The other day I got to talking with somebody who I just recently met about weight loss. She didn't know how much weight I had lost, and when I told her, she said, "Wow, you would never know you used to be bigger!" That brought up several feelings for me. Probably the first feeling would be disbelief because I feel like I have a gigantic amount of skin (sorry for the mental images). I HATE THE SKIN! Most of it I can hide except for my arms, but it still doesn't make it any easier when I catch a glimpse of myself before getting in the shower.
But then there was also the feeling of a statement like that just being kind of surreal. I feel like my weight has defined me, or more accurately I have allowed it to define me, for my entire life. Until recently, it has always been in a negative way. But even now, I'm still defined by my weight to some extent. Except now I'm the girl who's lost an entire small adult male human instead of the girl who weighs as much as much as a small male adult hippopotamus (full disclosure, I have no idea how much an a small adult male hippo weighs). It's just odd to think that if I chose not to share, a stranger looking at me today would apparently never know about this struggle that has played such a huge part of my life. Is that good or bad? Maybe some of each. It's just weird to think about. I wonder if I will ever come to the point where my weight loss will be just a casual thing mentioned every now and then in conversation. I kind of doubt it, mainly because I am really passionate about trying to help other people lose the weight too. So I don't ever want to forget how it felt to be bigger and how much work it took to lose the weight. I never want it to be just a casual thing that I did a few years ago.
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