...and the mental work

Since the last great weight loss attempt, something else happened. (A lot of something elses happened, but probably only one big one that pertains to this).

My uncle died. He was my mother's brother, and his daughter, my cousin, is my best friend as well. Once he was gone, we spent many, many hours talking about our childhoods, our mothers and our weight issues.

I am emphatically not blaming all this on my mother, but I will say without her influence, I might not be having as hard a time with this as I am. Not with the physical aspect of losing weight, which (and don't shoot me) is honestly not THAT hard for me. I absolutely get the eat less, exercise more thing and when I put that into action, I lose weight. It's as easy as that. (Don't hate me).

What I'm more concerned with here is the psychological issue. I hit a wall, and it's not just a physical plateau, though of course it's that, too--I hit a wall when I start to feel too good. My mother has been gone for more than 25 years and I didn't come here to malign the dead, but let's just say that when I felt good about myself growing up, I generally got snapped back to my mother's version of reality pretty quickly. Those things die hard, very hard. So hard that all these years later, I'm still dealing with them.

So my task this time, I think, is to learn that it's okay to feel good. It really is. It's okay to be proud of yourself (your physical self, there was a big mind-body disconnect going on there) and that no giant hand is going to come down and smack me when I feel really good.

I lie in bed sometimes, at thinner points, wondering, what will/would it be like to be even thinner? What would it be like to feel good all or most of the time? To be really physically active? To have unbounded (more or less) energy? And....do I deserve that?

I think the key this time will be to realize that, yes, I actually do deserve that.