Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

After all that noise yesterday, look what showed up in my email this morning: a “success story” from Weight Watchers that involves a 175-lb weight loss. I must say, Michele really called my bluff. Details here.

Michele’s best tip:

Mini goals are critical to those of us with a lot to lose. Those can be scale goals such as losing 20 or 30 pounds¹, or process goals, such as journaling successfully for three weeks in a row. And remember to reward yourself.

1. I love how she says “20 or 30 pounds” like it’s nothing. Like the 10 pound range there is so small as to feel almost insignificant. Like she doesn’t read the “success stories” of people who have 25 pounds to lose, either. Because, guess what? At our weights, “20 or 30 pounds” DOES feel insignificant. [↩]

So, why the term-paper-esque report on another diet blogger posted yesterday? Because, simply put, it’s difficult to find support and information for people who have as much weight to lose as I do. It’s hard to find success stories of people who are still up and at ‘em. The amount of weight I have to lose, in total, rightfully belongs squeezed into the uniform of a chubby cheerleader. This isn’t the kind of sneeze-and-it’s-gone, overnight journey that seems to grace the pages of Weight Watcher’s Magazine (where even the 20-pound losses are marked with an asterisk and the footnote: “Results not typical.”).

At the same time, it’s hard to slog through hundreds of diet books and blogs written by people who have, when compared with me, miniscule amounts of weight to lose. I have 120 pounds to lose before I move from “obese” to “overweight” based on a straight BMI Calculation. Another 40 pounds after that before I hit “normal” range. Frankly, when I read about women who have 20 pounds to lose and how disgusting and unloveable and monstrous they feel when they look in the mirror, it is almost more than I can take.

Last time I lost weight, I had dropped over 40 pounds before people even began to notice that I was losing weight. Even then, they didn’t really notice that I was thinner. They thought I looked “rested” or “pretty” or, in the case of the first person to notice the weight loss, that I had perhaps “contracted cancer and was chronically ill.” Nice.

So, although I can appreciate the struggles of people for whom 4 or 5 pounds makes a real difference in clothing fit, self esteem, and day-to-day activities, I cannot relate to them. That’s why I’ll be adding a category to my sidebar links for these supersize bloggers who have 100+ pounds to lose (or, who have lost some fraction of those already).

Writing this entry may or may not be against company policy, but it’s something I need to do.

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Starting weight: 326.8
Last week: 322.6
This week: 323.8
Change this week: +1.8
Overall change: -3.0