What Fills My Bag - Emotional Baggage

I've made so many dips into the uncomfortable, the sad, the angry and the frightening on my journey. My heavy weight was a constant companion and losing it is almost as hard emotionally as being fat is in the first place. Changing the capacity in which food was in my life and truly working on changing that relationship with food has left me at times with the feeling that I can't do anything. At times I'd feel like I couldn't do anything, I never figured it would be as hard as it has been or that it would be that emotional.

Looking back I see that it was emotions that caused the problems in the first place. Always feeling like I was the first to be teased or taunted and now whenever someone pays me a compliment I don't know how to respond. I don't know if I believe it. For so long I was the person people would whisper about and that mentality eventually breaks you down. It breaks you down until you believe it. If I'm already "The Fat Girl" then I might as well just sit at home, do nothing and stuff my face. Find solace in the fantasy world of books, or play video games where at least the cruel judgements that society paid me were less loud.

Fat girls can't go out and shop anywhere. Fat girls can't eat in public without being judged. Fat girls can't wear the cute or sexy clothes they'd like to. Some do, and power to them, but I have a feeling most fat girls were like me...perhaps saying they were proud and 'okay' being the size they were but truly miserable inside. Miserable because society thinks that making fat people unhappy is somehow okay. I have a personal philosophy that no one can get to be that big on the outside if they aren't really hurting (medically, emotionally, psychologically) on the inside.

I've been sitting and thinking about my motivations, about why I got started, about how I'm going to find the strength to finish this when I've never finished anything so important before in my life. It's so confrontational that I just want to duck my head under the covers and pretend it all doesn't exist anymore.

When I was approaching being under 200lbs I felt the twinge of all of this. How dare I change the me that I'd always been? Do I have the right to pull myself from the mold that society had cast me in? Was I strong enough not to crack? 200 was a hugely scary number for me to break through and I think that showed in my weight loss results. I wonder how much of that plateau I hit was just emotional, and had nothing to do with the physical.

This brings me to present day. I finally managed to get through a plateau that had dogged me since the end of November - probably my longest lasting plateau to date. Now I have a lot of struggles with being intimate due to my changing body image. In my head I'm still a "fat girl" and feeling undesired therefore undesirable. I don't know what I have in my mind as "desirable" because I don't find people who are terribly skinny to be attractive either. There is so much emotional baggage that comes with gaining weight. I look at it all like this:

There's a ton of emotional baggage we pack in our 'suitcase' when we gain weight. When we decide to lose weight we decide to unpack that suitcase. We also choose to remember all the hurt and pain we'd packed away. It takes so much strength to confront all the things in the dark corners of our 'suitcases'. Unpacking the baggage that got us in a bad place is the only healthy option, but it certainly isn't the easy option...