Having been down the road of extreme weight loss several times – when I say extreme, I mean losing half your bodyweight or more – it gets better and less stressful with practise.
I now know, for example, to go with the flow – sometimes you are on a roll and easily able to shift 50lb or more without a break, and sometimes you need to sort of ‘let it settle’ and let your skin and posture catch up for a while.
My back problems, which were partially caused by my urgent need to shift a lot of weight and use of corsetting to avoid the need for core exercises, as getting out was more important, have been greatly eased, but not completely removed, by the rehearsals. Messing with flags and walking a lot is very good exercise for a bad back.
If I was sensible I would go full-hippy and take up yoga again. I have done in the past but alas I am more motivated by competing with myself, so I am better suited to other things. I am just not cool enough for yoga for more than ten minutes before I would rather be doing something else, unfortunately.
So, having settled after shifting the first 70lb, it is now time to shift some more.
Interestingly, I have now found a healthy weight scale that actually takes my huge bone structure into account, and it turns out the weight I would bonk myself at is actually my healthiest weight, so I have habitually lost too much in the past, which is probably why being at an allegedly healthy weight is a painful and miserable experience.
At 98lb, which I have been for two periods in the past, I had to run at fairly high intensity for about four hours per day and eat every two days. I thought I looked good, but I used to be referred to as ‘three melons on a stick’ by surprisingly thin people, so I guess I was a bit of a freak. At one point, at the top end of the allegedly healthy weight for my height, a doctor who had never previously met me told me with some horror that I needed to eat more and to stop doing whatever I was doing. This was at 120lb or so, so it made no sense to me at the time. When will they stop criticizing and start saying I am doing something right, I thought?
It turns out from the new scale that I located that the correct weight is more like 160-170lb, which is way heavier than most women of my height, but is because I am supposed to be a sturdy little person that can throw other people around the room and have a very good quantity of lean body mass. This comes as something of a relief and makes actually being healthy a more approachable idea. I wonder how many other people out there, punishing themselves over not being good enough, have had their lives devastated by anxiety because nobody is using the right tools in the first place?
The NHS, in my early life when I was actually miserable about it, rejected obesity as being a problem and I was basically told that I was big and not to worry about it. After they decided that it was useful for getting funding and more surgeons and departments, it suddenly became an epidemic in the early 2000s. I have worked in several equally wasteful departments of the NHS. They aren’t even particularly helpful, because they choose to reject preventative medicine and use a low denomination approach which is helpful to very few people in reality.
So, it looks as if a six month deadline on reaching a reasonable weight, which is actually heavier than I was when my sisters were braying disgusting verbal abuse during my childhood, is workable, and this has cheered me up immensely. My current campaign of ignoring everybody and doing whatever I feel like doing regardless is most helpful. So much so, that I think it should be the first thing every person with a weight problem deals with.
As I have said before in previous posts on obesity: Start from the perspective that you are fine, then look at your relationships and see who is eroding your confidence to the point that hiding and putting something in your mouth to shut yourself up is the only option. Once you have got rid of them, life gets a lot easier and more pleasant. It is their problem. Don’t make it yours anymore. The likelihood is that you have been listening to somebody else’s hang ups and beating yourself up with it. Stop that.