Watching Discovery Health and Thinking

There have been lots of programs on Discovery Health about obesity lately. Tonight I am watching a show about obesity in young people. It's almost painful to watch, you just want to tell them to make the changes while they are young and avoid the heartache that obesity will cause them in their life. My therapist and I have been talking a lot lately about regrets in life. While the message to remember is that you can't change the past and you can only move forward, sometimes you still can't help but think about the "what ifs".

I know that I have made many life decisions based on my weight. For a long time I had closed the door on things like pursuing a relationship with someone because my self esteem was so low because of my weight. I realize how warped my thinking had become and my self image had even been warped. I keep looking at my comparison pictures and I can literally see the emptiness in the old pictures. I look miserable, like there is no light in my eyes. There is so much fat on my face that I can hardly smile. I knew I was big, but until I see a new version of myself I don't realize how bad it was. The only way to survive like that was to tell yourself that you weren't that bad, and that you hadn't changed that much. But a picture is worth a thousand words, you can see how much better life is in every new photo I take.

I had another little epiphany this week, realizing that my attitude about food is starting to change. I was at a lunch meeting this week with some co-workers, all of whom are either overweight or obese. I ordered a marinated chicken breast and cottage cheese off of the "lighter side" part of the menu and had a very satisfying lunch. Almost everyone else at the table ordered the daily special which included a cup of creamy chicken and rice soup and a dish called a hot hamburger. It was a burger on two slices of bread, fries on top of that and then gravy over the whole thing. Let's count this out:

Soup 225 calories
Hamburger 250 calories
2 slices bread 160 calories
Fries 380 calories
Gravy 120 calories

That's 1105 calories for one meal, and then to top it off when we got back to our meeting the Schwan's guy was trying to be nice and gave all of us an ice cream cone which was another 250 calories, for a grand total of 1355. Wow. It wasn't that long ago I would have been right there with them. Licking my plate clean and I would have had regular meals the rest of the day. It was almost gross to watch. I guess that's a good thing, I feel like I am finally starting to alter a few of those pathways in my brain that tell me that food is about pleasure. Instead I truly ate things because they fueled my body. Full disclosure though, I did eat the ice cream cone--and damn it was good, LOL. At least I can feel good that my noon meal was probably closed to a total of 600 calories, even including the ice cream.

The scale isn't moving too much. I have fallen off the wagon as far as my exercise goes, that needs to change and I know that I need some calorie adjustments. I think what's tough right now is that my total calorie needs is starting to get so much lower and I haven't necessarily made that adjustment so my weight loss continues. I am eating the same calories amounts but I haven't taken into account that as I get smaller my calories needs are decreasing. I get the feeling that there will always be something to work on, something to keep tweaking. This is a marathon, not a sprint and I just need to keep that in perspective.

This has been a heck of a long post, guess I just had some garbage to get rid of today. Wow, it's almost like my own self-led therapy session tonight, LOL.