This week's numbers:
- Today's weight: 214.0 lb
- Change since last week: -1.0 lb
- Cumulative weight loss: 120.0 lb
- Average weekly weight change: -1.88
As I slowly continue to whittle away at the numbers, I find myself drifting into weight territory I haven't visited in years. For instance: I was leafing through my old copy of Making Peace With Food the other day, in the workbook sections of which I had scribbled various bits of data, and there I found a dated notation that proved I haven't weighed this little since the late 1980s. That's pretty freakin' mindblowing.
At some other point in the past week or so, I was leafing through some old files and found some photos of me that had been taken in 2002. Wow. I had completely blocked out how seriously huge I was. Mind you, there is no emotional charge on this observation--it's not like I was looking at the photos and thinking "How disgusting! Ellen, how could you have let yourself get so such-and-so?" or any such crap like that. I'm just plain old astonished at my former size. I must have been in denial--or to put a more neutral terminology on it, I think I took my size for granted the way we don't really think about air going in and out of our lungs--it's just there, you know?
But now that I'm getting used to seeing a significantly smaller me, that old photo is seriously startling. Some 340 pounds on a 5'3" frame is pretty damned hard to ignore. In the photos, I look like I'm almost as wide as I'm tall. God alone knows what kind of assumptions strangers must have made about me when looking at me. It's possibly a tribute to the strength of my personality that I had so many friends in my life who were able to look past all those layers of fat (and any prejudices they might have had about that) to see the real me.
Ironically, I'm sure at least some strangers looking at me today without any knowledge of my prior history would still think "oh, she's fat." No doubt some of them are even now making fatphobic assumptions that I must be a lazy careless slob in denial of her weight, who eats huge amounts of crap food while lolling about in front of the TV. And no doubt at least some will still be making such assumptions when I finally find a bottom weight, which I expect will leave me still significantly fatter than those impossibly thin models in the media. Oh well--like that silly old childhood aphorism says, "when you assume, you make an 'ass' of 'u' and 'me.'" Heh.
Yeah, sometimes I can still get a little cranky about the assumptions some people make. But mostly, I don't give a shit about the fatphobes, because I'm having so much fun enjoying the better health and functionality of my body as it currently is. I know I'm doing the right thing, and I feel gorgeous on the inside, where it really counts. And isn't that the real point, anyway?
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