Weigh in day 6/4/09, plus some notes on my low self esteem

I lost 0.6 lbs this week, despite being on steroids for my sinus infection and not exercising much. When I first weighed in I was upset. "Only .6 lbs?!" I thought, "That's nothing!" For a little while it felt like a personal failure. I felt like I might as well have gained. But eventually I realized that progress is progress, no matter how small. Losing .6 lbs is better than losing nothing, and much better than gaining! Now I've lost 24.6 lbs, which I feel I can round up and call 25 when I tell people how much I've lost so far. And you know what I'm going to tell myself starting now? 25 lbs is a lot of weight!

I have low self esteem, so I tend to minimize my accomplishments. When I lost 10 lbs I thought "That's nothing, it won't really count for much until I've lost 20," and when I hit 20 lbs I still felt like I hadn't really lost that much, and that it hasn't made that much of a difference. I've been feeling like I haven't lost enough and I must not be trying hard enough. I tell myself that I must be barely scraping by, and that all the weight I've lost so far has been due to luck. This is what I do when I accomplish something: I explain it away by saying I got lucky or I didn't really try that hard so it doesn't really count for much. I have been telling myself that I'm still quite fat and I can't consider myself on the road to success until I've lost 30 lbs, but I know when I hit that I'll tell myself that I need to be at 185 to have accomplished anything (that's when I'll no longer be obese.) When I hit 185 I'll tell myself "Well, it took you long enough! If you hadn't screwed up so much you could have gotten here faster. Anyway you still look terrible, so don't pat yourself on the back just yet."

But today I checked out "Start Living, Start Losing" from the library. It's a Weight Watchers book of success stories. In each 2-3 page story, someone tells the history of their battle with weight, the turning point, their time in weight watchers, and what their life is like now. At the end of their story they give a little piece of advice. A lot of people used that section to talk about the importance of positive self talk. I recognized myself in their stories - they talked about their inner naysayer and their lack of confidence in their ability to lose the weight. I've been realizing lately how much I trash talk myself in my head. It's even there at the subconscious level - I assume, without even thinking about it, that people that I meet automatically don't like me or automatically think very low of me and that I have to prove that I'm likable to them. If they compliment me or say they want to hang out with me I just assume that they're just being nice and they really don't mean it. It's really a very big problem!

I've decided I'm going to work on it. I'm going to tell myself how well I'm doing, and that 25 lbs is a huge and impressive amount of weight to have lost in 5 months. Because it is. AND I'm going to try to tell myself that I'm beautiful, just the way I am, until I believe it. Somehow I've gotten it in my head that it is physically impossible for me to be pretty until I hit a certain weight. I actually have certain weights in my head at which it will magically be ok for me to wear sleeveless shirts, wear little dresses, go running in shorts, etc. So I feel like I'm working towards beauty, and when I get there I'll like myself and other people will like me too. But I need to like myself right now, no matter what I look like, because as far as human beings go, I'm pretty great, damn it!

Here goes everything...