(Another) Progress Report Quasi-Pep Talk

I haven't been doing these very often because my thoughts don't tend to turn to physical progress as often as they once did. I tend to be more focused on mental progress since that feels more meaningful to me. It's not that the physical progress isn't important. It's actually very important, but one leads to the other and the mental changes have had a more profound effect on my overall quality of life at this point.

I have mentioned before that my weight loss feels like a Russian doll effect. I am getting smaller, but my shape is generally the same. This is sometimes discouraging because my lower body is so disproportionate relative to my upper body and I wish my belly and behind would shrink more visibly.

Part of what has persuaded me to make this post is that I think my stomach finally is changing. The reason that I'm so keen on my stomach changing is that it is such a focal point for unwanted attention from strangers and even business acquaintances. Sometimes I'm sitting across from a person I deal with in my work, and their eyes drift down and gawk at my belly. Sometimes their eyes dart down to it repeatedly. It makes me very self-conscious that people break eye contact during conversations to look at my stomach, and they are in a "client" position so I can't really call them on it.

Here is the progress I have noticed:

• The old chair with arms which has been my measuring stick for so long continues to offer feedback. When I started, I squeezed into it with difficulty, couldn't use the armrests, etc. Now, I can sit in it comfortably and can fit one of my arms between my body and the chair's arms.
• The shape of my hips and lower body has changed because my stomach is finally starting so show some "lift". It still hangs down plenty, but it's definitely getting visibly smaller.
• I can see more of my upper thighs than I have seen in years, both on the sides and at the top. I may actually be developing a bit of a lap.
• My breasts are getting smaller. Since I'm a "D" cup now and would like to be back to a "C" (my smallest bra size as an adult), that makes me happy.
• Veins are starting to show on the sides of my wrists and my forearms are pretty much "normal" looking and not fat at all. My upper arms are another story, but I don't think I'll ever be rid of batwings, and I'm not really too preoccupied with that.
• My collar bones are visible and my shoulders are taking on definition.
• My upper calves are noticeably smaller. My upper calves have always been huge, even when I wasn't all that overweight. At my highest weight, they were like volley balls attached to the base of my knee. They're still big, but not nearly as big as before.
• My double-chin continues to shrink at a slow rate, though it is still a little wrinkly which I'm not a fan of.
• I can feel that there is less fat in my cheeks because the space where the creases leading to my nose is bigger. It's easier to clean pores at the sides of my nose now.
• I notice that it is easier to sit with my legs together and that when I sit in our tiny (very tiny) toilet, I don't need to use the entire space to spread my legs apart when going to the bathroom.
• Post bathing powdering of parts of my body that rub together requires less powder. There's less "acreage" to cover.
• When I shower, I notice that my belly button isn't as "deep" when I clean it. Also, when I sit with my hands resting on my stomach, I notice that my belly button is higher.
• It's easier to touch type because my stomach isn't getting in the way as much.
• I use an armless chair, and I used to take up the entire space and possibly hang over the sides a bit. Now, there is a little room on the sides.
• I negotiate narrow spaces in shops more easily and feel less inhibited about trying to squeeze into them. There was a shop I had been wanting to go into for some time, but the layout was very narrow (keep in mind, I'm in an urban area where the shops are smaller and shopkeepers try to maximize stock space by making narrow aisles). I avoided going in because I didn't want to be knocking things over or totally blocking the aisle such that others couldn't pass by. I finally went into that shop, and everything was okay.

I'm still not incredibly confident about my ability to go out and just do anything. I still don't think I can fit into theater seats, restaurant chairs, or negotiate any space at my current body size. I also wouldn't go on an airplane right now. If I were less pear-shaped, this might not be an issue, but my lower body is just too big.

Last time I weighed myself (not too terribly recently, but not too long ago either), I weighed 249 lbs. It's interesting to consider all of the possible perspectives on this. I started around 380 lbs. by my rough calculations. That means I've lost 35% of my body's weight at its highest point and am roughly 2/3 the size I once was.

I'm also currently only about 19 lbs. heavier than my husband's highest recorded weight. That's probably the smallest difference between his and my weight ever as I have always out-weighed him, though it's important to note that I'm still 50 lbs. heavier than his current weight as he has been losing weight over the past several months as well. It would be nice to one day not be heavier than my husband, though the truth is that our body frames and sizes are roughly similar. His feet and hands are almost the same size as mine, though he is 5 inches taller than me. His frame is on the smaller side, and mine is on the bigger side.

