Losing the weight is only the beginning...

I used to be fat. Not in the jolly, Santa Claus laughing kind of way. Fat in that can’t walk up a flight of stairs without stopping for a break and can’t fit in the seats at the movie theater kind of way. Fat in the way that causes little children to laugh or look away and causes teenage boys to openly make fun. I was fat in a way that made me never want to leave my house and face the light of day. I was only 29 and I weighed 450 pounds.

Making the decision to lose weight was actually one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made. It came in conjunction with ending an unhappy marriage and starting over. I joined Weight Watchers and  lost 75 pounds in the first six months. Then I got frustrated with Weight Watchers and hit a plateau for another six months. I thought about weight loss surgery but was too terrified to go under the knife so I considered it a last resort. Instead, I took another, more radical approach and underwent a medically-supervised liquid diet. That plus a ton of exercise helped me get rid of the last 175 pounds.

The hardest part is that as I lost weight, I lost friends – which didn’t help my self-confidence at all. People who I thought were my friends started ridiculing me and telling me that I was too skinny and that I looked sick and anorexic.  I started having body image issues that drove me to seek professional help. My therapist told me that people were upset because I had changed the “status quo”. I had gone from being the fat friend who made everyone else feel better about themselves to being the skinny one who got all the attention. It was so hard for me to imagine that people would actually HATE me because I made a life-changing decision but they did! Luckily, not everyone felt that way about me…which I guess really means that those people I thought were my friends weren’t. They just wanted me around to make themselves feel better.

It’s been four years since I lost the weight and I struggle daily. I’ve found better, more encouraging friends and am more at peace. I still have body image issues and I still struggle with thinking of myself as a thin person. But I’m still the same person inside – I still love and laugh and cry and get angry and rage. My weight fluctuates as I learn to live and enjoy life but I’m getting better at keeping it where I want. I love being active and I thank my body daily for getting me as far as it has. As for those people who I thought were my friends? I’ve accepted that they didn’t have my best interests at heart and I’ve made peace with losing their friendship. Because I found that there’s something better out there – me.