have been living quite garrulously with the 200s. It's been like the good ol' days with my dear middle-aged friend BMI; in no time at all we've been popping the top buttons of our jeans so as to make room for that second fish taco. Don't get me wrong, gaining almost all of my weight back has been truly horrible, but...ohhh....so many good food memories are in each of these rolls...
My weight gain story is pretty standard: I stopped working out regularly (despite having a 2-year membership to 24 Hour Fitness) and have made many, many imprudent food choices. The long and short of it is that my health stopped being a priority and has been compromised as a result. I make no excuses and I have no one else to blame. But just so you don't think that this post is going to be a total Debbie Downer, I can tell you that for the past four weeks, I've been exercising (almost) daily and, for the most part, I'm eating pretty well, too.
As many overweight people can attest, there is a lifelong struggle with obsessing over perfectionism; the "all or nothing" mindset that I really only ever apply towards diet and exercise. I am certainly no exception to this. Making good food choices has never been a simple decision for me, but an agonizing process that involves qualifying food with calories, carbs, points, and/or emotions. Deciding what to eat is like happy hour for my Ghosts of Diet Plans Past and all of their conflicting information. Making the decision to exercise, then, isn't just choosing 30-60 minutes of physical activity, but a numbers game against the food. My 60 minutes of aquatic aerobics this morning might have burnt off the rice cakes and hummus, but if I want the scale to read a different number from last week, I will need to supplement with cardio. And so on and so forth it goes. As you can imagine, it's an exhausting and uninspiring process altogether. When it comes to losing weight and gaining weight, it is first and foremost always a battle of the mind.
There wasn't one major light bulb moment prior to this past month that made me stop and think, "Holy Hannah, what have I done? I need to make a change now!" There are thousands of those moments for me (and everyone else), particularly riiight after a meal or a national holiday. There are a lot of really crappy moments from this past year that I can pull from to motivate me towards the salad and the gym: like when I was all alone in a David's Bridal dressing room, and I had to claw, rip, and eventually sob my way out of a turquoise party dress that was vacuum sealed to my waist. Or when I inhaled The Boy's pint of Haagen-Dazs during a 15-minute episode of Last Week Tonight, and had to race to the grocery store in order to replace the pint before he noticed it was missing. Or when, a week later, I ended up eating the unopened replacement pint o'shame during another 15-minute episode of Last Week Tonight, and had to replace the replacement (For the record, I will never understand the kind of people who can leave whole pints of Haagen-Dazs, unopened, in a freezer for more than eight hours. I suspect that these are the same people who don't feel the need to eat the last three French fries left on their plate. This is the only evidence I've got to support the existence of alien life forms). I've stopped wearing jeans altogether because I'm too lazy to purchase a larger size and I'm too embarrassed to walk around in my old pair because I have to leave the top button and fly undone to make way for my girth. There is a terrible loneliness and shame that accompanies each of these moments. Despite having plenty of friends and family who have similar struggles with their weight, it's my body and my battle. I am grateful that I'm not the only person who has these kinds of "war stories". It's even a little bit comforting knowing that most people who lose any significant amount of weight usually end up gaining it all back after a year or so. But when I wake up in the morning, I am the only person inhabiting this body, I am the only person to blame, I have failed only myself, and it will only be through my efforts that I will begin to (slowly) pull myself up out of this again (and again, and again, and again).
During these first four weeks, I have found myself asking the same question over and over: how on Earth did I do this the first time around? I am so tired and I have no energy. The (unfortunate) answer: gradually. If you, dear reader, find yourself in a similar situation as me, there's no sugar-coating this one. The Beginning is very slow and very awful, with little to no motivation to inspire you to keep going. It does help to know that I am capable of dancing, running, swimming, lifting and biking again, even at my current weight, because I have done it before and the memories are relatively fresh in my mind. It also helps that I truly love going to Zumba and Aquatic Aerobics, and taking walks around the beach. When I go to Zumba class, I can close my eyes, dance, and go to my happy place. Of course, when I open my eyes to face the wall-to-wall mirrors and see my reflection wobbling all around, I know that the struggle is real, friends. My body looks heavy, my movements are sloppy, and natural lighting is pretty much the worst. When I actually look at myself dancing in Zumba, I am reminded of a recent trip to the La Brea Tar Pits. I think about the statue of the female mammoth struggling to free her own heavy limbs from sinking into the pit. OK, the tar pit analogy might be an over-exaggeration, but try lugging around a 50 lb bag of flour from Costco and see how gracefully you can sway your hips. Worst of all, everything hurts more because my body isn't used to moving around this much anymore. My calves scream in pain when I dance, my arms ache in the water from lugging around dumb bells, I have blisters all over my feet when I go for walks, and I will spare you the details of the damage inflicted on me recently by a bike seat. If I spend any kind of time thinking about how hard the last few weeks have been, or how much harder the next few years will be, I might be tempted to throw all of my jeans into a bonfire and start buying Haagen Dazs in bulk because it's definitely, 100% the easier option. Unfortunately, I'm 5'2 and being this heavy does not come without an equally heavy cost. If I could somehow have a Freaky Friday moment and switch metabolisms with The Boy and have his resilient skinny Asian metabolism, I would, but I can't.
This time around, I am doing my best to not overthink everything. I am doing my best not to think of Zumba in the "number of calories expended" but as one of the few non-food related hobbies of mine that I enjoy. I'm really trying not to qualify every piece of food that I put in my mouth. I have to accept that there is no such thing as perfection for me when it comes to eating or exercising because unfortunately French fries will always exist and lunges will always make me fall over. I just have to remember that there is an imperfect healthy person waiting for me at the End of all this, despite this super awful, slow-as-molasses Beginning, and I have every intention of fighting my way to meet her.
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