I once talked about the percentages in a post and how each pound lost becomes more meaningful than the last because the ratios keep getting "better". That is, losing 1/380th of my weight is smaller than 1/249th of my weight. Each pound is more meaningful than the last. However, I'm still more interested in mental progress because I feel that on a daily basis, it really has been more profound. Each pound still is not something that I can see as an external change on a daily basis, but I can feel the lack of obsession with food and the lack of struggle on the inside every single day.

Not all the changes are good...

Sometimes I think the fact that I have been fat all of my life (well, since 4th grade of elementary school) has one tiny blessing when it comes to weight loss. That is the fact that I have never had an attractive body. For as long as I remember, I have had fat legs, a belly apron, and a large behind. I've always had lumpy cellulite and breasts which were not beautifully shaped.

The reason this may be a blessing is that I am not freaked out by all of the changes brought on by weight loss. I don't expect there not to be stretch marks all over me or bat wings on my upper arms. I don't expect a flat stomach or firm thighs and a nice behind. I can't expect these things because they have never existed on my body. When I lose weight and things start to sag and droop, it's pretty much just a variation on what my body has always been.

I think a lot of people when they lose weight, and the ridiculously idealized bodies people choose for their avatars on weight loss forums would seem to support this notion, want to end up firm, toned and "hot". Such an expectation would never be on my radar so I face no disappointment at the end of the road. My body is not going to look "good" naked when I have reached my goal and I'm okay with that because my body is like an old, well-worn, stretched-out sweater that can't get back its shape and I'd have to be delusional or have a ton of cosmetic surgery to have it end up otherwise.

The benefit of this is that there isn't disappointment waiting for me at the end of the line when I inevitably fail to meet some absurd ideal form based on the images we see of people in the media. Such people are Photoshopped, plastic-surgeried-into-perfection or have nothing better to do than to work on their bodies for several hours a day and do not represent our potential so much as our distorted expectations of what is achievable. That being said, even someone with my low expectations can find some disappointment in the results of weight loss.

As I have mentioned before, for my weight, my face has never been particularly fat. Of course, it has been "fat", but I haven't had much of a double chin for someone who was closing in on 400 lbs. and my cheeks haven't been too plump. While this was "good" when I was fatter, as I lose weight, I'm starting to find that the skin on my face is getting thinner. This makes parts of my face look younger as it's a bit like a face lift as the fat droopy areas start to thin out.

However, weight loss is causing the skin around my eyes to get very, very thin and bringing out all of the wrinkling one might expect with my age of 45. The wrinkles are shocking and not something I expected at all, but there is also the fact that my pale skin reveals bluish darkness around my eyes because of the coloration beneath. I first looked younger due to weight loss, now, I'm starting to look older.

Some people who are losing weight say that others remark that they are looking "sick" and are perhaps losing weight too quickly or losing too much. The person who is losing weight gets upset at this, but my experience is enlightening me about why others may have such a perception. My face, and my eyes in particular, are starting to look drawn (from the wrinkles) and tired (from the darker coloration showing through). I can easily see how someone who has seen my plumper, less-wrinkled, and pinker face at a higher weight for years would view me as looking "sick" as a result of this change. It's a reasonable conclusion, though one that they only reach because of their point of comparison and not because I'm actually ill or my weight loss is "bad". If anyone ever tells me I'm looking bad because of my weight loss, I'm not going to get mad; I'm going to understand where they are coming from.

So Many Cells

In dealing with my hard-to-discern progress, I've been trying to conceptualize how the changes in my body occur. Since I likely still weigh over 300 lbs. (perhaps considerably more, it's hard to know), I've been mulling over the effect of the loss of just one pound on the entire mass of me.

My guess based on my calorie counting, exercise, and likely base level calorie number maintenance for a person of my current size, is that I'm under-eating by as much as 1500 calories a day, possibly a bit more or a bit less. That means I'm probably losing somewhere over 2 lb.s a week, and about 10 lbs. a month.

I can't recall if I've mentioned this fact before, but the number of fat cells in your body is set by a certain age (around your late teens). I will always have a lot of fat cells unless I have surgery, which I have no plans to do. Looking at my size, and considering the number of fat cells in my body, I'm thinking of just how little impact 1 lb. of cell shrinkage is going to have on such a vast number of fat cells. There is a lot of territory to cover and the distribution of 1 lb. is going to be infinitesimal and impossible to notice.

