Farewell

The other day I was browsing the forums over at My Fitness Pal (my husband makes fun of me every time he catches me doing this, but I love reading about others' journeys toward better health), and I came upon one lady's success story. She had lost a good 40+ lbs and was getting ready to run her first half marathon. She had posted some pictures of her weight loss and she looked great.

As I was looking at her before-and-after photos, a very odd thought came into my mind. In her before picture, everything below her chest just kind of spilled out into this bulge all the way down to her hips. After her weight loss, there was distinctive curve in at the waist, a concave line where her t-shirt went from her rib cage down to her hips with no bulge and no muffin top.

For just a split second, I caught myself thinking "I wish I looked like that!"

See, for most of my life I've been (to varying degrees) that stranger's "before" photo. I remember in painful detail what it's like to be fat. To avoid certain stores because I know their clothes won't fit me. To wrestle into Spanx for every date and special occasion. To cross my arms around my tummy when sitting down so no one would see the rolls spilling over the top of my jeans. (That's assuming I was wearing jeans; usually I wasn't because I couldn't find jeans that fit.)

It's been years, but that fat girl still lives somewhere inside of me. I hear her internal dialogue sometimes when I'm out shopping and stumble upon knit fabric or lift up a shirt with an *impossibly* tiny waist. "There's no way that will look flattering on you." I catch her comparing me to other women, like the stranger in the My Fitness Pal forum, and coming up short. She is stunned when I accomplish something athletically or hear someone make a comment about how "fit" I am. Excuse me, fit? Don't you know who I am?

It's funny, because when I look in the mirror, it's not like I'm not shocked or dissatisfied by what I see. It's been a long time since my dress size has been a double digit. Most of my current friends have never known me as overweight. And I am pretty happy with my body... you know, as happy as any woman can be in this media-obsessed, cosmetic-surgery-ridden, bikini-mom fallen world that we live in. I am, for the most part, content.

It has literally been years since I've been able to count the rolls of fat on my belly, but that voice still lingers, which I guess just goes to show that years and years of negative self-talk are harder to lose than pounds on a scale. It's almost like my mind (or maybe my heart) hasn't caught up with my body. These thoughts are not based in reality, and I am quick to dismiss them, but they still crop up like an instant reflex. Or, maybe, like a well-planned, well-executed attack.

So I have decided I am going to actively practice something different. Instead of just playing defense against these negative thoughts, I'm going on the offensive. And it's more that just teaching myself that I'm not that fat girl I was years ago. It's embracing the woman I have become. A woman who no longer needs to give a second thought to whether her t-shirt calls attention to her tummy. Not just because it's no longer relevant, BUT EVEN IF IT WAS, I am driven by more than a desire to not be "fat". It's not why I run, because if it was I would have stopped running long ago. It's not a motivating factor for anything I do, because there is more to life than worrying about the way others will perceive me. I'm not a "recovering fat girl" or a "former fat girl": I'm a grown woman, wife, mother, and child of God who also happens to be a pretty serious athlete.

So I'm just going to say goodbye to that fat girl. She used to own me, and she's still renting out some space in the back of my mind. But as of today, she's being evicted.