This is what I was trying to say

I am not very good at expressing my deepest feelings sometimes.  I say what I am thinking/feeling, but it never comes out the way I mean for it to.  I recently tried to explain some of the junk up in my head about losing 100 pounds, but it came out to the hearer like I was just putting myself down and judging myself and others by their size.  Ugh!

I know it won't make sense to most people, but losing a lot of weight is complicated.  A good thing for sure! But not all smiles, rainbows, and ponies like you might think.  I don't understand all the why's of it, but even though I've lost a large chunk of me, and must be much smaller than I was, I don't feel it.  I can see the loss in the size of clothes I wear, the way everything is falling off my body, the comments that others make, but I still feel like the same huge person inside.  I'm beginning to wonder if that will ever change, and realize that it may not.

Then I read this article this weekend that I somehow stumbled across when doing schoolwork and looking for something completely unrelated to health/weight loss.  It seems like I was "meant" to see this, and it did hit home oh so much.  I almost cried reading it.

The article could best be summed up with this statement found later in the report:

"Cultural fantasies of weight loss present a tidy, attractive proposition – lose weight, gain self-acceptance – without addressing the whole truth: that body image post-weight loss is often quite complicated."

The parts that I really related to the most were:

"Everything starts sagging, and you've got stretch marks, and clothes fit differently, ... and you're saying, 'Am I doing the right thing? Because this shirt doesn’t look right,'" she says. "...I would get really down on myself about, like, 'I'm not doing this correctly,' or, 'This isn't what it's supposed to look like.'"  I so understand this!  I knew my body was not pretty to start with, and I knew it wasn't going to get pretty afterwards.  I did not know exactly what to expect and I knew that going in, but did not realize how the skin would hang down now empty of fat and nowhere to go.  I didn't realize that my hips would look the way they do or that I would feel uglier than when I started if that is even possible.

"Despite now being a very lean 166 pounds at just under six feet tall (and training for a marathon!), Janetzko says he still doesn't see a thin or fit person when he looks in the mirror."-  I was so thankful to read this because THIS is EXACTLY what's been going on in my head!

"Any discomfort you may feel with your body is compounded by a sense of shame at not feeling unmitigated pride at a moment you expected to be triumphant."-   YES! YES!  YES!!!  People think I should be proud and excited and thrilled, and I am those things, but I am also other feelings too that I guess I can't express because people don't understand. 

"Big, important things about people's lives do change after they've lost weight – and yes, often for the better – but no one becomes a different person. You're still you, even when you're half of your former self."  I was hard, incredibly, unhealthily so, on myself before this all started.  I am trying very hard to improve in that area as I also improve the physical part, but I don't know how to change all that overnight.  I'm still me on the inside, and like it or not, that me doesn't like herself much.  That's not going to drastically change just because my butt size goes down.