This may sound discouraging, but it is not. It actually encourages patience. I know that I can't see a difference in a week, but I will see a difference in a month or two. I have to give my body a chance to shrink in a leap because it's unrealistic to expect it to shrink in baby steps. I have to give it time because there's so much ground to cover. It's a little like tiling a vast space one tiny tile at a time. At first, you feel like you'll never get it all covered, but as the months go by, you have covered a wall, then another, and in a few years, the room is nearly done. Those inches become feet, and the feet become yards.

This conceptualization has helped me become a little more patient with the process during this period of "FWB" (fat without benefits). I'm hoping the sense can stick with me as time goes by.

Monitoring Methods

Now that I'm heading deeper into the 6th month of my efforts to lose weight and be in control of my eating, I've decided that it is time to add in another form of monitoring my progress. I still have ambivalent feelings about the scale and will not be using it for the time being.

At this point, I still regard it as a "de-motivational" tool because of the way in which the readings cannot be trusted as a measure of progress. Weight values fluctuate greatly based on time of day, time of month, and increases in muscle mass. I don't want to find myself in despair because the readings haven't moved or have gone up when I know I've done everything right. I'll just keep doing everything right for the time being and let the chips fall where they may.

Previously, I've mentioned that my clothes have been my measure as well as observations of specific bodily changes. I'm also watching my interaction with my environment to see if things are changing. For example, I have a small half-bath bathroom which is little bigger than a small closet that I used to occasionally scrape my belly on when entering or exiting the room and I clear the door with more clearance than before. I also have a chair with arms which I barely squeezed into before which is a better fit, though this is probably one of the slower changing experiences since I'm losing weight so much more slowly in my lower body.

The next monitoring phase is coming photographically. I had my husband take a picture of me about a week ago and download it to his computer. I can't bear to look at it myself, but I am going to have him take regular pictures at 4-month intervals and ask him to check for visible progress. I'm guessing I'll have the courage to look at them myself about a year into this journey, or whenever he does a comparison and reports that progress is clearly visible.

I wish I had had him take a picture at the beginning, but I think that would have put pressure on me to succeed and I simply was not ready at that point. I can only chart my progress if I expect to make it, and I'm not sure I had the highest expectations at the beginning. It wasn't that I expected to fail necessarily, but rather that embarking on this trip was enough of a stretch for me.

The Belly Apron

One day my husband and I were lying on the sofa together watching T.V. My husband's was in front of me and leaning back against me. He kept shifting around. I asked him what the problem was. He said that he was having trouble getting comfortable, but thought it would help if I moved the pillow that was behind him. That "pillow" was my belly fat.

If you're obese, you know about the "belly apron". This is the blob of flesh that hangs down in front of your genitals. When Roseanne (the comedienne from the television show) was still fairly fat, she was criticized for having plastic surgery on her stomach and breasts. She said that the reason she did it was that she'd lost about 75 lbs. and her stomach still hung down over her genitals and her then-husband Tom Arnold mocked and derided her for it. She had the surgery to get rid of the dreaded belly apron.

Since I've been very fat most of my life, my belly apron has been with me since junior high school. One of the crueler kids once asked me in the locker room after gym class if I had pubic hair because I was so fat that she couldn't see if I had any or not. If I hadn't been so humiliated, I might have asked her why such a thing was of interest to her, but I just wanted to run and hide.

One thing I can certainly attest to is the endurance of a belly apron even after one has shed considerable weight. Mine endured during my previous weight huge weight loss, and is currently the last thing to shrink during my current weight loss. I can lose inches on my chest, waist, legs, and arms, but that apron has always just hung there making me hate my body and making certain aspects of hygiene more cumbersome. It also, frankly, is a serious problem when having sex.

I have reconciled myself to the fact that, even if I lose all the weight I want, that skin is still going to be with me. When I lost weight before, the fact, that it was still there never allowed me to feel good about my body. It completely distorted my impressions of how I looked, even though it had gotten a lot smaller and less unattractive. I think the only way I'm ever going to escape it is with surgery, and I can't afford that. It's disheartening to know that, no matter how hard I try, that disgusting belly apron is going to be there one way or another.