Weight Loss Diaries Glenda Hamby

Day 01. I stood on the scale this morning and I'm two hundred eighteen pounds. I'd rather say 218 (two-eighteen) because that sounds like an Interstate or an apartment number or the number of marbles in a jar but two hundred eighteen sounds reeeally heavy. What does this number mean to me? This number means I'm overweight.  Actually obese. No actually, actually morbidly obese I mean I weigh as much as a football player-an NFL football player. I weigh more than my husband. I always have. It feels overwhelming. It feels disturbing It feels disheartening. I feel disgusted by it. I feel afraid. I'm a fairly smart and confident person. I've had a lot of success and many areas of my life. Weight loss has not been one of them. 
What do I want to believe about this number on the scale? Well in spite of all the thoughts that are banging at the door of my mind right now, I'm choosing to believe that this number is just a number. It doesn't define who I am. It doesn't say how trusting of a friend I am or how committed I am to my husband, or how nurturing a parent I am, or how productive I am as a or co-worker. Yet somehow I've made it out to mean that I am failing in some way. Being overweight has overshadowed a lot of my life in ways that I never really thought about but now that I'm giving myself to a time to think and pray deeply through it, I have more of an intentional thought life around weight loss. I'm creating a new narrative in the messy middle and getting to after. Step One. Do Not Quite. No matter what. 
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Day 2 of my weight loss adventure through the messy middle and getting to after. Today, I returned to work after a week long break. For some reason, I feel indifferent. Maybe it's because I've been home spending time with my husband, family and friends. From out of no where I'm feeling a looming feeling. Expectations of my work life? I feel a weightiness in my chest. I don't like the feeling of things left undone, but the perfectionist in me hangs between it's not good enough to start, and yet not good enough to finish. That in turn, just ramps up feelings of anxiety. Despite how I feel, and how much I have to get done, I have to prioritize my health.
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DAY 03. Although I'm excited by all the newness of my weight loss adventure, I thought it might be good for me to identify the excuses that I've used in the past that I've let sabotage my weight loss journey. In the past I've started out with a lot of momentum and then fizzle out. This time is different. Yes, I'm super excited by the novelty of starting something new. This time, I tell myself that I am no longer going to  give myself the gift of excuses to get out of doing what I know I should be doing in order to lose weight.
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Day 04
So I wrote down in my journal this morning this question: what if I don't quit? What could happen? I asked myself this question out loud, “What if I don't quit ?”
If I don't know anything else about myself I know this for sure, that when I have a goal before me I become consumed with the goal so much so that I forget to do what I need to do today to get to the goal. Subsequently,  I begin to just obsess over what's going on in the future to my own detriment rather than focusing on my daily meal plan, movement, staying hydrated, getting enough rest, and practicing self care. I just can't obsess about what's going to happen the future. I can't obsess about how long it's going to take me to get to my goal weight. In the past, that’s what I did. It only made me frustrated. I felt defeated. I felt stressed and I felt anxious. I was repeatedly missing the mark, not having any weight loss success whatsoever.  I would just focus on something that was so far in the future that I really was not even paying attention to what I was doing at the at the current moment right in the present moment.
Today, I'm looking ahead at my goals for this week. I’m also looking at my 30, and 60 day goals as well. So I reverse engineered my goals, beginning with 60, then 30, then weekly, then daily. So right now my goal for January 30, 2019 is to lose 7.75 pounds. My goal for this week is to lose about 1.94 pounds, so that would mean that my goal for March 1, 2019 (which seems like eons away) and although that seems daunting to think that far ahead in the future, I'm writing down my goals through March 1, 2019. My focus is on what is the one thing that I can do today that will move me towards my future goals?
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Day 05
I'm feeling anxious about completing week one. Well I mean I'm just really anxious about what's to come. This morning as I'm journaling I'm having all of these negative thoughts come up. There's a few of them so I'm just going to look at them one by one so that I can be aware of them, and question them Most importantly, I need to counteract that thought with a more encouraging thought. It's not always easy to do that when those condemning thoughts are knocking at the door of my mind. I'm no longer allowing destructive thoughts to sabotage my progress in this weight loss journey. The first thought that came to my mind was that "it's only a matter of time before you mess up". Yep, it is. It is only a matter of time before I mess up because you know what? Life isn't perfect. I'm not perfect. I will make mistakes. I will mess up, and when I do I have to tell myself my recovering perfectionist self, you will make a mistake. You will mess up. Okay so then what? The world is still spinning! What happens next depends on my next thought. So I fall off the wagon. That makes me a human being. Trust the process. True transformation takes place in the messy middle.  So I am prepared to make a mistake but it's only a mistake if I don't learn from it. I'm going to choose to look at my thoughts. Journal my way through them. Forgive myself. Show kindness and compassion when I fall down. I'm going to choose to love myself back to where I need to be.
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Day 06
January 6, 2019. I stood on the scale today and I weigh 209.7. I've lost another 3.3 pounds for a total weight loss of 8.3 pounds! Let me say this again. It's January 6, and I started this weight loss adventure on January 1. I'm kind of in shock right now. When I stood on the scale this morning I could feel (and I know this is going to sound crazy), but I could feel a difference in how my body felt. So when I stepped on the scale and it read 209.7, I was like what is happening here.
Just the other day I was having a mental break down thinking about 208.1. Why 208.1? Well, I've never been below 208.1 in years. I had built a mental block around getting past this number. I get close to it, self-sabotage, allow my fear, perfectionism, and stress eating curtail my weight loss efforts.
So what does it feel like to have 209.7 staring back at me? What does this number tell me? It's a just a number on the scale. It's not my identity.  How I feel about myself should not rise or fall with the number on the scale and that's what I'm working towards. For me, I know that I can get so caught up in that.  The scale is up therefore I feel dread and discouragement. The number on the scale goes down. I feel happy. And like that, as it just jumps up and down so do my emotions.  I’ve adopted a new practice when stepping on the scale. One that is based purely on assessing the number without emotion, judgment or criticism. I haven’t yet mastered this entirely but it’s worth practicing. No matter what the scale says, I look at it as just a number. It is a number. It informs me how much I weigh.  It does not define my worth, value, identity, intellect, curiosity, or depth. I'm learning to view it solely as information and observation, and then pivot from there. Adopting this practice of eating is empowering. It’s putting me in a position where on a daily basis I am in control of what I am eating becoming increasingly aware of the difference between physiological hunger vs. emotional hunger.
I've been practicing mindful eating on this weight loss adventure for for six days now and I'm down 8.3 pounds.  I'm 1.6 pounds away from 208.1. Rather than let my anxiety overtake me, I am choosing to hit pause, revel in the moment, and take all of this in. I just need to do that. I want give myself the time to celebrate my little daily wins. They are significant. Each step towards getting to after is significant. I shouldn't say little because I shouldn’t minimize my work, my progress, trusting the process,  creating consistency where there was chaos, developing daily habits that create the future self that I am becoming. Above all, loving myself now through the messy middle and getting to after. 
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>Please rate and leave an honest review of the podcast, then
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