03/25/10: Changes, happiness, goals and me

Will we all get along?  Me, changes, happiness and goals, that is?

I am following a lot of blogs.  I think I can keep up with it all once they are all caught up.  But I have a rule with myself.  I won't actively follow a blog until I've read the whole thing to catch up.  I have completely read about half the blogs I'm following.  Catching up after 4 days in hiatus was HARD!   But I'm caught up.  So I decided to start reading a "new" blog.  I think, when I have completely read all the blogs I am following right now, it will be a good day's worth of reading.  Enough I can do in my waiting for the computer minutes and lunch breaks and maybe even some at home.  Beyond what I've got right now, ~80, I think it would be too much.  I'd love to follow all...but I gotta pretend to work a little at work.  We'll see.  Some people don't post as much as Drazil or I.  :)

Anywho, the idea for this particular blog came from Jen is gonna lose it!  It's her third blog in and she is talking about goals.  Her Dr. wanted her to come up with a list of three short term goals and three long term goals.

Now, I've blogged previously about my take on goals.  I don't have goals that are tied to numbers.  I'm not shooting for 25 lbs lost in a month or an end goal of 142.  Although my ticker is tied to that...it's just because they want a destination.  I don't know that I'll get there.  I don't know that I'll stop there.  It's not my goal.  My goal is to be healthy, to be happy, to feel good, to lose limitations.  My goal is a feeling.  And this ties to Jen from Oregon's blog because of this statement she made:

"It took me a few minutes to wrap my head around what I was being asked to put down in black & white. Perhaps I don’t have it correct, but what I did come away with is that I don’t have a clue how I will feel in the moment…um, because I have never been there before."

Haha.  I just had an Aha moment.  And it's a bizarre notion!

I don't know how I will feel, either.  Will I wake up one day, look in the mirror, get on the scale and say "ok, you're there?"  I will feel better before I get to a normal BMI.  I know that because I've spent much of the last decade in the overweight category, not the obese category.  And most of the time I was "overweight", I felt fine. 

I believe you can be "overweight" and be healthy.  BMI is such a funny thing.  I mean, really.  If I lift weights to lose weight, I will be "heavier" with smaller dimensions.  Muscle weighs more than fat.  I have huge powerhouse thighs and they will never be a teeny girl legs.  I have always carried a lot of muscle quite easily.  But it's likely that I could be a 28" waist with 34" hips and 34" chest and still be "overweight" by the BMI category.  I know this because I've been there before.  And I won't care about the BMI if that happens again.  Especially not if my body fat is reasonable.  At some point, the BMI range won't matter to me.  At some point (far far away from now) the BMI scale won't relate to my personal health anymore.  I'm not a statistic.

I also believe at some point, I will stop worrying about my health, whether or not I even can feel good.  At some point, the limitations will be gone and I'll just be living.  I don't know that I'll know exactly when it happens.  It will happen slowly over time as pounds are lost and my body goes back to "normal".

But the part that is elusive to me is "how I will feel in the moment…um, because I have never been there before."  But it's elusive to me for different reasons.  Cause I have been there before but not at the age of 34.  I have been there before, but not after losing control of my weight and struggling to regain control.  I have been there before, but not ever with the understanding of what it's like to not be there.

When I was there before, I had always been there.  I didn't have any comprehension whatsoever of what life felt like not there.  I didn't have any comprehension of exactly why it's so important to not let it go.  I put my weight on for a reason.  I thought it would protect me and allow me to heal mentally and emotionally.  And it did.  It took the focus away from what happened and put it on something that was, in my mind, arbitrary.  But I also thought, when I made the decision to gain weight, that it would be easy to lose it.  I was so wrong.

And I should have seen the flawed logic there.  It wasn't easy to gain it.  I knew how to eat, I knew how to exercise - and even loved it.  I knew how to take care of myself.  I was active and interested in life.  And I gave all that up, although not without a fight.  I had to make myself not go to the gym.  I had to make myself eat more at dinner.  It took my own focus off of me and what I was dealing with and transferred that focus to something, again, arbitrary.  I was able to start railing against other things.  So-and-so didn't want to go on a date with me because I was fat, is what I said to myself.  In reality, so-and-so didn't want to go on a date with me because I was damaged and I was exuding damage to anything and everything around me.

At some point, the struggle stopped being about making myself do the opposite of what I liked and preferred.  At some point, the struggle became about what it needed to have been about.  At some point, I moved on.  And I didn't realize it at the time.  I just knew, one day, that I was ok to lose weight.  But I'd said that would be easy, once upon a time.  I'd thought to myself, it's as easy as making the decision.  HA!

Fast forward to now, or at least slightly into the future...how will I feel in the moment?  I don't know.  Because the last time I was there, I had not been raped, I had not decided to play with my weight to give myself protection, I was not 34, I was not married and hoping to start a family soon, I was not yet in my chosen career, I was not even out of college, I had not been around the world twice, I had not lost either of my parents, I still had my closest friends living right next door to me; the last time I was there, I had a completely different set of circumstances.  I don't know what it will be like with my circumstances now.

I've been grappling with the changes coming for a little while now and just this morning I asked my sweet hubby if he thought I would change.  He didn't know what I was asking - and truth is, neither did I.  But reading Jen from Oregon's comments in her third blog, it made something click.  I would love to think I'll be who I was when I was there before.  But I'm not that person anymore.  I have understandings now that I didn't have then.  I have lost pieces of me now that I still had then.  Times are different, things are different, so presumably, I will be different.

And that's something to watch for, I think.  I don't want to lose me.  I don't want to become someone I don't like.  And it's so easy to see how that could happen.

Wow.