Today I’m thinking about a difficult subject: self image. When you go though a drastic change like I did not only do you change on the outside, but how you see yourself from the inside changes as well.
I always thought my self image was healthy when I was at 290 pounds. I thought I was pretty and was generally fine with how I looked. I was not in denial about my size or that I was overweight. But as I got healthier I saw how bad myself image really was. I’ve always loved myself and found success in life but my thoughts were often dark. If someone saw me eating Taco Bell in my car, I’d just assumed they thought how fat and gross I was. Who knew what they were really thinking, but that is what I assumed. When a thin girl would make eyes at my husband and then look at me, I always thought she was thinking, how did such a cute guy end up with such a fat girl? I knew I was overweight and felt like there was a thinner person trapped in my body sometimes. When I would see pictures of myself, I would think I was huge but that’s not really me. What I expected to see in the mirror was never what I saw because that’s never how I felt inside.
As I started to drop weight, I still struggled with my self image. All of the sudden how I felt inside is what I looked like on the outside. While this was very excited it was scary at the same time. People started treating me differently, especially men. It was hard to start wearing clothes that actually showed my body (skinny jeans!) that I thought I’d been hiding for so long. It made me feel very vulnerable to ‘reveal’ my body even though people could see it the whole time. What if someone made a snide comment or laughed? (This never happened) For me, my self image was linked to my outer image during this time. I loved being flirted with or people commenting how good I looked at work.
Now that I’m almost to healthy weight, I feel like my self image is not as linked to my outer image. I have found that I’m happy with the person I’ve become on the inside. If someone sees me eating Taco Bell in the car, now I think “I worked for this taco! Maybe YOU should get to the gym!” I still don’t really know what I look like on the outside. Some mornings I wake up and think I’m still morbidly obese and then I remember. Even this morning I went to put on my skinny jeans and thought, “There’s no way these are going to fit!” and yet they do. I think my self image and outer image have almost caught up with each other. I’ve been doing a lot of studying about diet, the evolution of eating, self image issues with women and find it helpful to understand the underlying issues with our society that are effecting us all.