What it's like to be somewhat less fat

When I wrote the original post, I didn't intend to turn it into a series. But it turns out that losing weight brings with it its own set of issues. Shocker, I know. But here we are. Not that far removed from where we were. As they say, the more things change...

You're sort of stuck in limbo. You're not as fat as you were, but by no means have you escaped the label altogether. You're still in the plus sizes, but you can venture into regular sizes ("misses") too. Not everything there fits, but some things do.

You've learned over the past year to talk about your weight; you've changed your policy of avoiding the topic altogether. You have the freedom to talk about it because nobody can judge. You're doing so well. You're making an effort. You've taken control of your own health. People can't take your size and assume that you're lazy or full of self-loathing. Unless they don't know, in which case they can judge all they want to. But you're past the point of wanting to share your success with the world, past the point of needing those accolades from thin people who don't really know what they're talking about when they tell you how fabulous this is. You've mastered the smile and the thank you when somebody compliments you on your weight loss, even while internally you're thinking about how much further you have to go.

You do constant comparisons, with everybody. Whereas before you felt like you were the fattest person in existence, now you understand that you fall somewhere between the extremes, somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. There are people who are fatter than you and people who are less fat than you. It's hard to wrap your mind around that, even though you know in your head that you were never the fattest person in the world.

So you look at everybody and compare yourselves to them. I bet we weigh about the same. Her stomach is bigger, but so are her boobs. And you derive intense, shameful satisfaction whenever you can say to yourself, She is definitely bigger than me. You read articles about weight loss and the different weights people are at, and whenever somebody's weight is between where you were and where you are, for a minute you think that you're fatter than them, and forget about the weight you've lost.

You start thinking of yourself as not that fat, maybe even a little bit shapely, kind of cute. Then you catch sight of yourself in the mirror, or try to pick out clothes for a big event, or look at unflattering photos of yourself (most of them) and you come back to earth, hard. You're still fat. Maybe it's all relative, but what does that matter? You have so much further to go. Your body confidence bobs up and down, and often you wonder if you're just fooling yourself about the remote possibility that you're kind of cute sometimes. You wonder if even losing all the weight would be enough to end these feelings. You suspect that it won't.

You can see your collarbones now, there, not totally defined but definitely visible, noticeable even when you aren't hunching your shoulders. You're inordinately proud of this and you try really hard not to notice other women's perfectly sculpted collarbones because you really need to feel that your own little shadowy ones count for something.

You compare your weight loss now to your weight loss back then and you come up lacking. You feel pressure to maintain a certain weight loss rate, to be able to announce every week that you've lost another 2-3 pounds, even though that's not reasonable and your doctor agrees. Back in the early days, you had optimistically projected what weight you'd be at by now, and you aren't there, and you try really hard not to hate yourself for that. And sometimes you succeed.

Other times you gain a pound or two in a week, and as much as you tell yourself that it's just water retention, or hormones, or an over-indulgent weekend that you'll work off in no time, or a down cycle in your thyroid function, it's impossible to really believe it, not with visions of gaining all the weight back dancing in your head. You're a little horrified at yourself that one or two pounds can cause this level of pessimism. But you can't stop it.

And yet your motivation is waning. It's hard to keep up that level of discipline for so long, and when you see how long it's taking and envision how much longer it will take, you become even more unmotivated. Losing half a pound in a week starts to feel like a gain in terms of the disappointment you feel in your throat when you see the number on the scale. You want it to be gone. You want it to be over. And the more you feel like that, the harder it is to make it happen.

You thought when you lost all that weight you would stop thinking about it so much, that you would finally be free from it, that that would be the most beautiful thing about it. But you haven't stopped thinking about it, not at all. If possible, you think about it even more than you did. The reminders are still there, because you still haven't escaped the fat zone. They're still all around you, but more than ever they're inside you and you can't get away from them. You think that maybe when you've finally reached your weight loss goal, that's when you'll be free from all this, thin and comfortable with yourself and the space you occupy.

You push back the idea that maybe you'll never get to your goal weight, that maybe this is where you'll be forever, stuck in weight loss limbo. You push back the niggling thought that no matter how thin you finally get, you'll never be free from these feelings. But deep down, you know it's true.