Day 33: How much do you weigh?

Ever since I left my full time shift work job (which I hated), I lost weight.

The reasons are simple:

– I returned to a regular and healthy sleeping pattern (shift work kills your sleeps)

– Regular exercise

– stopped eating out at lunch or dinner breaks and have more time to prepare healthy meals

– reduced stress levels

Without being on a “diet” I lost weight.  So, people ask me, how much weight did you lose? The answer is impossible to answer, since I don’t own a scale.

When I was younger and living at home, there was a scale in my bathroom.  I sometimes think I lived on that scale, since I weighed myself a least twice a day: once in the morning, and once at night.  That’s the “at least” answer.  I was always trying to get to some kind of goal weight, focusing on those numbers.  If the numbers weren’t decreasing, or increasing, I put pressure on myself to change it.  But watching those numbers always put pressure on myself.

How do I look at my weight now? By what I see in the mirror.  But of course, I’m aware that this method is flawed: when I’m bloaty and feeling sick, I’ll look a bit bigger, but just the next day, I’ll look thin and fit.  Or, if I’m in a sad or down mood, my eyes will deceive me and I’ll look like I’m a million pounds, and if I’m in a good mood, then I look like a size zero.  The point is: you can’t weigh your weight in the mirror.  It’s a lesson I’m still trying to properly learn, but that I understand well.

Yet this lesson, this idea that I don’t know where I stand, is freeing.  It means I can’t chastise myself for not losing a certain amount this week, or for gaining: because I have no way of knowing.  It means I’m not obsessive about a number, that could very well mean nothing.  It means that I have to appreciate my body for how it feels.  And it’s going to feel based on my healthy lifestyle, which I’m currently living.

I love that I don’t know that number, that I’m not dictating by a number, that really means nothing.  I think that we all need to just appreciate our bodies, and forget that number because at the end of the day, we are not that number.  With this is mind, I don’t want to know how much I weigh.  Let me be happy for where I am.

Today, I want to love my determination.  I’m working on a project close to my heart, and despite hitting walls, I’m determined to make a difference. And I will.  With my body, I want to once more love my stomach, because since “faking it till you make it” I’ve really started to love my stomach a bit more.

Have a good day!