A Not-So-Perfect Ten

I've been doing this diet thing for a couple of months now. It's not so much a diet as a change in the way I live, eat, etc. Today I am wearing a pair of size ten jeans.

Holy shit! I'm wearing a size ten! My body is now in better shape than it's ever been. I'm still flabby in all the wrong places, and the loose skin that's left behind is less than desirable, but still, I'm about 70 lbs smaller than my largest size. That's quite an accomplishment.

At last weigh-in, I was 154 lbs. That's 4 pounds over my goal of 150.

All that being said, I still look in the mirror and I see the fat and unattractive person I've always seen staring back at me. The pride in my body that, when I was closer to 200 lbs, I just knew would radiate from the very core of my being once I was this small doesn't exist. Sure, I see the difference, I can feel the difference, but psychologically I'm still the ugly fat kid that everyone pokes fun at on the playground.

I once told a story about a blue skirt that I wanted so badly when I was about 8 or 9 years old. It wasn't incredibly short or anything. Just your plain old blue skirt, mid-thigh innocent kids clothes. The kind that parents of 8 year olds these days would sigh relief over if their kids asked for it. Instead of sighing relief my mother told me that I was too fat to wear a skirt and briskly scuttled me off to the plus-sized jeans and oversized shirts.

In retrospect, I probably was too fat to look good in such a skirt, but I think the embarrassment of my fat ass hanging out from beneath the hem would have been far less psychologically damaging than the realization that even my family looked at me with shame and disgust.

So now, here I am, skinny enough to wear that skirt, or perhaps one a bit more provocative, but I'm still not comfortable in my skin. It may be an old cliche, but beauty really does have to start from the inside.

I guess now that I'm here, at my goal, the only thing left to do is start getting to know the new me, maybe learn to like her a little. It's either that, or I suppose I could easily turn this thing into some sort of obsession where I end up a 90 lb skeleton that looks in the mirror and still finds all the fat.