I've lost 60lbs and I still feel fat

I have heard it said many times before. People who lose weight, to finally get to the end, only to still feel very similarly about their bodies and their image as they did before.

I am in the 150’s, the last time I was this weight I was in highschool, right before I went to college. I am tall so at this weight I look lean, because I am, but in my head I still feel like I am a towering monster.

I’ve done this all my life. In highschool I was a super athlete best shape of my life playing for the national team, I was good at what I did and I was in great shape, and yet I still did not feel like I looked good enough. My pant size was still too big in my own silly head, and I was not small and petite like all my other friends. I am not a Taylor Swift die hard fan, and I have never really listened to much of her music, but one time in passing I heard this lyric from one of her songs, and I have never related to anything more in my life — “everyone is a sexy baby and I am a monster on a hill” well, yeah, Mrs. Swift, I absolutely relate, thank you. Not only am I the same height as her, but I also happen to be large framed. If I had blonde hair I could have gone back and would have fit right in with all the viking women, but instead my genes probably come from a scottish countryside peasant lady who had huge quantities of milk to churn.

And I know for a fact I am not alone. I know much like me, y’all ladies out there are also crazy, so do not even try to lie, but the question really I want to explore here is, why are we this way??

First it’s the weight. We finally lose it, then suddenly our arms look weird and flabby, but then after that it’s our faces, we look old!!! and next week it is something else new the internet came up with. There is always something to obsess and worry about, I have yet, in all my years on earth as a woman, to meet a fellow woman who says — well yes, this is it, I have done it, I am pleased with how I look, there is nothing left to improve. Imagine that.

I am incredibly good at becoming accustomed to myself, and you probably are too, I will lose some weight be happy for about three days and then my brain is like, wow awesome, but have you noticed your thighs? Now mind you, I have made oceans of improvement, I used to spend hours, days on end, thinking about how I look, now I am far too busy for this nonsense and I have too much to do and far too many children to dedicate myself full-time to being my own personal hater, buuut, nonetheless I still find myself being very unkind and unforgiving of myself. It is true, I look in the mirror and I can see, I have lost a lot of weight, and yet the next hours roll around and I find myself sitting, thinking my legs look far too fat. What I have come to notice is that the more we pay attention to our appearance the more things we will somehow discover, are wrong. I did not know that women were supposed to worry about hip dips until the internet told me. I did not know I needed to have a face card that does not decline, until the internet informed me, I did not know I might be chopped until this last year either. IT IS EXHAUSTING.

Now I am not here to argue that we let ourselves go and become chopped willingly, it is good to care about our bodies, it is good to take care of it and nurture it, but it is also important to be kind with yourself. There is a happy medium between complete uncaring and undying obsession with our looks, it is just hard for us ladies to find a good balance.

Beauty for us matters, it just does. We want to walk into a room and feel good in our own skin, and there is nothing wrong with this. The world loves and values beauty. Pretty privilege is a real thing, so is ugly discrimination lol. But our problem is that we don’t compare ourselves to some reasonable standard, no we compare ourselves to everyone around us, and especially become focused on what others have that we do not. If you are tall like me, maybe you have desired at one point to be tiny and petite, I know I have. I grew up in Portugal, men there aren’t known for being tall, they are dark and handsome, but the tall part is lacking, and I lost count of the times I was told that they just did not like tall women. Ok thanks João. If you happen to be more straight framed then you’ll wish for curves, if you have brown eyes you want blue, if your hair is dark you want it light, if you have thick eyebrows you want thin ones, if you have straight hair you spend your time trying to get curls, if you have curly hair then you want it straight, on and on it goes, we have set ourselves up for a game we cannot win.

Could I objectively lose another twenty pounds? Yeah, probably, but being thin will never make me petite, at some point I am just going to have to accept that God did not build me to be a delicate super feminine woman, I was built to survive a famine and carry a sack of potatoes up a mountain.

and so what?

I am tired of my own nonsense, and I know you are too. Here I am after all this hard work, all this good work, and yet I find myself only able to criticize what I have done? If i was working hard for someone else on a project, days in, days out, lots of commitment, hours on end, and if at the end all they had to say was criticism over all the small details I missed, I’d quit, and so would you, might even say some choice words. If my husband treated me the way I treat myself I would have never married him, if my mother treated me the way I treat myself she would never be in my life, neither would my friends, so what the heck is my problem? What is yours?

I was hyper critical of myself when I was super fit, when I was fat, and now again at my thinnest, so clearly the problem is not my body, I’m the problem, it’s me, and you know what true freedom is in all of this? It is not in finally being beautiful, it is in realizing I do not actually have to be any of that. Some days I look tired, maybe my thighs are bigger than what I want, maybe my hair looks crazy, maybe God forbid, I am indeed a little chopped, and so what? The sun will still rise tomorrow morning, my children will still love me, so will my husband, I will still have the same things to do, the same people to love, the same places to go, and the same damn potatoes to carry up the mountain.

Wherever I go, there I am. It is time I start making peace with who I am, with what God gave me, with how God created me to be. I will tell you this, it has been easier to lose sixty pounds than it has been to learn to just be content with myself, but no matter how much I weigh, what color my hair is, what my legs look like, the soul behind my eyes remains the same, and maybe if I really claim to care so much about beauty, maybe it is about time I stop being so ugly towards myself.