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Monday 18 March 2013

Emotional Well-Being and Catching up with Friends

I was talking to a dear friend of mine on the weekend. We caught up on Saturday for movies and pizza, I ended up staying the night as I couldn't be bothered driving home at 12pm when I was tired. And then we went to a cafe near the ocean and had breakfast and after heading back to her place we chatted and before I knew it was 4pm!

(Then I had dash off and get home to get myself organised for the week ahead.)

So what has us talking for so long? Well besides family, life, friends, boys and all the usual things that come along, there was also weight loss and emotional well being.

Something that I have been accepting more and more is that I am happy. I am proud of myself, I am happy with the decisions I have been making, I am happy with my exercise and I am happy at where I am in life.

Partly this is to do with my weight loss so far, which while I do not weigh myself, it has become more and more obvious I am losing weight through my clothes and shape.

My happiness with myself is being reflected in my confidence and appearance and also my decisions and how I am with friends with family. Everything else just seems to be so much better. Decisions that might have made me depressed or upset or got me down a year a go are just so much easier to handle, they are just a bump in the road.

It is amazing how everything is interlinked. You look good, you feel good, so you are happy and this affects how you deal with things.

It also goes the other way.

Sadly, my friend is in a similar position to where I was when I first started this journey. She is unhappy, she is depressed, she feels guilty and hates herself for the decisions she makes that mean that she is gaining weight not losing weight, which just makes her more unhappy and everything else in life is just that bit harder and more stressful.

It's exactly how I felt when I first started. It took me a long time of thinking about how hard and long and how I don't have enough time to do anything else etc before I realised I needed to stop thinking and start doing.  That meant I started going to the gym, and when the gym didn't work and I realised I needed something more, I started PT. Best decision I ever made.

So we talked about my journey, how hard it has been and how far I have come and how much it has been worth it. But most of all I made sure she didn't feel judged for how she is and how she is coping. I made her think about little things she could be doing and told her I still make mistakes today. That one day she will just have enough and start making the right steps.

I made sure she knew she could talk to me, that I would understand and not make her feel like a "lazy fat person who obviously doesn't try hard enough" because that's what we all have in the back of heads anyways, that that's what all those "skinny" people think of us. (Whether that is true or not is irrelevant, it's what we think.)

The reality is weight loss is not just about controlled intake and exercise = weight loss. It's about all the emotions and pain that got us there in the first place. And if you don't fix that then you will never maintain your loss once you get there, because you never really understood how you got to be so big in the first place and will make all those mistakes all over again.

I hope that if you have a friend out there that needs help and guidance that you will make them feel loved and understood and not mock them for their weight battles, because we are often our own worst judge and enemy and need support from our loved ones more than anything to help us take the first steps.

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